Sermon: All Saints Day

Ephesians 1:11-end; Luke 6:20-31

Durham Cathedral. Holy Eucharist for All Saints Day. 1^st November 2007

Earlier this week I was in London and walked through Brompton Cemetery on my way to the tube station. Amidst the forlorn and lopsided memorials to once-loved people one inscription caught my eye. A man whose name I didn't notice was described as "Sanitary Commissioner to the British Army in the Crimea." His whole life summed up in one sentence which I'll come back to later. When I preached on Sunday I asked if we were to be remembered for one question, what would it be? Another question is, if our life were to be summed up in one sentence, what would it be? It's a relevant question as we follow the example of countless saints.

There are many themes that could be picked up in a sermon on All Saints Day. I approached this by asking what particular light this year's readings shed on the saints. As I read them I was struck by the creative tension they present to us and in which we Christians are called to live: the glorious promise of our inheritance in heaven which sends the author of Ephesians into ecstasy, and the challenging words of Jesus about where God's blessing lies, not on the rich and powerful but on the poor, the hungry and the tearful. We celebrate the saints because they, in their varied ways - at times extraordinary, at times devastatingly commonplace - have found the way to live into all those truths, not sacrificing one in order to maintain the other.

In February this year I was privileged to stay in Soweto during my visit to the diocese of Johannesburg. The conferences at which I was speaking were held in one church there which is a remarkable centre for the local community, providing accommodation for numerous social services and organisations, and I stayed in a house in the next street to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu's homes - the only street in the world that can claim to be home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners. There was an incredible sense of being where history was made, of treading where saints of our own age have trod. One Sunday I preached at Holy Cross Church which was in the news during those terrible days in 1976 because the first schoolboy to die in the school children's (until that moment peaceful) march was shot right outside its doors. Today there is a large museum named after him, the Hector Pieterson Museum, across the road from the church which tells the story of the Soweto children's march and the subsequent bloody events.

The service, in true African style, lasted three hours and there was much singing and dancing: you would have been impressed or amused to see me doing my best to keep pace with it all. It nearly ended a couple of times but then picked up and kept going. Afterwards, having been greeted by everybody myself, I sat in the priest's living room awaiting his return from talking to people after the long service. It took him another hour to get away from discussing their individual problems with them and when he came back he was exhausted. He said to me that the people do not want the service to end because for them it is a foretaste of heaven come on earth, it is the high point of their week when they can put behind them the difficulties of daily life and for three hours be lifted up into heavenly places, catching a glimpse of the hope to which they are called. And they simply don't want it to end, which is why whenever it seemed the singing and dancing would end, it started up with renewed vigour.

Recently I was talking to someone who had just returned from a visit in the Middle East which included visits to some Moslem mosques and holy places. As she described it, she was almost lost for words as she tried to describe the utter beauty of what she saw - the intricate delicacy of the designs, the vibrancy of the colours, and the sheer scale of it all. I'd had a small foretaste of this when I visited the Alhambra Palace so I could guess what she was trying to describe. For her the whole experience was an overpowering glimpse of the beauty of God that, thanks to our creation in God's image, can be expressed in human creativity, albeit expressed in this case by people of another faith to our own but who share our common humanity. She said that coming back to this country, our church architecture paled into insignificance compared to the beauty of what she had seen in one place in particular.

In both these cases there is a human foretaste of heaven - in the worship of a church in a township ravaged by HIV AIDS and previously imprisoned in the injustice of apartheid, and in the human creativity of people who do not share our faith but point us through their art to the divine beauty that transcends creed and culture.

Both stories are challenging to us. If we were left to our own devices and asked to describe how we can share the experience described by the author of the letter to the Ephesians - our inheritance in Christ, our knowledge of the hope to which we are called, the glorious inheritance among the saints, the immeasurable greatness of God's power for us who believe - we would probably come up with something that involves worship in a gloriously appointed church with music to our own particular taste, surrounded by the people we most like, and perhaps - if we are in generous mood towards the clergy - a good sermon thrown in. Or we'd be with the same familiar and loved company but in breathtaking natural scenery watching the sun set dramatically, or at a table laden with a feast of food and wine, with no calories involved. Or something else on those lines where everything is just perfect. We would not come up with a simple church amidst the hard grind of township life, opposite the site where a 10 year old boy was killed by police, or a stunning non-Christian place of worship thousands of miles from home as contexts for our glimpse of the hope to which we are called.

But if we turn to the gospel reading, we are reminded that - in the words of an old book title - God's kingdom is an upside down kingdom. "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. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven."

No wonder the people of Holy Cross Church in Soweto know that they've had a foretaste of heaven when they worship; the blessings come in the midst of known need so they are open to them. The problem with so many of us is that we don't know our need so we don't expect to be drawn into God's presence in unlikely places. When Jesus turns to the woes that follow the blessings, "woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets" he speaks an obvious truth. When I am full after a meal the last thing I want is any more, so I say no, but in doing so I close myself off to whatever culinary delight is coming next. That's not a reason for eating too much (or, as I once saw someone do at a funeral breakfast, eating pudding first to ensure she had room for the chocolate cake), but it is a challenge to us to know with what we fill ourselves, to know what riches we trust in, to know what affirmation we seek, and to make sure that we choose wisely so that we are not overstuffed with the wrong things.

Which brings me back to All Saints Day and to the challenge these two readings present to us as we think about the saints. Saints are people who can hold together the glorious promise of our inheritance in heaven which sends the author of Ephesians into ecstasy, and the challenging words of Jesus about where God's blessing lies, not on the rich and powerful but on the poor, the hungry and the tearful. And sometimes the saints are themselves the hungry and the tearful. There has much in the press this year about the fast-tracking of Mother Teresa to sainthood, but the secular press was wrong-footed by the so-called revelations that for most of her life she was serving the poor and giving herself to prayer at the same time that she was doubting God presence and care. That seemed to the world as a negation of her faith and dedication, but the church nodded wisely and knew otherwise. Indeed our readings today point to the fact that the truth lies elsewhere: they remind us that Christians are called to hold all those truths together, that doubt and despair are not the negation of faith but at times integral components of it. And those we honour today as saints give us examples we can follow precisely because, in many cases, they struggled.

All the more famous saints began somewhere, doing whatever was in front of them and just keeping going faithfully; and if the saints offer us anything this evening they offer us their example and their encouragement to begin wherever we are, however unpromising our raw materials. And my Sanitary Commissioner in Brompton Cemetery did just this. If ever there's a vocation that demands dedication in the midst of bleak conditions, surely it was dealing with the sanitary conditions in the Crimean War. We don't know about his faith, but if he was a Christian he would have known what Henry Scott Holland, a later Canon at St Paul's Cathedral, meant when he said "The more you believe in the incarnation, the more you care about drains." Saints are people who believe in the incarnation and care about drains, who let the hope of glory inform their actions in the appalling messes of the world.

We will be doing a lot of remembering over the next ten days - all the saints today, the faithful departed tomorrow, those who gave their lives in war on Sunday week. As we do so, with gratitude and with determination to follow their example, we must be ready for what RS Thomas, watching two old cronies on a bleak wet and cold Welsh hillside, calls in one of his vivid and incisive phrases the challenge to "dip belief / Not in dew nor in the cool fountain / Of beech buds, but in the seas / Of manure through which they squelch / To the bleakness of their assignations."(R S Thomas, "Look"). The saints have very often dipped not just their toes but their belief in the local manure, Mother Teresa certainly did in Calcutta, and the people of Holy Cross do so in Soweto.

But the saints remind us too that, "In Christ you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit. This is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory."

This All Saints Day, for all those truths, thanks be to God.