Sermon: All Saints Day

Holiness is another country: they do things differently there.  At least it often seems so when we tell stories of the saints, the holy ones who have given themselves to the service of God and their fellow human beings and did not love their lives even unto death.  The saints point us to another world where what is most real or possible or desirable looks different, is recalibrated in ways that defy the values we live by.  If there is an ounce of religion in us, we are drawn by the saints, fascinated by the good life they have lived, because what we thought was impossible or unattainable has been put within our reach in these particular men and women we honour and cherish.  The recent pilgrimage of the relics of St Therese of Lisieux ‘the Little Flower' around England shows how sanctity remains a point of both fascination and attraction.  We all have our favourite saints, and perhaps we have placed ourselves under their protection and patronage, honour their icons and crave their friendship and prayers.  For me, as well as St Michael the Archangel, it is St Catherine of Alexandria (because I was ordained in a chapel dedicated to her), St Benedict (whose kind, humane rule has been an inspiration for much of my adult life) and now St Cuthbert who has given me shelter under his roof for a while. 

The first time the feast of All Saints is mentioned in history is in connection with the transfer of the relics of the martyrs from the catacombs to the Pantheon in Rome in the year 609, that is, exactly 1400 years ago.  Some of these martyrs were known by name, some not.  Soon the feast was extended to include all those the church thought of as saints, not only the martyrs who had died for the sake of Jesus Christ.  But the emphasis was always on those who had given up their lives for Christ, whether through physical suffering and death or through their fidelity as his witnesses (which is what the word martyr literally means).  All Saints Day was and is a celebration of those across the centuries with the power to inspire us to live more faithfully as followers of Christ. 

I have pondered this power to inspire as I have looked back on my sermons during 2009.  This year I have preached about St Paul, St Joseph, St Peter, St Alban, St Cuthbert (twice), St Bede, St Oswald, St Chad and St Wilfrid.  Of these, no fewer than six are saints of the north (eight when I have preached about St Hild twice this month.)  I suppose it's inevitable that when we live as we do here, surrounded by the bones of so many saints and the memories of so many more, we should be asking why the associations they evoke are so powerful.  I began to glimpse this when I was a parish priest in Northumberland within the gravitational pull of Lindisfarne not far up the A1.  So on All Saints Day I should like to think about our northern saints and ask what it is that continues to draw so many to visit these lands of theirs so many centuries later. 

Preaching at a service in 1887 to mark the completion of work on the Cathedral of the new diocese of Newcastle, Bishop Lightfoot took a text from Isaiah: ‘Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn'.  His topic was the mission of Iona and Lindisfarne and the saints who led it.  He wanted the new diocese to be proud to embrace within its boundaries the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, what he calls ‘the true cradle of English Christianity'.  He describes the 7^th century as ‘the golden age of saintliness, such as England would never see again' and speaks of how Bede in the next generation ‘looked back with longing eyes on the departed glory' of its child-like simplicity, its generous devotion and its fervour of missionary zeal.  The prose is purple, and not altogether free of nostalgia, and perhaps Lightfoot lays too much stress on what divided the Celtic church (as he calls it: I prefer to say ‘Irish' of St Aidan's time and Saxon of the rest) from the Roman, even though he recognises the gifts Roman allegiance was to bring to England in uniting it for all time with catholic Christendom on the European mainland.  

But I do not think I can improve on his three distinguishing marks of northern sainthood: apostolic simplicity, single-mindedness and missionary fervour.  Whether it is Oswald at Bamburgh, Aidan on Lindisfarne, Wilfrid at Hexham, Benedict Biscop at Wearmouth, Cuthbert on the Inner Farne, Hild at Hartlepool or Bede at Jarrow, and whatever the differences between some of them, there was in them all a fierce determination to be Christian that would let nothing stand in its way.  Only Oswald died as a martyr; yet all of them truly laid down their lives for the sake of Christ.  They brooked no compromises when it came to giving everything to this project of embracing and living Christianity and seeing it planted, rooted and established across England.  Not only that, but this outpouring of vision and energy was an expression of a civilisation at the height of its achievements, as witness the books and artifacts from Northumbria's golden age of the 7^th and 8^th centuries, some of them here in Durham. 

We do not honour our northern saints because of ancient Northumbria, however favoured we are to live in this region with its ‘passionate places, passionate people' as the strap-line puts it.  That would be to fall into the trap of nostalgia.  The saints I have mentioned, and the many others of the Saxon era whom Bede names, speak with their own authentic voice about the central values of the Christian faith not only as a set of beliefs but as a lived experience forged in the vicissitudes of ordinary life.  The landscapes of north-east England are holy because of them, whether it is the astringent beauty of Lindisfarne, the soiled pavements of Jarrow, the rock-hewn crypt at Hexham, the breezy headland at Hartlepool or these majestic grey towers of Durham.  The northern saints have the capacity to engage our imagination as to the possibilities of true sanctity in a way no other cluster of English men and women from the same age and place have.  They have created here a terroir in whose soil and climate saints have continued to be grown to this day. T.S. Eliot was writing of Canterbury but his famous words in Murder in the Cathedral are even more true of the north-east:  For the blood of the martyrs and saints / shall enrich the earth, shall create holy places./ For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ,/ there is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it.

Our second lesson this morning urges us to ‘lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely and run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith'.  For if the cloud of witnesses in this and every place has that capacity to inspire us, because we see in them the image of our Saviour and Lord, then All Saints Day is indeed a high day on which to renew the resolve of our baptism and pledge ourselves, like them, to embrace Christianity once more as the truth for which we will live and die.  The New Testament reminds us that we are all ‘called to be saints': people who are being made both whole and holy, learning how to inhabit that country where they do things differently, because it is now our home.   

Michael Sadgrove, All Saints Day 2009 (Hebrews 11.32-12.2)