All Saints Sunday
Scripture: Matthew 10:32-33, 37-38; 19:27-30
Oops!
When I was a kid, I always wanted to do things by myself, my way. If I were asked to mow the lawn, I would do it my way. If I were putting something together and wasn’t quite sure how to do it, I’d work to figure it out — my way. When I was learning to drive, the same thing. I was independent that way.
My father had a different approach. He figured he’d already made all the mistakes at whatever it was I was doing, so if he showed me, I could learn faster and avoid them. I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t want to learn from his mistakes. I wanted to learn from my mistakes.
This, in short, illustrates the entire human problem. It explains our separation from God.
Ugh!
The Prophet Isaiah put it plainly: “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight” (5:21).
Wisdom that comes only from our own eyes is really just ego and pride masquerading as wisdom. This is the story of the Fall. When Eve was tempted by the serpent, he said to her: “You will not certainly die … you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4–5). In other words, you can do it yourself, without God’s help.
The Fathers often traced the Fall back to envy. Adam and Eve were not content to receive life as a gift from God; they wanted what belonged to God himself. They wanted autonomy. They wanted to determine good and evil for themselves. They wanted to do it their way.
Tito Colliander, in Way of the Ascetics, describes what this looks like from the inside:
“Often [our high faith in ourselves] is so deeply rooted in us that we do not see how it rules over our heart. It is precisely our egoism, our self-centeredness and self-love that cause all our difficulties, our lack of freedom in suffering, our disappointments and our anguish of soul and body. Take a look at yourself, therefore, and see how bound you are by your desire to humour yourself and only yourself. Your freedom is curbed by the restraining bonds of self-love, and thus you wander, a captive corpse, from morning till eve.”
And he goes further:
“Thus you are led from moment to moment in your halter of preoccupation with self, and kindled instantly to displeasure, impatience or anger if an obstacle intervenes.”
Ego. Pride. Self-will. These are the root of our broken relationship with God — and, if we’re honest, the root of most of our broken relationships with each other.
I once heard a priest say: “You’re not truly Orthodox until a priest tells you that you’re the problem.”
So if we’re the problem, how do we move beyond ourselves?
Aha!
The answer our Orthodox faith gives is deceptively simple: empty yourself. Humble yourself. Or, as the Fathers put it: keep watch over your heart.
It begins with small things. If you have an urge for sweets, say no. If you have an urge to talk, stay silent. If you’re prompted to meddle, keep to yourself. If you want two cups of coffee, drink one. If you have the urge to look at the clock, refrain.
The goal is not to destroy desire but to train it, so that our desires serve God rather than rule us.
As we learn to conquer the small desires, we gain more mastery over our ego, and we can begin to address the bigger vices and deeper habits. This is what Lenten fasting is all about: breaking our dependence on ourselves and learning to depend on God.
But here is the good news: if salvation depended on our ability to conquer our ego, none of us would stand a chance. God has not merely shown us the path. He has come to walk it with us.
And we are not the first to walk this road. We are surrounded by witnesses who have already traveled it before us.
Whee!
This is what Pentecost — which we celebrated last week — is all about.
Pentecost began as a harvest festival in ancient Israel. By the time of Christ, it had also become associated with God’s covenant and, especially, with the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai — the moment when God showed his people how to live and how to depend on him rather than themselves.
Our Pentecost carries the same spirit, but goes even further.
We do not celebrate the giving of a law written on stone tablets. We celebrate God writing his law on our hearts by giving us himself. The Holy Spirit is not an instruction manual handed down from a distance. He is God walking alongside us, dwelling within us, showing us the way from the inside.
Through the Spirit, we move from being merely carnal — driven by appetite and ego — to becoming truly spiritual: people whose deepest desires are being reoriented toward God and neighbor.
And this is grace. God does not stand at a distance and shout instructions. He enters our lives. He shares his own life with us. He gives us the strength we do not possess on our own. He patiently reshapes us into the people we were created to become.
The saints are proof that this is not merely a beautiful idea. It actually works.
Yeah!
And this brings us to today — the Sunday of All Saints.
The saints are not people who were born without ego or who somehow escaped the human condition. They are people who faced the same struggle you and I face — the same pull toward self-will, the same temptation to be wise in their own eyes — and, by God’s grace, they chose a different path.
Day by day, in small things and large, they said no to themselves and yes to God. They picked up their crosses. They became last in the world’s estimation and were raised up by God.
In today’s Gospel, Christ tells us that those who lose their life for his sake will find it. The Kingdom is full of this kind of reversal. Ego grasps for first place. Love makes room for the other. Pride insists on its own way. Humility receives God’s way.
The saints show us what that looks like in practice.
Not just monks in deserts or martyrs facing execution, but ordinary people living ordinary lives. The mother who bites her tongue when she could have been right. The man who gives when it costs him. The parishioner who stays silent when the urge to meddle is almost unbearable. These are the small deaths that make a saint.
The saints show us that holiness is possible. The Holy Spirit shows us that holiness is not achieved alone.
God has given us his own life, his own strength, and his own presence. The same Holy Spirit who descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost is at work in us today. The question is not whether God is willing to make saints. The question is whether we are willing to let him.
Amen.