Celebrating All Saints

Address given at All Saints Stradbally (Castleconnell) on All Saints Sunday 3 November 2019

We are celebrating All Saints today - but who are these Saints we celebrate?

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 Saints, such as outstanding bishops, teachers, martyrs and missionaries within their own area - this includes our many early Celtic Saints.

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 to be a Saint, after exhaustive enquiries and checks. By now there are thousands of them. I have a RC ‘Book of Saints’ at home which has alphabetical entries for almost 5,000 named Saints and groups of Saints, starting with St Aaron – a C6^th Breton Abbot, and ending with St Zoticus – a C4^th priest in Constantinople.

Today in the calendar of the CofI we also celebrate St Malachy, a C12th archbishop of Armagh, who was made a Saint in 1190 by Pope Clement III.

It is particularly important for RCs 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 whether someone 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 person.

Most reformed Christians reject this 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, Anglicans like us continue to honour Saints, at least those recognised before the Reformation. But we do so as examples of holiness and faith, in order to strengthen and encourage our own holiness and faith, and we do not ask them to intercede for us.

The Church of England has not declared any new Saints since the Reformation – with the odd 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 later 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 Bishop of San Salvador, and Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We in the Church of Ireland are more parsimonious, but the BCP Calendar includes commemorations for two post-Reformation Bishops - Jeremy Taylor, bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, and Charles Inglis born in Raphoe, a bishop in North America.

All of these are examples for us of holiness and faith – 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 todays 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 were not just exceptionally holy people, but also ordinary Christians like you and me!

We are all saints (with a small ‘s’) 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. 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 – 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 3^rd reading from Luke’s Gospel (6:20-31).

First, as saints we must never forget that we are blessed by God, whatever burdens we may carry. Jesus tells us:

‘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 is often called the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do to you’:

‘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.’

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 to finish, as we celebrate the lives of all the Saints, let us pray:

God our Father, by our baptism you made us your holy people

and called us to share in the joy of your saints. 

May your Holy Spirit encourage and strengthen us

to live for others as Jesus taught us.

We make this prayer to you in His name.  Amen

The works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh on Sunday 30th June 2019, the 2nd after Trinity.

‘For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.’ So says St Paul in today’s reading from his epistle to the Galatians 5:1,13-25.

But am I truly free? Are you truly free? I’m pretty sure I have never really been free to do exactly what I want.

I remember an evening at this time of year playing with my brother, when I must have been around 6 and Tom 2 years younger. My mother called us into the house to go to bed – but I didn’t want to. I was enjoying myself, and it was still light. I ran away across the fields with Tom in tow, and she hitched up her skirts and chased after us. Tom suffered a nasty wound when he snagged himself on a barbed wire fence as we went through a gap. When she caught up with us, she slapped me roundly on the leg for being such a naughty boy and causing my brother to be hurt - the only time I ever remember her doing so. And she was right – I needed to learn the lesson that there would be consequences if I did exactly what I wanted, regardless of others.

And even now, as an old man, I am still not totally free. If I break the criminal law of the land - if I drive dangerously - and I’m caught, I will be tried and punished for it.

Today I want to explore what Paul’s talk of freedom and slavery is all about.

It was Paul’s theological conviction that Christ by God’s grace sets us free from the Jewish Law to follow a more important law, the law of love, which is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourself.

The Jewish Law is called the ‘halakah’ in Hebrew, meaning ‘the way to behave’. Jesus famously summarised it as ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:35-40) – though he was not the first to do so.

Since the time of Moses, the Jewish Law had become a vast compendium of commands and prohibitions, drawn from the Torah, the first 5 books of our OT. It went far beyond the 10 commandments – it prescribed how to apply 613 ‘mitzvot’ or commandments to different circumstances. Pious Jews of the time, especially the Pharisees of whom Paul was one, did their very best to follow every jot and tittle, since they believed this is what God required of them.

Much of this was good - it encouraged people to good, ethical behaviour. But attempts to follow it slavishly resulted in behaviour which was perversely damaging – contrary to the law of love. Remember how Jewish religious leaders attacked Jesus for healing on the Sabbath, when work was prohibited. This attitude led Jesus to declare ‘The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ (Mark 2:28). Jesus respected the spirit of the Jewish Law, and he said he came to fulfil it, but he tempered it with the law of love.

Paul reminds the Galatians that even if Christ calls them to freedom, they must not think that they are free to do absolutely anything. They are still bound by Christ’s law of love. ‘Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence’, he says, ‘but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”.’

Paul continues, ‘If … you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another’. Here he is restating that ancient ethical maxim, the Golden Rule, “Do as you would be done by”. This is not a specifically Christian idea, but one found in almost all religions and secular philosophies, in ancient times as much as today. It is after all the basis for peaceable coexistence and human flourishing in any society.

But Paul goes further than this: ‘Live by the Spirit’, he says, ‘do not gratify the desires of the flesh’.

For Paul it is the Spirit, sent by God at Jesus’s request, which enables us as Christians to live up to the law of love. He understands the tensions in our human nature between our baser instincts – this is what he means by ‘the flesh’ – and our better natures which strive for all that is right and good and true.

The works of the flesh are the consequences of giving in to our baser instincts. Paul gives us a long list, including not only sexual unfaithfulness, but also hatred and jealousy, anger and envy - all of them behaviours which damage relationships with other people. They are behaviours contrary to the law of love. They cut people off from God’s kingdom.

I fear we see such behaviours all too often from fundamentalist religious leaders, and populist political leaders – and their bad examples spread like an epidemic among their followers. We must resist infection by them.

Paul contrasts these behaviours with the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace – patience, kindness, generosity – faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the qualities that the Spirit calls us to display as Christians who follow Christ’s law of love.

Each one of us is like the soldier in the trenches in Woodbine Willie’s 1^st World War poem.

I'm a man, and man's a mixture,

Right up from 'is very birth,

There's part of 'im comes from 'eaven,

And part of 'im comes from earth.

There's summat as draws 'im upwards,

And summat as drags 'im duhn,

And the consekence is that 'e wobbles

Twixt muck and a golden crown.

We wobble. We wobble because all too often our baser instincts overcome our best intentions. But God offers us forgiveness if we respond to Christ, repent and try to do better.

And by God’s grace we have received the Spirit which Christ asked the Father to send us. If we live by that Spirit, if we allow ourselves to be guided by that Spirit, we will not be slaves to our baser instincts, we will not be down in the muck. We will be free, free to live by Christ’s law of love, free to enjoy the fruits of the Spirit, and free to inherit a golden crown in the kingdom of God.

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

O God, the light of the minds that know you,

the life of the souls that love you,

the strength of the thoughts that see you:

help us to know you that we may truly love you,

and so to love you that we may fully serve you,

whose service is perfect freedom,

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen