Why do we dedicate a Sunday every year to the commemoration of all the saints who have preceded us?

All our other Feast Days focus on Jesus.

Why this day that focuses instead on us, his followers?

Is it simply to give us a chance to grieve those we love who have died?

Is it a way of connecting to our ancestors who have moved onto another plane of existence, as with the Mexican celebration, “El dia de los Muertos” (the day of the dead)?

It is helpful to grieve, and it is healing to connect with those we have loved and lost to realize that we have not really lost them at all, but I don’t think these are the real purposes of this Feast Day of the Church.

We celebrate All Saints Day year in and year out because in doing so, we recognize and acknowledge that we stand upon the shoulders of those who lived and died before us.

In recognizing all the saints, those known to us and those we never knew, we recognize that we exist in a web of relationships that extends throughout time, all the way to the beginning of time, and forward all the way to the end of time, and throughout space to all the corners of the earth.

The Bantu people would call this “ubuntu,” “I am because we are.”

According to ubuntu philosophy you can’t be human all by yourself.

It is relationships with other human beings that makes us human.

The same could be said to be true of Christianity.

I am a Christian because you are a Christian.

I cannot know about and follow Christ without someone else knowing about and following Christ.

Together we are all the body of Christ. In a society that glorifies individualism, taking time every year to remember that we do not exist in isolation by reflecting on the contributions of our ancestors throughout time and space reminds us that each of us is because we are.

Now I know that some of you like to think on this broad philosophical and theological level, and others of you like to think about things such as this more concretely, so I will do that as well.

I am who I am because my mother and father are who they are and their mothers and fathers were who they were, and so on and so forth.

Without them I would not have language.

Without them I would not understand the world around me.

Without them I would not know who Jesus is.

And I am not just connected to and through my parents.

Everyone I have known throughout my lifetime has contributed to making me me and I to making them them.

And everyone I have known was connected to countless other people and they to other people.

The web of connection is truly infinite.

No 6 degrees of separation really, no separation at all.

When you think about it really, it makes death the true unreality.

Nothing and no one really dies, because we exist in each other forever and ever.

This is why the Episcopal Church has a calendar called the “Lesser Feasts and Fasts.”

For almost every day of the calendar year there is assigned a person who went before us who the church considers to be a “saint.”

Now, we do not have canonized saints in the Episcopal Church as the Catholic Church does.

Instead, we have people who were in some way known to have been significant in the web of human connections that make up Christianity.

These are not perfect people.

Many if not all were quite flawed.

Our calendar does not encompass all the saints, for all who walked in the path of Christ throughout space and time are saints, whether remembered by the church or not.

They are simply people who have stuck in the Church’s memory who are particularly good reminders of our connection to all the Saints throughout time and place and who are particularly good reminders of what it means to be part of the human web of Christianity.

I am sure that you could add to this list of saints people from your own life who are for you a reminder of what is to be a human being and a follower of Jesus, a reminder that you are because we are.

I want to share with you the stories of just a couple of the saints that come to my mind today.

First there is our very own Frances Perkins.

Many of you know her story, but I think her story is important enough that it bears hearing again.

Frances grew up in Worcester Massachusetts in the late 1800’s and spent her summers at her family homestead in Newcastle with her grandmother.

At her parents’ knee she was taught that the poor were poor because they were lazy, however Frances was a bright young girl and quickly began to question the truth of this teaching.

She observed her poorer classmates in school and found them not to be lazy at all.

As a young woman she went off to Mount Holyoke College to major in physics with minors in chemistry and biology.

But it was not these areas of study, however, that were to become her vocation.

It was a class she took in American economic history that would steer her to the vocation that became her passion and her life.

One of the requirements of the class was to visit the local mills to observe working conditions there.

The appalling conditions inspired her with the idea of reforming or at least doing what she could to change the abuses she witnessed.

Her parents imagined that Francis would return home upon her graduation to take a job teaching or in the congregational church until she found a suitable mate for marriage.

Frances had other ideas.

She left Worcester for a teaching position in Lake Forest, Illinois.

While in Chicago she joined the Episcopal Church and spent most of her free time working at Chicago Commons and Hull House, two of the most well-known settlement houses of the time.

In 1907 she accepted the position as general secretary (leader) of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Associate.

Her primary work was to thwart the efforts of pimps to lure newly arriving immigrants and southern black girls into a life of prostitution.

Many times she put her life on the line to save these young girls.

She went on to investigate malnutrition among children in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, work for safe working conditions in factories, and to fight for a 54-hour work week for women and children.

In 1911 she and some friends were witnesses of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire where 147 people died because of unsafe working conditions.

Years later, Frances said that this was “the day the New Deal was born.”

Next she worked for the New York State Government, becoming the state’s Industrial Commissioner.

She worked to create a system of unemployment insurance among many other things.

She also used her position in state government to fight antisemitism within the state department.

In 1930 the Hoover administration issued an executive order to block any immigrant who might not be able to support themselves in the United States.

This was increasingly used to keep persecuted German Jews from entering the United States.

Frances found a loophole.

The State Department took her to court.

She won.

In 1933 President-elect Franklin Delanor Roosevelt asked Frances to serve in his cabinet as Secretary of Labor.

Frances told him she would only accept the position if he endorsed the list of policies that she would pursue: a 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, workers’ compensation, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to states for unemployment relief, social security, and universal health care.

He agreed and she accepted the position.

In her 12 years as the Secretary of Labor, she achieved all of these goals except one, universal health care.

Frances Perkins said, “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain, common workingmen.”

It was her faith that compelled her to do what she did.

She understood that every human being had value and purpose because of God’s love.

And to sustain the incredible difficult work that she did she spent one full day a month in silent retreat at the Convent of the Sisters of the Poor in Catonsville, Maryland.

She knew that she was not doing her work alone, but only with God’s help.

Or we could talk about Vida Dutton Scudder, educator, organizer, writer, reformer, and social activist.

Vida was born in 1861 in India to missionary parents.

As a young woman she was one of only two American women admitted to a graduate program at Oxford University.

It was while a student at Oxford that Vida was first introduced to socialist thinking.

She began to question her privileged station in life and was unable to reconcile it with her identity as a Christian.

After graduating from Oxford she returned to the States to teach English Literature at Wellesley College, a position she held until her retirement in 1927 at the age of 66.

But this is not why she is remembered in the Episcopal calendar of saints.

She is remembered because of her work on behalf of the poor. In the same year she began teaching at Wellesley, she helped to found the College Settlement Association, a society that gathered women to study social and economic problems in order to find solutions to them.

The Association founded several Settlement houses in urban areas around the country including Hull House in Chicago (one of the places that formed Frances Perkins) and Denison House in Boston.

Vida was the administrator of Denison House for more than a decade.

Vida’s socialism sprang directly from her understanding of the Gospel.

Her view of the Gospel message was unequivocal.

In her words, “Woe is proclaimed to rich people. Possessions are described as subject to theft and corruption. . . We are distinctly bidden not to seek or accumulate them and are told it is all but impossible for a rich man to enter that social utopia, the kingdom of heaven.”

She was convinced that socialism and Christianity went together hand and glove, and that Christianity provided socialism with the checks and balances it needed in order not to become brutal in the way that it did in Russia during and after the revolution.

For Vida, charity without social reform and restructuring is useless.

She wrote that philanthropy is “a sedative to the public conscience” and “fundraising efforts only” squeezed a little more reluctant money from the comfortable classes, who groaned and gave, but changed not one iota.”

Vida knew that socialism was not perfect, but it was the best solution she could see to the problems in the world around her, and as a woman of strong faith, she found socialism the best way to live out her faith.

So many people are because Frances and Vida were.

And so many people follow Christ because Frances and Vida followed Christ.

And there are so many more saints I could tell you about.

I give thanks today for all the saints that went before us and pray that we, the saints of this moment, might continue the connections that make us human, the connections that make us Christian.

For I am me because you are and they were and you are you because I am and they were, may we pass on our humanity, our Christianity to others. Amen.