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Sermon - All Saints' Day (B) - 1st November 2009
St Alban's & St Alban's Anglican Church Epping
Readings: Isaiah 25: 6-9. Psalm 24. Revelation 21: 1-6a; Gospel according to John 11: 32-44.
HOW CAN WE SAY THAT WE’RE ALL SAINTS ?
Prayer : God, help us to see that you are making all things new, and to grasp what Jesus meant by the words, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”
There is an old motto, “familiarity breeds contempt”, but when it’s the Bible “familiarity breeds inattention”. Because many have heard or read bits many times before, we think we’ve got the picture and cease to notice important details.
Once upon a time, Jesus went all over Galilee… He used synagogues for meeting places and taught people the truth of God. God's kingdom was his theme - that beginning right now they were under God's government, a good government! He also healed people of their diseases and of the bad effects of their bad lives. Word got around the entire Roman province of Syria. People brought anybody with an ailment, whether mental, emotional, or physical. Jesus healed them, one and all. More and more people came, the momentum gathering. Besides those from Galilee, crowds came from the "Ten Towns" across the lake, others up from Jerusalem and Judea, still others from across the Jordan.”
When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said:
"You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
"You're blessed when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
"You're blessed when you're content with just who you are - no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought.
"You're blessed when you've worked up a good appetite for God. He's food and drink in the best meal you'll ever eat.
"You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'care-full', you find yourselves cared for.
"You're blessed when you get your inside world - your mind and heart - put right. Then you can see God in the out side world.
"You're blessed when you can show people how to coop erate instead of compete or fight. That's when you discover who you really are, and your place in God's family.
"You're blessed when your commitment to God pro vokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God's kingdom.
"Not only that - count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens - give a cheer, even! - for though they don't like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always got ten into this kind of trouble.”
The first of the Beatitudes gives us the key to the inner meaning of them all: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” From Jesus’ perspective all are poor until God becomes the centre of their lives. “‘Human life is strangely kaleidoscopic. The strong at one moment are the weak at another. The poor (in the biblical sense) are not a fixed, easily recognizable quantity of men and women.’ … To be poor in the gospel sense is to be a have-not standing before God, dependent on him alone for deliverance. … All people have to be brought into the presence of God and see themselves as the weak and poor. … The Church should engage in humanitarian action on behalf of the poor because such action is a parable of the love of God in Christ, who ‘for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich’ (2 Corinthians 8:9)
This is the challenge to us particularly as we celebrate All Saints’ Day one of the “Principal Holy Days” of the Church’s Year. Do we recognize deeply within ourselves that we are weak and poor, and that we are dependent on God alone for deliverance?
This brings us to a second question - about what we are celebrating. What is a saint? Maybe common everyday usage is a better guide to what “saint” means than the church’s attempts to formalise and declare who is a saint.
There is constant publicity about the complex processes in the Roman Catholic Church, extending over years, as to whether Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Australia’s Mary McKillop, should be declared saints of the church.
I for one am a bit uncomfortable when the church institution and officialdom gets into the business of legislating whether a person is a saint on the basis of some claims that he or she was the channel of some “miracles” – usually meaning some healing which is inexplicable in terms of the scientific knowledge that we now have about nature or the universe.
In popular parlance, a saint is a good person, someone a bit exceptional, someone who at cost to themselves lives to help others. People instinctively recognise such a person as different, but not necessarily blameless nor without blind spots or skeletons in their cupboard; certainly not “perfect”. Nobody ever is!
Actually this common sense approach is nearer to the use of the word in the New Testament. Have you noticed how Paul starts most of his letters? Some of his letters are the earliest documents we have in the New Testament, written down decades before the Gospels according to Mark, Matthew, Luke and “The Acts of the Apostles” and the fourth Gospel John. So we need to give special attention to what St Paul wrote and to what he did not say.
Paul does not use the word “saint” as a mark of achievement or holiness by an individual. Saul from the town of Tarsus, in what is now southern Turkey was a very keen, zealous, young Jewish student; when he became a Christian he changed his name and was called Paul. But I don’t think he would have been comfortable with the title we have tagged onto the front of his name, ‘Saint’ Paul; certainly not in the way the Church came to speak of an individual being a “saint”!
For Paul to be one of the saints is to be trying to follow the sort of life Jesus had taught and lived. It is continually allowing the love, the graciousness, the compassion, the patience and the forgiveness of God to be reflected in one’s life. Paul used a word which is not used today and would not be understood by most people. He speaks of the life-long process of being “sanctified” – being made holy. By this is meant day-by-day allowing the Spirit of God to change us, little by little drawing us nearer to reflecting Jesus Christ in the way we live.
I think we often use honorifics like calling someone a “Saint” with a capital “S” as a way of letting ourselves off the hook. We escape from a clear or implied challenge to change the way we live by “projecting” the ideal out there onto someone else: “I could never be a saint”… “I could not do what is required”… “Ask someone else who knows better or has more talents”… “Oh that’s for the Rector, or the Deacon or Priest or Bishop to do”… “I’m too old to do anything like that now”… “Don’t ask me, I have never been any good at that sort of thing”… We have an immense capacity for inventing excuses, and probably kidding ourselves that we are being humble in the process.
We tend to make too much fuss about the clever, the outstanding, the exceptionally gifted or self-disciplined person, or those who by accident happened to be in a particular situation at the right time and did the right thing. It is good to remember them and appreciate them. But there are many more people whose names are not widely known, whom we should recall with profound thankfulness for the contributions they have made to us through their being in-tune with God and their faithful perseverance.
The famous “Eulogy to the Ancestors” which starts with the words, “Let us now praise famous men” after recounting the feats of the notables goes on to speak of those not widely known:
“Some of them left behind a name,
so that others declare their praise.
But of others there is no memory;
they have perished as though
they had never existed;
they have become as though
they had never been born,
they and their children after them.
But these also were godly men,
whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten;
their wealth will remain with their descendants,
and their inheritance with their children’s children.
Their descendants stand by the covenants;
their children also, for there sake.
Their offspring will continue forever,
and their glory will never be blotted out.
Their bodies are buried in peace,
and their name lives on generation after generation.
The assembly declares their wisdom,
and the congregation proclaims their praise.”
In this service we sing a hymn about saints in the sense used in the New Testament, a hymn not about palatial buildings or outstanding forebears, but about all people who are seeking to follow Jesus the Christ. God is always seeking to draw us into new life.
1. All saints? How can it be?
Can it be me,
holy and good,
walking with God?
How can we say that we're all saints?
0 that we could!
2. All saints! — Crucified love
sings from above
what it will do
making us new,
naming and claiming us "all saints,"
till it comes true.
3. Some Saints touch the divine,
and as they shine,
candles at night,
holy and bright,
gladden the spirits of all saints,
giving us light.
4. All saints stumble and fall.
God, loving all,
knowing our shame,
longs to reclaim:
standing or falling we're all saints.
Treasure the name!
5. Come, saints, crowds who have gone
beckon us on,
hindrances shed,
joy in our tread,
one in the Spirit with all saints,
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Enquiries, comments and criticisms are invited; also requests for additional copies of sermon scripts or permission to quote / reproduce.
The Reverend Clive H. Norton, phone 9411 8606; fax 9410 2069;
7 Dulwich Road, Chatswood, NSW 2067. E-mail: chnorton@bigpond.com
Revelation 21:5 and John 11:40 readings for All Saints’ Day, Year B.
P araphrase by an American local church minister, who for 35 years had, in his words, “stood on the border between two languages Biblical Greek and everyday English”, trying to put the inner sense of what Jesus was on about, into words and phrases that the people would understand better. Quoted from THE MESSAGE – The Bible in Contemporary Language, by Eugene H Peterson, (NavPress,Collorado Springs,USA; 2004); the Introduction to the New Testament pp 1319-1321, and .
ibid “Sermon on the Mount” Matthew 5-7, pp. 1325-1331.
Reginald H Fuller, Anglican NT scholar and theologian, PREACHING THE LECTIONARY: The Word of God for the Church Today (The Liturgical Press, Minnesota 1984, pp 118-9, including quote from Cambridge sermon in 1932 by Hoskyns).
From the book called Ecclesiasticus or Ben Sirach, among the collection of manuscripts coming roughly from the period between the ‘Old” and “New” Testaments of our Bible, Ecclesiasticus 44:1-15
Revd Dr Brian Wren, an English theologian and hymn writer who has 24 hymns in the Australian ecumenical hymnbook, Australian Hymn Book II, Together in Song. Brian wrote All Saints? How can it be? to mark the centenary in 1988 of the church-building of All Saints’ Hunters Hill.