All Saints Sunday Revelation 7: 9-17
“Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I have been quite captivated by this question from our first lesson. For one, thing I myself am robed in white, so 
you would be totally within your rights to ask who I am and where I came from. Over the course of the coming year, I look forward to sharing myself with you—who I am and where I come from—just as I look forward to learning those things about each of you.
In a sense, my role as a priest is to envision each of you robed in baptismal white— that’s what this garment symbolizes— regardless of what other colors you may be wearing. No matter what else may be going on with you are with me, no matter how we feel about ourselves or each other in a given moment, we are all always first and foremost children of the living God. Where we come from is the waters of baptism. Who we are, as our baptismal rite insists, is Christ’s own. Forever.
Hang on to that image, because I am going to share a rather more disturbing one with you. I have been pondering and praying a lot about the Ebola epidemic, which raises for me one of those unanswerable questions about why God allows such suffering. Of course—as usual—the question points back, at least in part, to us. Why do we allow such suffering? Which in the case of African hemorrhagic fevers has a lot to do with the legacy of colonialism and global movements of capital and the fact that Liberia and Sierra Leone have such poor health infrastructure.
So with this global tragedy on my mind and heart, I suffered a kind of shock of recognition when I first read through the lesson from Revelation. I wonder, might those saints robed in white be the health workers in their hazmat suits, washed in the blood of suffering Ebola victims? My prayer is that they find, in this impossibly hard work, a way to stand before God with praise and worship nevertheless, trusting that God will—in the fullness of time—wash away every tear.
Of course that’s not what the author of Revelation could possibly have had in mind, but I don’t necessarily think he had in mind the “Left Behind” movie either. The trouble with this complicated little book of scripture is that we often know more about it from peculiar interpretations within popular culture that we do from how its preached or studied in Episcopal Churches. It doesn’t come up often in our Sunday lectionary.
So a couple of things to remember about the Book of Revelation. Note that it was not written to scare people, but to comfort them. It was directed to a persecuted community of Jesus-followers who had suffered enormously, and served to remind them that salvation belongs to God and not to the violent and oppressive political powers they lived among. The message is fundamentally about hope—hope not just for the elect but for multitudes, from all tribes and peoples and languages. Hope that their suffering would not be the final word.
Returning to where I began, who then are those robed in white, and where do they come from, anyway? We know that they are marked and vested as servants of God—the very definition of saints—which is no doubt why we are hearing this lesson today on the Feast of All Saints. So lets consider what we might learn about the nature of sainthood from the white-robed ones we meet in Revelation.
To begin with, saints are weird. At the very least, we know from this passage that they wear strange clothing. Which might seem like a rather superficial observation, except that garments are—throughout history—an indicator of comfort, status and belonging. Or the lack thereof. Saints have always known for their uncomfortable clothing and unfashionable appearance. Think of St. John the Baptist in his scratchy camel hair suit, or St. Joan of Arc martyred in part for cross-dressing. Or for that matter, think of our brave Ebola health workers in their hazmat suits. Saints don’t dress for success. In part because they usually don’t have much, at least not in conventional terms.
Also—and my second observation is closely related to the first—saints get into trouble. They provoke the powers. They praise God when they are supposed to be praising the emperor or the war effort or the winning brand. Saints go to the places where people suffer, and then—in part because they stand with the suffering—they start to seem even weirder. Criminal, even. Saints regularly end up in jail or quarantined.
I think its especially important, here in this sanctuary where we are surrounded by cleaned up images of saints, to call out the countercultural aspects of sainthood. To represent saints as polished and perfect is the very definition of hagiography. A word which means, literally, the study of saints, although in common parlance it has come to mean a kind of dishonestly flattering portrait. So let us remember that while sained-glass saints don’t tell the whole story, they do serve to inspire us. And they should, because whatever weird and troublesome things they did, it was for love of their neighbors and God. And the tradition teaches that they love us still. Which brings me to a third aspect of saintly character.
Saints hang in there. They are the ones who persevere through and come out of the great ordeal, as the lesson from Revelation teaches us. Which may be the key way in which we differentiate saints from ordinary misfits or troublemakers. They are so impassioned for God’s cause of justice and peace that they’re willing to suffer the label of misfit or troublemaker until God’s shalom is fulfilled.
So, you multitude robed in your baptismal white—at least in my priestly imagination—what manner of saints will you be? Will any of us be? How in our contexts—our families, our workplaces, our communities and our congregations, will we welcome the weird and indeed risk being the weird? What kind of trouble will we be called to make for the love of God? And when we find ourselves in the inevitable trouble that accompanies saintly lives, how will we support each other and hang in there anyway?
Honestly I don’t know the answers to these questions, although in a way they’re exactly what I’ve come here to discover. I want to know to how we’ll call forth sainthood in each other. And I do think that our lesson from Revelation does give us a valuable clue as to how to begin. Which is by doing exactly what people have always gathered in church to do: to sing the praises of God. “Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen!” sang the saints.
So when beloved friends act weird, let us sing to our God: “blessing and glory.” When trouble seems unavoidable, let us sing: “wisdom and thanksgiving” even so. And let us keep right on singing, “honor and power and might be to our God,” until the one on the throne wipes away every last tear.
