Called to be Saints: Sermon Preached on 5th November 2023 (All Saints’)

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – 1 John 3.1-3; Matthew 5.1-12

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

This Sunday, we’re keeping All Saints’ Day, the day where the Church celebrates – you know – all the saints. That’s all very well and good, but you wouldn’t want to be too like a saint would you? If you’re being honest, you probably wouldn’t even want to get too close to one of them. In being so good at the whole Christianity business, they rather show the rest of us up. We’re just ordinary Christians – we believe and trust in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we try our best to live good lives and all that, but we also know we aren’t very good at it. With their constant praying, doing good, being pious, and staying away from all the naughty but fun things we enjoy – from booze to gossip – saints leave us feeling a bit inadequate. Just for example, you wouldn’t want a rector who’s too much of the saint, would you?

That’s my instinctive reaction when I hear about saints, one that I suspect many of you share. But I think it’s also an incorrect reaction. Look at your Bibles! The people who were close to Jesus, and went on to build the Church, certainly weren’t perfect. The apostles did plenty of squabbling and bickering with one another – so much of it that you’d think they were just like today’s Christians. Nor did the apostles avoid the good things in life. That St Peter liked getting lavish hospitality from the congregations he visited, for himself and his wife – at least if you believe St Paul’s gossipy comments in his letters.

Saints aren’t perfect. Only God is perfect. We sometimes get a little confused about what a saint is. Saints aren’t just the famous people like Peter and Paul who get a special day in the Church’s calendar. The truth – the frightening truth – is that all followers of Jesus Christ are called to be saints.

Now, it’s absolutely right that we especially remember and celebrate those Christians who stand out for how close to God they lived, or who achieved great things. They should be examples to us of what is possible for Christians to achieve in the power of the Holy Spirit. So let’s talk a bit about them. We have the biblical saints. We also have historical saints, some of whom we should know more about. For example in this part of the world, we might have heard the names of Saxon and Norman saints like Aldhelm, Edith of Wilton, and Osmund, but few us know much about their lives. This is a pity, because they were remarkable people, and each of those three West Country saints in particular dealt successfully with an issue that is very much live in the current Church – Aldhelm preached the Gospel in a country where the Faith had been lost, Edith raised the status of women in the Church, and Osmund helped people of clashing cultures flourish together after the Norman conquest.

We also have more modern saints to guide us. On the west front of Westminster Abbey, about 30 years ago, the statues of ten martyrs of the 20^th Century were erected, to remind us that God has not stopped calling people to live exceptional lives for Christ. Some of these are very familiar: Martin Luther King perhaps most of all, but many of you will have heard of Dietrich Bonheoffer, the Lutheran Pastor who was murdered by Hitler, or Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop shot dead at the altar by the military dictators of El Salvador in 1980. But if I mentioned the names of Esther John or Manche Masemola, I suspect most of you wouldn’t know who I was talking about. Both of them were martyred for their faith in Christ, Esther John in Pakistan, Manche Masemola in South Africa.

Nor has this stopped in the 21^st Century. Many of us will remember the brave Coptic Christians from Egypt who were brutally martyred for their faith in front of the cameras by ISIS on a beach in Libya in 2015. But as we Anglicans are very bad at knowing our own story, I suspect few will know of the seven brave Anglican monks of the Melanesian Brotherhood, murdered in 2003 by a warlord in the Solomon Islands as they tried to make peace during a period of interethnic fighting. In today’s Gospel reading, a piece of Christ’s teaching many people feel lies at the very heart of Christian teaching, Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers” – something our world desperately needs to discover at present. So, let me remember as blessed by name from this pulpit Nathaniel Sado, Robin Lindsay, Francis Tofi, Tony Sirihi, Alfred Hill, Patteson Gatu, and Ini Paratabatu.

You’ll have noticed when I got into more modern times, I slipped away from talking about saints to talking about martyrs. Now, I’m not calling you to be martyrs and I’m not called to be a martyr myself, or at least I certainly hope I’m not called to be a martyr. I think I’m built for comfort rather than heroism. So what about the idea that all of us are saints, or if we’re not already, we’re called to be so. That’s part of what the feast of All Saints’ is about – it’s about celebrating that the church has produced so many millions of saints that there’s no way we could possibly remember all of them. Most of them lived lives of saintliness in very ordinary circumstances and in very ordinary ways. They also had their faults. They weren’t the finished article, any more than St Peter and St Paul were.

Somehow, in the humdrum of our ordinary lives, the Holy Spirit is at work in us, making us fit for eternity with God in heaven. In our Epistle reading, St John writes that:

we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

The moments in this life when we feel transported by beauty, or love, or goodness into a higher plane are moments when God shows us a little glimpse of the eternity He is preparing us for. In this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells us about a way of living that keeps the kingdom of heaven close here on Earth.

In a world obsessed with achievement, interestingly it’s more about what we are than what we do. There are nine items in Jesus’ list of beatitudes – six are about what we are, not what we do, or what we’ve achieved. They are about attitudes to life, ways of being, that all of us can aspire to whatever the circumstances of our life or our abilities. We will all find some of them easier than others – I don’t find it easy to be meek, you’ll be surprised to learn, but I often hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Of the other three items, two are about what might be done to us, about facing up to persecution and being lied about. And only one is about something that Jesus calls us to do: I already mentioned it—“Blessed are the peacemakers.”

In the Beatitudes, Jesus teaches us the way to sainthood in our own lives – being merciful or hungering for justice; being pure in heart or mourning; putting up with being spoken about wrongly for the sake of our faith. Most of all, Christ calls us to make peace in our own lives, among the people around us, even as the troubles of the wider world risk overwhelming us. For it is in that sort of meek, merciful, ordinary life that the Holy Spirit leads us to sainthood, and to heaven.

And now to God the Holy Spirit, God the, Son, and God the Father, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.