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

We must start with Jesus Christ

On the five Sundays before Lent I shall be giving a series of addresses on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians. This is the first, given in Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 6th February 2011, the 5th before Lent.

Today and the next 4 Sundays I shall be talking about Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
When the Rector invited me to give a series of themed addresses I confess I gulped hard several times. But something prompted me to reply, ‘Why not?’ And when I thought about possible themes ‘Ephesians!’ jumped straight into my mind, as if somebody had put it there.

In many ways it’s the supreme expression of Paul’s vision for his churches. I see the whole letter as Paul’s answer to this question: ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s church’. Its often poetic imagery is just as relevant today as it was in Paul’s time, I think.

I’m enjoying the challenge of probing deeper than I've done before into Ephesians and what it means. Inevitably in just five addresses I can only talk about some of its themes, but I hope you will find my take on it thought provoking. If you miss an address one Sunday, or want to come back to one, there will be paper copies available.

But there is no substitute for reading and reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself. So I would encourage you to take down your Bible at home and read perhaps a chapter or two of Ephesians a week, keeping pace with these addresses. It’s quite short – 6 chapters take up just 6 pages in my copy.

This week I shall first look briefly at the context of the letter, and then turn to examine the great theme of chapter 1, ‘We must start with Jesus Christ' - he is the source of all our blessings.

What is the context of Ephesians - who wrote it, to whom, and why?
The letter claims to be written by ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God’. But many scholars doubt that it was written by Paul himself, for reasons of style and vocabulary. They suggest that it may have been written by a slightly later author in Paul’s tradition, drawing on other letters, in particular Colossians, in order to summarise and pass on Paul’s thinking about the church.

In the version handed down to us the letter is addressed ‘to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus’. But most scholars today think that it is really a circular letter sent to several of Paul’s missionary churches, and wasn’t written specifically to the Ephesians at all. The earliest manuscripts omit the words ‘in Ephesus’. And it is strangely impersonal, unlike Paul’s other letters. There are no personal messages or references to specific events in Ephesus, even though Paul knew the Ephesian church and people very well.

Ultimately I don’t think these scholarly arguments matter a whit. What does matter is the quality of the thinking in it about the nature of the church and its role in God’s plan of salvation. I shall continue the ancient tradition of calling its author Paul and those to whom it’s addressed Ephesians.

We are all saints! Did you realise that? You, you, all of you, and me too – we are all saints, at least in the way that Paul uses the word - ‘hagios’ in Greek means one who has been made holy. The idea that a saint is someone with a halo, someone who is peculiarly good, someone able to grant miracles through intercession, is a much later idea, a medieval superstition. We are saints because by the grace of God we are Christians, ‘faithful in Christ Jesus’, to use Paul’s words. Our baptism was an external and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that God has made us holy.

In fact I suggest that we should see Paul’s letter as addressed to us – we are ‘the saints who are in Ephesus’!

Paul begins his letter (1:3-14) by counting the ways in which God has blessed the saints.
It is an amazing, poetic passage, a single sentence in the original Greek. The subordinate clauses break one after another like waves on a seashore, pounding in the message that God, in Paul’s words, ‘has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places’. It is the same message we heard in the Gospel reading (John 1:14-16): ‘From (Christ’s) fullness we have all received grace upon grace’.

The name of Christ echoes and re-echoes through Paul’s words:

• ‘In Christ’, God ‘chose us … before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love’.
  We are not Christians because we choose to be, but because God has chosen us to be - and we can trust God not to change his mind, because he chose us from the very beginning.
  
• ‘Through Jesus Christ’ God has ‘destined us for adoption as his children …, according to the good pleasure of his will’.
  God adopts us as his beloved children, full members of the household of God, because God's Son Jesus Christ introduces us to him.
  
• ‘Through (Christ’s) blood we have redemption and the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us’.
  It is Christ’s example of self-sacrifice upon the cross which shows us the way to redemption and forgiveness. It is a gift from God we do not deserve.
  
• In Christ, God has revealed ‘the mystery of his will … as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him’, that is in Christ, ‘things in heaven and things on earth’.
  The Greek word translated here as ‘plan’ is 'oikonomia' - also the root of the English word 'economy', which we are probably tired of hearing in this election time! It literally means the stewardship or overseeing of a household or institution. Paul is saying here that God’s purpose in overseeing his creation is that the whole of it should be drawn together in Christ. The whole of creation - chosen, adopted, redeemed and forgiven, all in Christ - what a breathtaking cosmic vision!
  
• ‘In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance’. Those who hear Christ’s ‘word of truth, the gospel of salvation and … believe in him’, are ‘marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit’ And ‘this is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people’.
  It is precisely because we feel Christ’s promised Spirit at work in and through us, that we can be sure that God has chosen and adopted us as his children, and has redeemed and forgiven us.

Paul almost bludgeons us to recognise that we must start with Christ! This is the key message Paul begins with. This is the message which I hope you will take away from all my words today. We must start with Christ – everything else, including the church insofar as it is a human institution, can only be secondary to Christ.

Paul continues, thanking God for the Ephesians’ faith and the love they show the saints.
He prays in beautiful words that they may know ‘the immeasurable greatness of (God’s) power for us who believe’ - we will shortly pray them for ourselves as our parish prayer for February.

And finally Paul drives home again to the saints at Ephesus, that Christ must be their starting point, finishing the 1st chapter with these words: ‘God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand … And he has put all things under his feet and has made him head of all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all’.

‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ’

He must be our only starting point! Amen

Next week we shall look at Ephesians 2:1-10, and the theme ‘We are saved by grace through faith for good works’.