Absalom and Florence

Communicating with the saints

Sermon preached at St. James Episcopal Church on All Saints Sunday, November 6, 2022, on the occasion of the installation of icons of Saint Absalom Jones and Saint Florence Li Tim-Oi.

“I believe in the communion of saints.” – The Apostles Creed

Who are the saints?  What is the communion of saints?  Why does it matter?

These questions have preoccupied me of late, especially as I’ve contemplated the icons of Saint Absalom and Saint Florence that now adorn our sanctuary.  It is no coincidence that their completion and installation coincided with All Saints Day.  Absalom and Florence have sought us out and invite us into deeper communion with them.  They have been praying for us, waiting for us to acknowledge them.  I am not sure why us, why now.  But we responded, and here they are!

There arrival has opened an aperture between heaven and earth, between the timeless and time.  This is what saints do.  They manifest, when the conditions are right, to bridge the distance between God’s reign and the world as it is, to transmit a fresh infusion of divine vision and power into our lives.  The relationship with the saints is reciprocal, however.  They need our openness to receive what they wish to share.   We have to be paying attention.

As E. M. Cioran observed, the saints combine mysticism and ethics in their action to relieve our suffering.¹  I think Absalom and Florence are resonating with us because they sense how much we need their help.  They know something of our grief, our anxiety, our longing for connection.

The saints work within a different set of operating conditions.  They are not subject to the laws of linear time and sequential causality that we normally experience.   For them, time is synchronous rather than diachronic.  They are guided by conscience, rather than attraction and aversion.  They transmit a counter-entropic energy, in the form of virtues (like peace, love, joy, kindness, patience), that reverse the flow of entropy toward disintegration and death. 

The communion of saints are those people, living and dead, who operate between the worlds.  Through their sacrificial love and conscious attention they raise the level of consciousness and spiritual energy available to our world.  Their service to creation transcends physical death.  They participate, while alive, in the Resurrection life of Christ, and move through death into an even larger field of loving action for the sake of the salvation of the world.  Their bodies are transfigured and continue, at a much more refined and subtle level, to transmit healing energy to the attuned heart.  This is what it means to say that the saints pray for us:  they communicate to us on a subtle spiritual frequency.

The prophet Daniel is intuiting the communion of saints when he speaks of “the holy ones of the Most High” who receive the kingdom for ever and ever, even as nations and empires come and go.²  The kingdom of heaven is in this world, but not of this world.  It operates under a different set of laws.  The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians implores them and us, to recognize and participate in this communion of saints:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.³

The saints radiate power. The kingdom of heaven is not of this world, but its power has real effects in this world.  Jesus describes those effects in his teaching of the beatitudes:  mercy, consolation, vision, vindication of the just.⁴  These are the virtues that Absalom and Florence wish to share with us.  Help is on the way.  It is coming, in part, so that we may become agents of this saving help.  Saints make saints. 

This is why we venerate Saint Absalom and Saint Florence, so that we may become like them.  Absalom endured enslavement and claimed his freedom in the service of liberating others from the shackles of all that binds us to sin and death.  He became the first African-American priest in the Episcopal Church, challenging its racism then and now.  He saw the end of slavery long before others could, more than two generations before the Civil War that would finally end it.  He saw the hope to which God has called us at time when there was no hope.  We need his vision and his courage.

Saint Florence embraced and embodied the Divine Feminine in a patriarchal church and society that has long sought to deny and repress it.  She became a priest in Hong Kong during the second world war, sacrificing much in the service of migrants and refugees, risking her life behind enemy lines.  The outrage in the Anglican Communion over her ordination forced her to renounce her license to officiate and she was forgotten and abandoned when the Communists took over China, consigning her to a re-education camp and torture.  It was 30 years before she  was able to escape to Canada.  It was only as a refugee that she was able finally to exercise her sacramental ministry as a priest again.  History is always playing catch-up with the saints. 

In our icon of Saint Absalom, his stole is patterned with Coptic crosses found in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the oldest continuous Christian communion.  It is a variation on the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning “life,” and the circle represents the eternal love of God or Christ’s halo and resurrection.  Against all the forces of death and division, we affirm the God of life and unity.

Saint Florence’s stole is adorned with the phoenix, a symbol of virtue and grace in Chinese culture, and of the union of yin and yang.  We must reclaim the union of the masculine and feminine energies in the divine, and the virtues that serve as a counter-entropic force, for the sake of the healing of our fractured psyches and our desecrated planet.   We are made in the image of God our Mother and Father.

The icons were designed and placed in such a way as to evoke a lively sense of the communion of saints participating with us in the Eucharistic feast.  Saint Florence holds the consecrated bread, and Saint Absalom the sacred chalice, welcoming us to the table with them.  It is an invitation, not merely to venerate them, but to become like them in their union with Christ, to receive the divine energy communicated through the sacrament of Holy Communion.  May this Sacrament strengthen us in our baptismal promise to become saints with them. 

1. E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 6 – 7.

2. Daniel 7:1-18.

3. Ephesians 1:17-19.

4. Luke 6:2-31.