I rarely write out the full text of my sermons, but I wanted to be quite precise in this one, so I have done. And I hope that it qualifies as a good thing. So here it is:
All Saints’ Day
Rev. 7:-24,9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Matt. 5:1-12(a)
Total Church
The Devil has done a fine job of deceiving Christians and would-be Christians regarding the Church. The idea of a bespoke, individual faith, pristine and perfect, not tainted by the corruption and failure of an institution, is a tempting one. And yet in reality it is just another species of the atomised individualistic consumerism that is so redolent of the twenty-first century western world. I understand why people find the Church difficult. One looks at the present manifestation of various ecclesiastical bodies and one is not exactly inspired. Additionally, people are often very badly let down and even terribly hurt by awful experiences in churches and, very sadly, with priests and others who should be signs of Christ and not the Devil. I have no intention of condemning anyone for experiencing these difficulties and for opting out. But I am a passionate advocate of the Church and I want to take this opportunity to try and explain why.
But let’s continue with the misconceptions for a moment. The great Anglican theologian E.L. Mascall comments:
Only too often the Church has been thought of as a purely earthly society, which we enter by baptism and leave by death, a continuing terrestrial organism with a constantly changing membership, comparable in this respect to the Royal College of Surgeons, or the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers.
E.L. Mascall, Corpus Christi, p. 21
C.S. Lewis, with his characteristically brilliant spiritual insight, gives us some idea of the diabolical methods of the enemy in the same area. The senior devil, Screwtape, observing that his fellow tempter and nephew Wormwood has allowed his human “patient” to become a Christian, gives him the following advice:
One of our greatest allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a terrible spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly very bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he had hitherto avoided…Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, pp. 15-16
In this quotation we see the first glimpse of what All Saints’ Day is all about and that is the total Church, not just the Church that we see in our small corner of the world and through our limited activities, but the Church as she really is, ‘spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners’. It is all too easy to look around us when we go to our particular building and see our particular congregation with all of its individual faults, sins and unappealing features and to think that this is what the Church actually is. But the reality is that the Church does not just exist in this particular location but throughout the world. And, even more amazingly, the Church continues in heaven, growing as each of our earthly members is promoted to eternal glory.
The Book of Revelation, straining at the limits of linguistic possibility, gives us a sense of this hidden and invisible reality:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood round the throne and round the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.”
Revelation 7:9-12
That is what the Church really is. But the Devil does not want you to see this. If he can’t stop you believing in Christ, he will attempt to make you believe that Christ and the Church can be separated and that you should go it alone. Then you will be more vulnerable and he will pick you off bit-by-bit.
So we begin by saying that All Saints’ Day helps us to remember the total church: the glory and majesty of the redeemed and glorified saints in heaven, whom we aspire to join one day in the everlasting and joyful worship of Christ.
Becoming Saints
Let’s turn now to another of our readings, 1 John 3:1-3, and specifically the words, ‘…it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2). We don’t know what we will be like, but we know that we will resemble God. In other words, to become a saint is to become like God. But there is a further step here because being like God is linked to the vision of God: ‘we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’.
This passage appears to be speaking about the end of time when we, to use St Paul’s language, see face to face, understanding fully, even as we are fully understood (1 Cor.13:12). We do not see God now in the complete way that we will at that future time. So how do we see God in this life? And what visions has God given us that we might look to and so be transformed?
Firstly, God has given us Jesus Christ: God made man. We see in Jesus’ life the reality of human struggles overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit and the help of God. Jesus speaks in our Gospel reading of reviling, persecution and all kind of evil uttered against his disciples (Matt 5:11-12). And yet these things he experienced in the greatest measure. Jesus was tempted as we are, yet without sin (Heb. 4:15) and the same writer notes that Jesus ‘had to be made like his brethren in every respect’ (Heb. 2:17) which means the full gamut of the human experience: ‘tears and smiles like us He knew’.
The point is that without Jesus we would not know what it is to see a human life fully and completely brought into the divine light, a human life totally and perfectly laid down before God. Without Jesus we may have the Law, the Prophets and the Scriptures but we would not have this: the life of God made visible in humanity.
Jesus is therefore the greatest saint because he is the exact image of God in humanity. Unlike Jesus, we are beset by sin and we cannot live lives which are perfect. But we can see in Jesus something of our calling as Christians. I will quote here from Rowan Williams, commenting on the writing of Irenaeus of Lyon, ‘…the Christian task (is) the following of Jesus in creating in the world…a life glorifying God’ (Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, p.47-48).
What does that mean exactly? It means that you have been put in a certain place in this world, at a certain time, surrounded by certain people, beset by certain temptations, and given certain tasks to carry out. Just like Jesus. But your place, your time, your people, your temptations and your tasks are your own, individual and unique to you. And your calling as a Christian is to fashion out of those things a life which glorifies God in the same way as Christ did.
That, ultimately, is what it means to be a saint: to live one’s particular life as Jesus lived his. And what is beautiful and glorious about this is that we see in the saints the light of Christ reflected in the different colours and aspects of the lives of other human beings. Like a precious ray refracted through a priceless diamond, the light of Christ plays in ten thousand places and strikes us from different angles, warming our hearts, inspiring our souls, as we feel it come close to us in their lives.
Or, to put it in the diabolical language of Screwtape once again,
He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on a miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His…Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, pp.45-46
‘United to him but still distinct’: that summarises everything I think I am trying to say. In our unique and distinct human lives, we are called to be united with God through Jesus Christ. This does not destroy our personality and our individuality but it fulfils them. And that is what it means to be a saint.
The Gift of the Saints
We have seen therefore that our purpose in this world is to become saints, and that this means using the life that God has given us to glorify God in this world in the same way as Christ did in his human life. But there is one further step: and that is to look to the saints to inspire and to help us.
In The Screwtape Letters, the Devil tells Wormwood to lead his Christian patient to focus on the foibles and failures of those around him in the local church congregation. This would undoubtedly produce discouragement in the man’s spiritual life. Conversely, All Saints’ Day encourages us to think about the godly and spiritual examples that the Lord has placed around us for our encouragement and sanctification. There is a spiritual law here: as we look to the lives of the saints around us, we too are drawn into their holy light. So, very practically, who are the saints in this world that the Lord has given you? Are there any at all? If not, may I recommend finding some. This may mean finding a confessor or a spiritual director or just seeking out spiritual companions to walk with you and inspire you on the way. But the spiritual life is not meant to be lived alone and finding godly examples to imitate - and to be inspired by - is certainly a crucial part of it.
And then there are the saints in heaven. How do we commune with them? We read about them in Scripture, we hear them spoken of in our liturgies and we remember them in the Church calendar. All of these are helpful and edifying spiritual graces. And it is needful to remember the purpose of them: to encourage us to become saints in our own lives as we see that Christians – ordinary men and women like you and me – have been doing for two-thousand years now. A particular practice which can be extremely edifying is to read the writings of the saints – official saints, yes, but sometimes godly men and women who have become a vision of Christ through their own lives and left their writings for our own growth in holiness.
All of what I’ve said can be summarised quite simply by saying the following: the Church is the place where saints are made in communion with other saints. Or, to put it slightly differently, use the gift of the saints - and the vision of Christ that they give to you – to become a saint yourself.
Amen.