All Saints’ Sunday
Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews
Most people are familiar with the fact that the church has its own calendar. Even if the only festivals people can name are Christmas and Easter, there is some knowledge that the Christian year is shaped, somehow, around the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. Perhaps people might also have know about Advent, as a countdown to Christmas, and Lent as a period when you might give something up. Other aspects of the church’s calendar lie hidden in plain sight: for Cambridge University, it is Michaelmas term – named after the feast of St Michael and all Angels near its start. Or there’s the start of the UK tax year on 6 April, a legacy of the fact that in the middle ages, the new year began on Lady Day, the feast of the annunciation, when Gabriel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of God’s Son. That’s 25 March, so adjust for the eleven days lost when the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar was made, and there you have the feast of the annunciation still shaping the due dates for tax returns and payments.
The Christian year takes its shape from the pattern of Jesus’ life, from annunciation to birth to death and resurrection, ascension and the sending of the Spirit, to its culmination in the feast of Christ the King, when we acclaim Christ’s reign over all creation. But look a bit deeper and there, inflecting the days, weeks and seasons of the year, are a whole list of saints’ days, commemorating apostles and evangelists, teachers and missionaries, martyrs and nuns, those who’ve dedicated themselves to a life of prayer separate from the world and those who have given themselves wholly to serving the poor in the world. There are people from every age and continent, men and women, the old and the young and everyone in between, people of different languages, ethnicity, culture and class – people whose lives, interwoven into the calendar shaped by the life of Jesus, show us something of what his life looks like in human flesh in every age and place.
And today we celebrate them all – the famous and the forgotten, the exemplary and the eccentric, the ones whose lives seem far removed from our own, and the ones whose lives seem a bit uncomfortably close to our own. And as we celebrate them we hear the good news that their calling is our calling; that our lives, too, are woven into Christ’s life.
Is that good news? How do you feel about having a calling to be a saint? Perhaps you’re tempted to check your head to see what size halo might fit, but I suspect not a few of you are like me and think the idea is absurd. Being a saint is for other, holier people. People with a different character and history to my own, a stronger faith and better prayer than my own, a purer heart and a deeper love than my own. Or perhaps you find the lives of some of the saints inspiring and would like to be more like them if only the circumstances of your life were different: if you didn’t have an addicted child to worry about, or a parent who needs care, or if you could just sort out your own bad habits or you didn’t feel overwhelmed by need and fear and crisis everywhere you look.
The good news, and it is good news, is that the call to sanctity, to being a saint, doesn’t start somewhere else, with someone else. It starts right here, with us. Being a saint isn’t about becoming someone or something we’re not. It’s about becoming who God made us to be: it names what our life in Christ looks like. And that means that we’re all called to be saints in different ways. So here’s a question: what does the life of Jesus look like in the particular circumstances of your life? How would he act? How would he be?
The next bit of good news is that this isn’t all down to us, as though if we can just try hard enough, sort ourselves out enough, put enough effort in, we can achieve sanctity. The church rightly saw this as a heresy many centuries ago. All Saints’ Day isn’t here as a festival to make us feel guilty for not being holy enough. It’s here as an encouragement to see our own lives, our own circumstances, as places of grace, where God is at work. None of us can become a saint by the effort of our will. Sanctity is a fruit of the grace of the Holy Spirit at work in us, as our lives are shaped after Christ’s.
And in case that sounds a bit abstract, here’s what Jesus himself says this might look like: ‘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 away 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. Do to others as you would have them do to you.’
And again, we might ponder what’s good about this particular bit of the good news. It sounds hard. It sounds like something my resistant, resentful, selfish heart doesn’t want to do and I would prefer it if Jesus had been speaking only to his disciples rather than to the whole crowd when he said this. But the good news is not just that Jesus said it. It’s that he lived it. Hear those words again not just as moral instruction but as a description of his passion – Jesus, who blessed those who cursed him, who prayed for his persecutors, who gave himself over to be struck and scourged, who was stripped of his garments and gave his life away, all out of love for his enemies – for us, in all the ways big and little in which we oppose him, deny him, and refuse his grace. Jesus shows us God’s life in human flesh. And that makes of all our lives potential sites of grace, where he can take on flesh once more.
There is no promise that the calling to be a saint is easy. Most of us know ourselves well enough to know that the Holy Spirit has her work cut out. But we can be encouraged by the lives of the saints as well as supported by their prayers, because their lives are not examples of what the heroic human will can achieve, but of what is possible when human lives are lived in openness to the sanctifying grace of God.
Each year, if we’ll let it, the Christian calendar shapes our lives, our time, our diaries, around the life of Jesus, teaching us to see how our lives are drawn into his life: where he is bringing his life to birth, where he is suffering, where he is inviting us into new life. Each year, we’re given particular examples of what a life caught up in Jesus’ life looks like, in the varied lives of the saints. And each year, on this feast day, we’re given the calling and the promise that this is for us, too: that he can and does live in us, that our lives can be open to his grace, and that he longs to call each of us what we are in him: saints.