All Hallows’ Eve and the Great English Heretic
Readings for the Twenty Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 26– Year B – Track 2)
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Psalm 119:1-8
Hebrews 9:11-14
Mark 12:28-34
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka CA on October 31, 2021.
Happy Halloween! We know that Halloween is a contraction of All-Hallows-Eve, the eve of All Hallows or All Saints, which is tomorrow November 1st, when we remember all the venerable saints who have inspired us communally as a church. And then Tuesday is the Feast of All Souls, when we remember all the deceased souls who have touched us individually in our own lives. These three days (Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls) comprise the Fall Triduum, which functions as a “powerful mirror-image of the energy flowing through the Spring Triduum” of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday when we celebrate the miraculous “resurrection” movement from death to life, while watching winter turn into spring. The Fall Triduum, on the other hand, recognizes and attends to the sobering and unavoidable movement from life to death as we witness death and decay in the plants and trees around us, as the days grow shorter, and the nights grow longer. Because these three days are so important, we often transfer the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls to the first Sunday after the actual feast day so that you all can participate, which is why we will be celebrating All Saints next Sunday, the same day as our pledge ingathering. So, you can celebrate Halloween all week if you’d like, since this whole week will be the eve of All Saints at Christ Church.
You all know how much I love talking and preaching about the saints. I mention at least one almost every Sunday. Last Sunday, I preached on St. Simon and St. Jude. Before that, I preached on St. James and St. John; and before that, I preached on St. Francis. In the Western Church, there’s a rich tradition of praying to the saints and asking them to intercede on our behalf. And this tradition remains alive and well in the Roman Catholic Church while Protestants tend to be much more wary when it comes to venerating and praying to saints who have passed on. Some Protestants consider the veneration of saints to be a form of idolatry. We Anglicans seek the via media (the middle way) and try to thread the needle by appreciating the value of veneration while remaining wary of its excesses and dangers.
Today, I want to talk about someone whose feast day was yesterday. He is on our calendar of commemorations, but would certainly not be included in any Roman Catholic church calendar because he’s considered a heretic. He’s called the “Morning Star of the Reformation,” because he was a reformer 150 years before Martin Luther. This English Reformer lived around the same time as Julian of Norwich and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and his name is John Wycliffe. He was an Oxford professor and priest, who wrote scathing critiques against the pope, clergy, and leadership of the medieval church who were enjoying way too much political power at the time. He felt that the clergy and especially the papacy were corrupted by power and that their love for power distracted them from the power of love.
John Wycliffe also rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, a widely held doctrine at the time that insists that the consecrated bread and wine change into the physical body and blood of Christ while still appearing as bread and wine. Wycliffe still believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, he just thought transubstantiation was problematic from a philosophical perspective. In this way, he’s a forerunner to an Anglican understanding of the Eucharist, which is intentionally vague when it comes to the details of the mystery while remaining clear that Christ is present in the bread and wine made holy. However, his rejection of transubstantiation got him in a lot of trouble with the religious authorities of his day.
The most significant and lasting influence of John Wycliffe was his love of Scripture and his desire to share Scripture with the whole world. In 14th century England, the Bible was only available in Latin and therefore could only be read by educated clergy who often used their knowledge of Scripture to assert power over others. It was considered a heresy to make the Bible available in other languages, especially the language of the common people: English. The religious leaders thought that creating an accessible Bible in the vernacular would be like throwing pearls before swine. John Wycliffe, on the other hand, wanted all his English brothers to read Scripture, including the common plowman. So, he translated the Latin Vulgate into Middle English and made the translations available to as many people as he could. And people then read these English Bible translations out loud to themselves and to others and many were inspired by the Scriptures to preach sermons in the vernacular. Those who believed that spirituality could only be expressed in the grandiloquence of Latin started calling these English Bible readers and preachers “Lollards,” which was a Middle English way of saying “mumblers.” But these Lollards continued reading the English Bible and preaching in English even after Wycliffe died because…that was how they obeyed the great commandment, which we heard read (in English) from the Book of Deuteronomy and again from the Gospel of Mark.
And what is the great commandment? To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Yes! And to love your neighbor as yourself? Yes. But imagine being a Lollard and reading these passages for the first time in your own language. You might notice the command that comes before the command to love and that is to listen! Hear, O Israel! Shema, Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echod.
Listen, all you wrestle with God. God is ours. God is on our side; and God is One. And God invites us to love him with our whole selves. And what do we do with those whom we love? We spend time with them. We talk to them, and we listen to them. Listening is an act of love, so how often are we intentionally listening to the One whom we are called to love above all others? How often are we spending quality time with God? How often are we practicing stillness and silence as the vestry did yesterday for a couple hours in the chapel? As the Centering Prayer group does every Monday night?
And may the spirit of John Wycliffe haunt us today on this All Hallows’ Eve with this question: How often are we listening to God speak to us through his Holy Word?
How often are we delving into the Scriptures that are so readily available to us, accessible to us now in ways that our forebears could not even imagine? Wycliffe was declared a heretic because of his creation and promotion of the English Bible that we now take so easily for granted.
Although he died of a stroke in the year 1384, Wycliffe was declared a heretic 30 years later at the Council of Constance. In an attempt to erase his influence and to make it impossible (in their minds) for God to raise his body at the Final Judgement, church leaders ordered that Wycliffe’s body be dug up from his grave and his bones be burned to ashes. I share this not only because it’s an appropriately dark and disturbing story on this Halloween, but also to emphasize the church’s failure to curb his influence. Today, Wycliffe’s influence remains stronger than ever. One chronicler wrote, “They burnt his bones to ashes and cast them into the Swift, a neighboring brook running hard by. Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; and they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which now is dispersed the world over.”
And today, the spirit of John Wycliffe invites us to obey the great commandment of loving God today and every day by listening (Shema, Israel!), listening to God speak to us through his Word made accessible to us in the vernacular, thanks to the great English heretic. Amen.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 