All Saints is a principal feast. This means it is one of the high holy days of the Christian year. And unlike days like Christmas and Easter, most people don’t really know what we are doing today on All Saints’ Day, other than, and very frankly said, celebrating those people who have died before us. What might be helpful is a brief march through history, and an explanation of where Anglicans find themselves…. In the earliest of Christian days, it was Christian martyrs who were viewed as Saints. This is why we hold Saint Stephen to be so very important to the faith, as the first Christian martyr. You see illusions to this in the reading we had today from the Revelation to St. John. Referring to saints only as the martyrs continued for the first couple of hundred years of Christianity. By the 3rd century, people began to include…

Grant us always to seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will. In the revised common lectionary, we almost never have Leviticus in our readings. We have this very small portion we heard this morning, every 6 years, and we have parts of this same chapter for Easter 5A and Epiphany 7A (and we don’t even always have 7 Sundays after the Epiphany). I can say the book of Leviticus generally is a little dry, but if you miss these 3 Sundays in the 3-6 year cycle, you never hear Leviticus in church. How little we read this book is ironic because Jesus quotes it a LOT. Within the Pentateuch, which are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also called the Torah, Leviticus is considered the most important for the Jewish faith. It is the central portion. This is where you find almost all of…