All Saints, 2007 St. Monnica

The Rev. Sara Fischer

This day marks the end of what I consider to be a little mini liturgical season—the season that begins with the Eve of All Saints, also known as All Hallows Eve, followed by All Saints Day on November 1, All Souls Day on November 2, and then All Saints Sunday. All Souls Day—a day that very few churches honor as its own separate feast—is also known as All Faithful Departed. There was a period in the middle ages where there was a significant distinction made between those saints with a capital S and all those who have died and gone before us. While the calendar retains the distinction, over time All Saints, or the Sunday following All Saints Day, has become the day when we celebrate not only those Christians whose contribution to the church is writ large, but also all the saints in our lives.

We all know saints in our lives. At our Thursday night celebration of All Saints I asked people to share about a saint in their own history. We heard wonderful, moving stories of people who had made a different early on in people’s lives—including a disproportionate number of stories about sixth-grade teachers. These saints have much in common with the Saints-with-a-capital S who fill the pages of our church calendar. Last year I introduced the tradition of preaching each All Saints Sunday on a saint from our church calendar, whom we might not otherwise pay much attention to. Remember Charles Henry Brent? He was our Saint of the Day last year. And now, the moment I know you have all been waiting or…..May I have the envelope please?

Our saint for the day is Monnica, blessed Monnica. Monnica is not known for being a famous missionary or a nurse or a mystic or a martyr. She was not even a sixth grade teacher. Monnica was simply a mother. Monnica, who lived from approximately 330 to 387, was a devout Christian woman in Northern Africa, whose contribution to the Church, was to pray without ceasing for the conversion of her husband and her son. Monnica stands for all Christians who pray for the faith of those they care for, and who never give up in sharing the Good News with those around them. The only thing that sets Monnica apart from all the other mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends who pray for the spiritual life of those they love is that Monnica’s son became famous. He later became known as St. Augustine of Hippo, considered one of the major heavyweights in Christian theology, up there with Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther. It is to St. Augustine that we owe much of the way that we talk about Christian faith. Augustine was not born with the faith that nurtured his intellect and made him great; he experienced conversion later in life, after a very well-documented misspent youth. He credits his mother with his conversion.

(As an aside, in his early life Augustine was a wonderful illustration of a memorable line in the movie “3:10 to Yuma.” Anyone see that? ….)

Monnica was born in North Africa, in what is now Tunisia, of Christian parents. She married a pagan, Patricius, who was short-tempered and not always faithful. Monnica had strong ambitions and high hopes for her eldest son, whom she at first tried to steer into a socially advantageous career and marriage. Both were a disaster. As Monnica matured in her own faith, she began to care less and less about Augustine’s worldly status, and more and more about his relationship with God. She also began to detach, not from her concerns for him, but from the idea that she would make it so. She realized that only the grace of God could bring Augustine to Jesus.

There are many biographies of Monnica; this morning I’d like to share the most irreverent version of her story. This from a saint-a-day book; the entry is titled “The Feast of Monnica: St. Augustine’s Nagging Mother.”

Everything we know about this saint we learn from the testimony of her devoted son Saint Augustine of Hippo, in his autobiographical Confessions….How did she convert … her son from a lusty heretic to a Doctor of the Church? She ruthlessly employed a simple mother’s method. She wept. She sobbed. She sniveled. She bawled. Until, in self-defense, … Augustine abandoned his mistress to become a priest. In Southern California the Spanish explorers found a rock spring that dripped ceaselessly. They called it, and the town they founded nearby, Santa Monica.”

Monnica is the patron saint of alcoholics, married women, and mothers, and is invoked against disappointing children. So why did I pick Monnica for our Saint of the Day?

Monnica is a saint for all of us who will never give up on those we love. Monnica is a saint for all of us who are knit together, whether through family ties or friendship or being part of a church. Monnica is a saint for all of us who ever wish the wrong things for their loved ones, and who let go and turn that all over to the grace of God.

I began by talking about All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and the distinction the church has made over the centuries between the famous saints and the every day saints. However, there is another category of saint which we need to remember, which is all of us, right here, right now. Jesus said nothing about saints in the bible. Paul refers to the saints over and over again, but hardly ever as those who have died. In scripture and in the early church, the saints were simply the faithful in the churches. Some of us are fairly uncomfortable with thinking of ourselves as saints. The reality of our humanity is that we are both saints and sinners. Another priest writes: “The church is a hospital for sinners rather than a museum for saints, [but] it is also a gymnasium for the making of saints.”

A little later this morning we will be welcoming new members into this particular gymnasium for saints. When we do this, we affirm our connections with one another, and our support for each other’s ministries in this place and beyond.

It is most appropriate that All Saints Sunday is a baptismal feast day, when we reaffirm our promises to follow Jesus in all the ways that he calls us. When we say, in our baptismal promises, “I will, with God’s help,” we commit to being saints in the making.

And so now I invite you to please turn to page 304 of the Book of Common Prayer:

In Holy Baptism we have become part of that great fellowship of believers in all times and places: the Communion of Saints. In baptism God has adopted us as children and made us members of Christ’s body and inheritors of God’s kingdom with the saints in light. Let us now renew the vows of baptism by which God has made us a holy people.