You may know that tomorrow is the Feast of All Saints. It’s one of the easiest dates to memorize in the church year, in large part because it falls on the day after the Eve of All Saints’, also known as All Hallows’ Eve or, in some quarters, Hallowe’en. (You all spell it with the apostrophe… right?)

Halloween, of course, is a major holiday in our secular year, but it stays true to its ecclesiastical origins. While it’s veered off a bit in recent years, Halloween still fits in recognizably with the sequence of All Saints’ on November 1 followed by All Souls’ Day on the 2nd, a day on which we commemorate all those who have died. In the church, All Saints is a major holiday too, a significant enough day that, unlike other, lesser feasts, we tend to celebrate it on the Sunday following, in addition to our celebrations during the week.

And so it is that most years, on the first Sunday in November, you’ll often find yourself standing in church, singing the beautiful hymn, “For all the saints.”

It’s a beloved hymn, and one that sums up the Episcopal or Anglican attitude to the saints fairly well, I think. Take a read through the first verse:

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
who thee by faith before the world confessed,
thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

There are a few things worth observing here:

It’s worth saying, first of all, that the “saints” are not just some specific set of especially-holy people. “Saints,” in this hymn or anywhere else in our church, doesn’t refer to a canonical set. We use “saints” in the Biblical sense, as when St. Paul addresses a letter “to the saints who are in Ephesus” (Eph. 1:1). The saints are all the “holy people of God,” living and dead, and that’s not only St. Paul or St. Monica or St. Martin Luther King, Jr.—that’s you, and me, and your Aunt Joan who first brought you to church when you were young.

Like any good hymn, this is a prayer. But it isn’t a prayer to the saints. It doesn’t address the saints, asking for their help or prayers. It’s always fine to ask a friend for prayer, living or departed, but we don’t need their help; we can address our words directly to God.

And while we begin with the words “For all the saints,” this hymn isn’t a prayer for all the saints. We aren’t asking for their prayers; but neither are we offering our prayers for them. It can comfort us to pray for those whom we have loved and lost; it certainly can’t hurt, in any case. But this is not a prayer for them; it’s not a prayer for God to give them something good or save them from something bad.

Instead, it’s a prayer of thanksgiving and wonder. “For all the saints who from their labors rest…thy name, O Jesus be forever blessed.”

The history of the world, and of each one of our lives, has been full of holy people. They were people, still, and therefore imperfect. But they were, and they are, holy people, people who have inspired us to be the best, most loving versions of ourselves. Some of them are famous. Some of them are completely unknown. But all of them have left their mark on our lives.

Sometimes we might ask them for their prayers, and be comforted by the reminder that we share some mysterious, ongoing relationship with our ancestors and departed friends. Sometimes we might pray for them, putting words to our yearning for them to be at peace. And this day—on All Saints’ Day—we can simply offer thanks to God that they lived, and bless God for creating a world that has such people in it.

There is much that could be said about the consecration of our new bishop on Saturday, but one image in particular stuck out to me from that day.

The cover art on the (forty-six page!) bulletin for the service was taken from a mosaic in Aachen Cathedral, in Germany. The mosaic depicts “The Pelican in her Pietry,” a classic medieval image of Christ. Medieval scholars believed (for whatever reason) that pelicans “nurse” their young by piercing their breasts to feed them with their own blood, a symbol that seemed to evoke both Christ’s sacrificial self-offering on the Cross and his continual self-offering in the Eucharist.

It is an image of Christ, as the program for the consecration notes, that is “both eucharistic and maternal in nature.”

It was an image that I was thinking about as I read through the bulletin while waiting for the service to begin. I happened to be sitting next to a dear friend, a priest with two young children even smaller than mine, someone with whom I’ve shared much of the complicated and sometimes-difficult experiences of parenthood and parish ministry alike. For both of us, having a bishop who is the mother of three teenagers and young adults was meaningful.

I was moved by the way in which this image of the pelican is a beautiful and complicated one: a depiction of the ways in which we offer ourselves to feed the people we love, and are fed by God’s own self-offering in turn.

But I was especially struck by a momentary glimpse, when Bishop Julia, after being vested, happened to turn—and we could see this image on her back.

What an image to choose, as the new leader of our portion of the church. It’s something I’ll be sitting with for a while. What does it mean to feed the people of our diocese from your own blood? What does it mean to be fed? What does it mean to carry this on your back, at every visitation, ordination, confirmation—at every sacramental event at which you serve during your time as bishop? How is this a comforting reminder of the maternal nature of a bishop’s ministry? And isn’t it kind of a troubling one?

I hope you’ll join your prayers with mine for Bishop Julia as her ministry officially begins. Bishop Alan has handed over the crozier; his time of shepherding our diocese is over, and Bishop Julia’s has begun! May Alan’s retirement offer him time for refreshment and rest, and may the Holy Spirit guide Bishop Julia in the weeks and months ahead!

This Saturday morning, clergy and laypeople from around our diocese will gather to celebrate the consecration of the Rev. Julia Whitworth as the Seventeenth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Bishops from around our church will lay their hands on her to “consecrate” her, setting her aside for the office of bishop in the church, a moment that will be led by the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church, along with the Rt. Rev. Jennifer L. Baskerville-Burrows—Bishop of Indianapolis, where Bishop-elect Julia served prior to her election—and the Rt. Rev. Matthew F. Heyd, Bishop of New York.

This consecration will induct our Bishop-elect into a line of bishops that stretches back two thousand years. Each bishop in our church is consecrated by a group of (at least) three others, each of whom was consecrated by three others, each of whom… and so on. Depending on exactly how you trace the “family tree,” any given Episcopal bishop today is in the 160-something-th “generation” in a line that stretches back through the founding generation of the Episcopal Church in the early days of the American republic, through more than a millennium of the history of the Church of England and the Church in Wales, and ultimately back to the first Bishops of Rome, Jerusalem, and Lyons and to their mentors, the apostles themselves.

This “apostolic succession” is about more than the laying on of hands. What is “handed over” is not a magic blessing, but a message. Each generation of our bishops entrusts to the next the incredible good news that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Sometimes we Christians live up to these words. Sometimes we betray them. Sometimes our bishops inspire us; sometimes they discourage us. But they embody, for us, the transmission over time of the simple but shocking idea that there is a God of boundless compassion and grace.

I hope that you’ll join me in praying for our Bishop-elect this Saturday! May her ministry among us embody God’s love for us. 

I was reminded this week of the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, which asks: Is an object the same if you’ve rebuilt the entire thing, one piece at a time?

This thought experiment takes its name from the story of Theseus, the legendary ancient king of Athens. Theseus was most famous for his defeat of the Minotaur, the half-human, the-bull monster to whom the Athenians were compelled to send young nobles to be sacrificed every few years. Theseus escaped the Labyrinth, rescued the victims, and sailed back to safety in Athens. And every year afterwards, the people of Athens celebrated this great day, by taking the ship on a sailing pilgrimage to Athens to honor Apollo.

Of course, keeping the ship seaworthy for generations meant frequent repairs, and eventually philosophers began to ask questions. Replacing a single part clearly doesn’t make it a different boat. But after centuries of maintenance, if each individual board and plank, each mast and sail, had been replaced since Theseus’s day—Could we really say that it’s still “The Ship of Theseus” at all?

It’s a decent question to ask of the church, as well.

I don’t think that this is only because as I write these words, I’m watching workers from Lyn Hovey’s stained glass studio scale the scaffolding outside my office to replace the stained-glass window in the nave, now beautifully restored. I don’t think it’s only because the kitchen is being upgraded and the paths in the Garden have been paved. The list of constant maintenance goes on—I can name the bell, and the door, and the organ, and more. The church is not the building, and the building is not the church, and yet in some real sense it is the ship in which we sail. (That’s why we call the body of the church the “nave”— navis is just Latin for a ship!) The building is a place of beauty in which we gather to worship God and spend time with one another, and if the work of rebuilding it piece by piece never seems to end, it’s sometimes helpful to remember that the only alternative is a ship that’s full of leaks.

But the church itself is constantly rebuilt, as well. And now I mean the people. Every year, a few members move away. Some have been with us for decades; some for just a year or two. Every year, new members begin to attend. Some are new to the neighborhood; some have lived here their whole lives. New parishioners are born, and some young or old pass away. Sometimes out of the blue it strikes me how much the church has changed, even just in the last four years, but it’s not a “directional” change. In other words, I don’t mean that we’re growing or shrinking, becoming younger or older; I simply mean that the collection of people who make up our church is constantly in flux, even as the church itself remains.

That’s probably true of our whole lives, as well. Each one of us is constantly rebuilt. Friendships come, and friendships go. We move on to new jobs, or trade one volunteering role for another. We move from place to place, or home to home. We may even change our minds, on rare occasions! And yet we are the same, even though by a thousand small steps we’ve traveled great distances from the way our lives once were.

But here’s the thing: even as we change, we remain the same. Whatever circumstances shape us, whatever situations in which we find ourselves, whichever ropes and planks we may replace, we are who we are. And “who we are” is nothing but the beloved children of God. Whatever choices you make, whatever you have done or left undone, wherever your voyage through this life takes you, however much you seem to have changed over the years, you are who you were at the moment you were baptized, when God looked at you, as God looked at Jesus, and said: This is my child, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.

On Monday this week, our church calendar observed the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels; this Sunday, our epistle reading from Hebrews compares Jesus to the angels. Given the other two readings on Sunday, which grapple rather contentiously with the topics of marriage and divorce, I likely won’t say much about angels on Sunday, per se. But angels are an interesting topic in and of themselves: They’ve been central to some people’s piety for thousands of years, and totally foreign to others’. So I thought I’d write a few words here for the curious on the rough topic: What’s the deal with angels, anyway?

First, a word on the word: “Angel” is borrowed from the Greek word angelos, which means “messenger.” That’s the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word mal’ak, which also means “messenger.” Both of them are used for both ordinary human messengers and for seemingly more-than-human messengers from God. To choose a couple of example out of a hat, Genesis 32 is following the story of Jacob: “Jacob went on his way,” it writes, “and the angels of God met him. … And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother in the land of Seir…” In verse 1, the “angels of God” are mal’akim. In verse 3, the “messengers” Jacob sends to his brother are… also mal’akim. When John the Baptist sends two of his followers to see what Jesus is up to, Luke calls them the angelon of John, just as Gabriel is the angelos of God. (Luke 7:24, 1:26)

In English, on the other hand, we use “angel” as a bit of a technical term: You’d never call the courier who delivers you food from GrubHub or Meals on Wheels an “angel.” (Although, depending on how hungry you were, perhaps you might!) We use “angel” for human beings only by way of metaphor: a human is being “an angel” when they’re acting like we imagine one of the messengers of God might appear.

But already in the Greek- and Hebrew-speaking cultures that produced the Bible, angels were also understood in this technical sense: there was a difference between a mere human messenger, even a human messenger from God, and an “angel” per se. Angels were understood to be a kind of celestial being, distinct from humans and perhaps closer to God. In early Judaism and in most of the Hebrew Bible, angels exist as a kind of amorphous species, appearing without much detail and no names. Traditions of named angels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, and so on) emerge later, in the last books of the Hebrew Bible, in pieces of the New Testament, and in other books that have ended up in the “in-between” status of the Apocryphal books.

The trend to personalize and add details to angels continued over time, and it makes sense. For many people, angels came to feel closer to them than God. “Angels,” for some, are not only God’s messengers but the ones through whom God works in the world, and this can be a comforting thing.

For others, angels don’t mean much. Particularly for those who are scientifically-inclined, the prospect of a species of rational, spiritual beings who possess free will but cannot be systematically observed seems strange. Others, of course, might suggest that they observe their work all the time! (And surely “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”?)

In the end, perhaps the best answer is the same old boring answer: There’s a healthy balance to everything. The most beautiful part of the Christian message is that you don’t need angels to be intermediaries between you and God. God the Father loves you like the world’s best mother loves her children. God the Son became a human being, and knows how hard it is. God the Holy Spirit is working in the world to draw you closer to God. God is with you, wherever you go, and God is for you.

And yet we all encounter messengers from God, I suspect more often than we think—mal’akim and angeloi and messengers, human and perhaps more than human. I’m a skeptical person myself, by nature. I struggle with the idea of angels, per se. But perhaps the last and best word comes from Hebrews, yet again, when it exhorts us to practice hospitality and love; to treat every stranger we see as though they could be a messenger from God—”for thereby wsome have entertained angels unawares.” (Heb. 13:2)