Tomorrow is the first of
November,
a day which many
Christians in many countries
celebrate as All Saints’
Day.
Of course, nowadays today,
Hallowe’en, literally “All
Hallows’ Eve,”
or in the language we use
today, “All Saints’ Eve”,
is more celebrated.
But even today, in some countries,
tomorrow will be a Bank
Holiday, and if you are that sort of person,
you might buy
chrysanthemums and put them on a loved one’s grave –
when I lived in France, back in the early 1970s,
you only ever saw
chrysanths on sale around this time of year.
But last year, I noticed they were focussing on Hallowe’en far more than they
used to.
In this country, though,
we never have gone in much for All Saints, except in Anglican church names.
We’ve tended to go straight from Hallowe’en to Guy Fawkes’ Night with nothing
in between.
But if the Church suggests, as it does, that we should celebrate All Saints’
Day, then maybe we should do so.
And there is a long tradition, in the Church, of celebrating a festival on the
previous day, the eve.
So it is all right to
celebrate it today, instead.
But what is a
saint, anyway?
After all, if we are going to celebrate All Saints,
we need to know what
saints are.
It seems to me that there
are two sorts of saint.
The first is a Saint with a capital S.
These are often Bible people, like St Paul, of course,
but there are also lots of
Saints who were, in life,
totally dedicated to being
God’s person.
To the point where, very often, they got into serious trouble,
or even killed for it.
There was St Polycarp, who was put to death,
and when he was given a
chance to recant,
to say he wasn’t a
Christian after all,
he said very firmly that
he’d served God, man and boy, for something like eighty years now,
and God had never let him
down,
so if they thought he was
going to let God down at the last minute,
they’d another think
coming.
Or words to that effect.
There were Saints Perpetua
and Felicity, her servant.
Saint Perpetua was a young mother, whose husband and father both roundly
disapproved of her being a Christian,
and Felicity, also a
Christian, was expecting a baby when they were taken and put on trial.
They were left until Felicity had had her baby –
la little girl, who was brought up by her sister –
and then they had to face wild beasts in the arena.
And so went to glory.
There are lots of other
saints, too, whose story has come down to us.
Although sometimes their stories are rather less exotic than we once thought.
St George, for instance, the patron saint of England:
he was born in Cappadocia of noble, Christian parents
and on the death of his father, accompanied his
mother to Palestine,
her country of origin,
where she had land and George was to run the
estate.
He rose to high rank in the Roman army,
and was martyred for complaining to the then
Emperor about his persecuting the Christians –
he ended up being one of the first to be put to death.
And his dragon?
Oh, that was a bit of a misunderstanding.
The Greek church venerated George as a soldier-saint, and told many stories of
his bravery and protection in battle.
The western Christians,
joining with the Byzantine Christians in the Crusades, elaborated and
misinterpreted the Greek traditions and devised their own version.
The story we know today of
Saint George and the dragon dates from the troubadours of the 14th century.
Of course, you can look at
it, as they did, in symbolic terms:
the Princess is the church, which George rescued from the clutches of Satan.
I imagine football fans often see places like Brazil or Argentina as the
dragon, especially during the World Cup!
But not all Saints belong to the dawn of
Christianity.
There is Thomas More, for instance,
who was put to death by Henry the Eighth
as he wouldn’t admit that the King’s marriage to
Katharine of Aragon was valid, or that the King was Head of the Church.
And in our own day, Mother Theresa looks likely to be made a saint, if she
hasn’t been already, although she died in her own bed.
You don’t absolutely have to be a martyr to be made a Saint, although it
helps.
So, anyway, those are just a very few of the many
“Saints” with a capital S.
No bad thing to read some of the stories of their lives, and learn who they
were, and why the Church continues to remember them.
Our Saints have one thing
in common.
Well, two things, actually –
the first being that they are dead!
The Church doesn’t make people who are still alive Saints,
and there is a long
process of investigating their lives to make sure they really were as holy and
as saintly as they were alleged to have been.
That’s partly why a lot of saints were moved to the “Second Division”
as it were, because the
details of their lives and morals couldn’t be verified.
But the Saints, along with a great many other people,
are what we now call the
Church Triumphant.
We, down here on earth, are the Church Militant,
and they, who have fought
the good fight and got where they hoped they would, are now Triumphant.
But the second, and main
thing that the Saints have in common is that they were all God’s people.
Their whole lives revolved about God, all the time.
Not just on Sundays.
They may have led wicked lives in their youth –
Saint Augustine of Hippo, who had rather disastrous relationships with women
all his life, is alleged to have prayed “God, grant me chastity, but not yet!”
–
but they all knew what it was to have been converted to Christ, and did their
best to live for him, and often to die for him, thereafter.
And it is that quality
that we can share.
We are God’s children, as St John reminds us in one of his letters,
and are constantly being
enabled to fulfil our potential.
We aren’t yet the people God designed us to be,
at least, I don’t know
about you, but I know I’m not!
But with God’s grace that will one day happen.
Jesus gives us a
blueprint, in the collection of his teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount,
part of which we read as our Gospel reading for today, of the sort of people
God’s children are:
poor in spirit –
not thinking more of themselves than they ought;
mourning, perhaps for the ungodly world in which we live;
meek, which means slow to anger and gentle with others;
hungry and thirsty for righteousness;
merciful;
pure in heart;
peacemakers and so on.
All the sorts of qualities that our world deems totally naff,
these are the qualities
God’s children will have.
No wonder being a Christian isn’t very popular!
And yet, it is those of us who most truly display these qualities who are the
closest to what we mean by “Saints”.
St Paul gives other lists
of characteristics that Christians will display;
you probably remember from his letter to the Galatians:
Love, joy, peace, patience and so on.
And he gives lots of lists of the sort of behaviour that Christians don’t do,
ranging from gluttony to fornication.
Basically the sort of things that put “Me” first, and make “me” the centre of
my life.
And in that wonderful
reading from the letter to the Ephesians that we heard earlier, he reminds us
that we don’t have to strive and struggle and do violence to our own natures.
He prays that we might be
given the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that we may know God better. And
he prays “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may
know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance
in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.”
We don’t have to strive to know this in our own
strength; we can allow God to put this knowledge in us and make it part of us.
Yes, of course, we are inherently selfish and it’s nearly impossible to put God
first in our own strength.
But the whole point is, we don’t have to do it in our own strength.
That is why God sent the Holy Spirit,
to
come into us,
fill us,
and transform us.
As we are, we would never
inherit the Kingdom of God,
whether on this earth or
in the world to come.
But transformed by God’s Spirit, then, in the words of St John,
“We shall be like him”.
And yet, paradoxically, we shall still be ourselves.
St Paul addresses some of
his letters to “The saints in such-and-such a town”.
He knew, and they knew, that it was possible to be a saint in this life.
The letter to the Corinthians, for example, begins:
“To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ
Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The word “sanctified” means “Being made saint-like”, and it’s one of the things
that happens to Christians who are truly intent on being God’s person.
You can’t help it;
the Holy Spirit who dwells in you does sanctify you, makes you more the person
that God created you to be.
Conclusion:
So when we celebrate All
Saints’ Day, we are not only celebrating those who have gone before us,
although them too.
We are also celebrating those among us, perhaps including ourselves, who are
“The saints in Brixton”.
There aren’t all that many of us, but if we truly become who we could be in
Jesus, if we are truly dedicated to being His person, then I reckon we could
make more of a difference than we think.
Amen.