1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12
Where can we find hope?
This week the AI company Anthropic warned of ‘catastrophic or existential risks to humanity’, if AI systems are not implemented with appropriate safeguards. Last Wednesday at a Durham Cathedral Institute event here in the Cathedral Iain McGilchrist and Carmody Grey gave a stark and sober warning about the dangers of AI. Yet they also expressed a cautious hope that a younger generation will wake up and find a better way of living in an AI world.
So perhaps the question is this: is there hope in humanity finding a better way, or does it lie somewhere else?
Today, the Feast of All Saints, offers us a rich opportunity to explore where we can find hope, however dark the clouds are under which we all live.
Let us start with the Beatitudes, the eight statements which form the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from Matthew chapter 5. They are a call to a holy way of life, but they are also an expression of hope. For these famous sayings speak of life lived in the present, but they do so in relationship to promises which will be fulfilled in the future: ‘blessed are the x, for they will be y’ is the message.
Yet it is our NT reading, from 1 John 3, which helps us clarify the dimensions of this future hope. For it refers to two of the promises of the Beatitudes, one of which is apparently fulfilled in this world – ‘you are children of God’ and the other in the next ‘we will see God as he is’. In other words, it would seem that there are two horizons for hope: hope for this life and hope for the life to come.
Note that for both Jesus and the apostle John writing his letter, the reality of hope in the life to come does not take away from our care for loving God and neighbour in this life. Rather, it is precisely because of the reality of a heavenly home with God that what we do in this life matters so much. As the apostle John writes ‘all who have this hope in him purify themselves even as he is pure.’ If God is our eternal home, we will want to live like we know where we are going.
If that is true, then we should not be surprised that the saints are people in whom this pattern is visible. For the women and men we call saints invite us to pay attention not simply to holy living but also future hope; indeed, I would suggest that the fact that they possess the latter is essential to their pursuing the former. We shouldn’t think they were just very good people; rather they were people who trusted in Christ for this life and the next.
You will forgive me, I know, if I tell you just once about the pilgrimage I led last month to Greece in the steps of an early saint, St Paul. What impressed us all as pilgrims was his courage and resilience, how he kept going through setback after setback, determined to bring the good news of Jesus Christ where our Lord had never been proclaimed before. Yet underlying this, we realised, was his absolute trust that his labours were not simply about this life. Such was his confidence in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Paul lived his life with a clear eye on the heavenly crown which awaited him. When we read Philippians in Philippi and Corinthians in Corinth, this came up again and again. Indeed, Paul wrote to the church in Corinth ‘If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied’ (1 Cor 15:19).
Our saints here at Durham Cathedral, Cuthbert and Bede, witness to a similar faith. Cuthbert inhabited a violent and uncertain age, yet his confidence lay not in political stability but in the lasting kingdom of God. Bede spent his entire life within a few miles of where we stand, yet his vision stretched to eternity. Now they accompany us on our journey of faith, as in communion with them we seek to live faithfully in this life and hope steadfastly in the next.
Speaking on Wednesday Carmody Grey encouraged people to respond to the AI threat and build hope by pursuing concrete practices which connect us with reality, practices which connect us to time, to place, to our bodies, to our creation and to God. It struck me: these are the practices of the saints, people who inhabited a discipline of prayer, worship, service, attention and holiness. These are also the practices which have formed the story of this Cathedral church for hundreds of years, as women and men - you and me - have brought themselves day by day, church season by church season, to seek and worship God.
And these practices, rooted in the present, do not detract from hope. Rather they are the building blocks of hope. For these practices turn our focus away from purely ourselves and our own human agency, to our creation, to our neighbour and ultimately to our God who stands beyond time and who holds all time in his hands. And it is when we are able to turn to God that we find hope not in a world which is going to sort itself out but in a God who will make all things new.
The Eucharist which we celebrate today is just such a concrete practice. We come to the Lord’s table, as the saints have done before us, looking back to God’s love outpoured on the cross, thanking God for his provision in the present, and looking forward to a heavenly banquet of which this bread and wine is just a foretaste. It is a practice that is an expression of trust and hope. We come not because we see everything now, but because we trust that one day we will.
The saints lived through dark times: Paul faced setback after setback; Cuthbert lived amidst political strife; Bede was one of only two in the monastery who survived a plague. Yet they had a hope in Christ which enabled them to serve faithfully in this life and look forward joyfully to the life to come. They did not hope because the world was becoming safer or more predictable. They hoped because Christ was risen.
In this risen Christ the Church is one across both heaven and earth, so that as we gather around this table we do so in fellowship with all who have gone before us. So today in their presence we praise God for all saints; we ask for grace to follow them in the way of Christ; and we rejoice that they are with us now as we receive in the sacrament the means of grace which fed them too, signs of all that God has done, all that God is doing and all that God will do. As Charles Wesley wrote.
Come, let us join our Friends above that have obtain’d the prize,
And on the eagle-wings of love to joys celestial rise;
Let all the Saints terrestrial sing with those to glory gone;
For all the servants of our King, in earth and heaven, are one.