We are celebrating All Saints today.
But just who
are these Saints we are celebrating? Let’s try to tease it out a bit.
The common
answer, I suppose, is that Saints are dead Christians who were most
particularly holy and close to God, either because they lived such exemplary Christian
lives, or because they died as martyrs for their faith in Jesus Christ.
But how can we be
sure that any particular individual is a Saint?
No one would doubt,
I suppose, that Jesus’s earthly family and close friends, and the Apostles and
Evangelists we meet in the NT, were very close to God and worthy to be called
Saints.
Later on, in the
first Christian centuries, local churches and dioceses quite informally came to
recognise other people as Saints, such as outstanding bishops, teachers, martyrs and
missionaries within their own area. This includes our many early Celtic Saints,
among them St Brendan the Navigator, who a number of us in the Pilgrim Fellowship was remembering in Clonfert
Cathedral yesterday.
The process of
recognising Saints was gradually formalised over the years, until eventually in
the pre-Reformation Western Church it was accepted that only the Pope in Rome
could declare someone a Saint, after exhaustive enquiries and checks, as is
still the case in the Roman Catholic Church. By now there are thousands and thousands of them. I have a
Roman Catholic ‘Book of Saints’ at home which has alphabetical entries for almost 5,000
named Saints and groups of Saints, starting with St Aaron – a C6th Breton Abbot, and ending with St Zoticus – a
C4th priest in
Constantinople.
It is
particularly important for Roman Catholics to have certainty about who is a Saint, because
they believe in the intercession of Saints – that dead Saints can effectively
intercede on our behalf with God, if we ask them to in prayer. Only God truly
knows who is a Saint, the theory goes, so no one is declared a Saint until God
has demonstrated this by performing miracles in answer to prayers addressed to
that candidate for sainthood.
Most reformed
Christians reject the practice of asking Saints to intercede – Article 22 of the
39 Articles describes the invocation of Saints as ‘a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of
scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God’. Nevertheless, reformed
Christians like us continue to honour Saints, at least those recognised before
the Reformation, as examples of holiness and faith that we do well to imitate, in
order to strengthen and encourage our own holiness and faith.
The Church of
England has not declared any new Saints since the Reformation – with the peculiar exception of Charles I, who was honoured for political reasons as St Charles
King & Martyr from the Restoration until 1859. But the Church of England
Calendar does list many post-reformation Christians as worthy of commemoration, without
explicitly calling them Saints. Not all of them are Anglican – they include for
instance: George Fox the Quaker, Oscar Romero the martyred Catholic Bishop of San
Salvador, and German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
We in the Church
of Ireland are more parsimonious, but our BCP Calendar includes commemorations for two
post-Reformation Bishops - Bishop Jeremy Taylor of Down, Connor and Dromore, and Bishop Charles
Inglis, a bishop in North America from Raphoe.
All of these are
examples for us of holiness and faith whom we should honour at All Saints – I suppose we might call them ‘heroes of
the Church’ – and we are at liberty, I think, to consider them Saints too if we
wish.
So far so good – but St Paul in today's reading from Ephesians 1:11-23
gives us a completely different view on who the saints are.
‘I have heard of your faith in the
Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints’, says Paul . ‘I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ … may give
you a spirit of wisdom … so that you may know what are the riches of his
glorious inheritance among the saints … for us who believe’.
It is clear from
the context of this and other similar passages, that for St Paul the saints are all those who are ‘in Christ’,
both those alive who believe and follow Jesus as his disciples, and those who
have died. For the first Christians, the saints included ordinary Christians
like you and me, as well as a few exceptionally holy people.
We are all saints
(with a small ‘s’)!
We are all saints
in this sense: we are sanctified, that is made holy, by being made part of the
body of Christ in his Church at our baptism - the English word ‘saint’ comes from the Latin
‘sanctus’, meaning holy. Even though we know we are all sinners if we are
honest with ourselves. We are not particularly holy, we often feel far from God
– and, please God, we won’t be asked to die as martyrs. But we do try to live good
Christian lives, and when we fail we seek forgiveness and try again - and again, and again. That is
what makes us saints.
Those that we
recognise as Saints (with a big ‘S’) and heroes of the Church are different from
us in degree but not in kind – they too knew they were sinners. Even as
marvellous examples of holiness and faith worth celebrating, they were human
and fallible just like us. Remember, even the great St Peter was rebuked by
Jesus with the words, ‘Get thee behind
me, Satan’.
I wouldn’t for a
moment suggest that we should celebrate ourselves at All Saints - how horribly
narcisistic that would be – but surely at All Saints tide we should remember the
saints (with a small ‘s’) from whom we have received our own faith, whether
they are parents, teachers, friends, or others we have met on the way.
Since we are all saints, surely there are
implications for how we should live our lives.
And I think Jesus
spells them out for us very clearly in today’s 3rd reading from Luke’s
Gospel (6:20-31).
First, as saints
we must never forget that we are blessed by God, whatever bad things may befall
us. Let's hear Jesus's words again:
‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom
of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are
you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and
when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man
… for surely your reward is great in heaven.’
Second, as saints
Jesus tells us that we must obey what philosophers call the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto
others as you would have them do to you’. He tells us:
‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless
those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the
cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes your coat do not
withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone
takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.’
Wow! That is a big 'ask'! How
difficult these things are for ordinary, self-centred human beings. But they
are commands from the very lips of Jesus, the Son of God. Unless we do our best,
however poor, to follow them, we cannot claim to be part of the body of Christ,
and we are not worthy to be called saints, even with a small ‘s’. No wonder we
need the example of the Saints with a capital ‘S’ to show us that it is
possible!
So as we celebrate the lives of all the Saints,
let us pray that God the Father, through his Holy Spirit, will strengthen and encourage
us to live up to the example of the Saints, and to behave as Jesus has
commanded us to.
