All Saints Festival 'Now and not yet' 2nd November 2014

Introduction

The story goes a little girl was with her family in a party being shown round a cathedral. As the guide was explaining a historic tomb nearby, the girl was staring at a great stained glass window through which the summer sun was streaming, bathing the cathedral floor in colour.  As the group was about to move on she asked the guide in a shrill clear voice, ‘Who are those people in the pretty window?’ ‘Those are the saints, ‘the man replied. That night as she was undressing for bed she told her mother, ‘I know who the saints are.’ ‘Do you dear?’ replied her mother. ‘Who are they?’ ‘They’re the people who let the light shine through.’  Do you want to be a saint? Let’s give God before the whole company of heaven the sins that stop his light shining through us.

Sermon

Christianity is now and not yet.

We Christians have eternal life but we look forward to everlasting life.

To know the Lord is to have eternal life, life that right now tastes of heaven and that’ll last beyond earthly life so there’s a ‘not yet’ about it.

Beloved, we are God’s children now; St John says in our second reading. What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

What’s now is we’re God’s children. What’s to come is heaven when we shall see God. What’s in between now and then is hope and purification to let his light through us, as the little girl put it.

That first reading from the book of Revelation isn’t just about the not yet but the now. The vision of St John the Divine was first given to Christians facing martyrdom for their faith. It speaks into the pain of their and our ‘now’ of what is ‘not yet’ but will be, namely God’s final overcoming of the sufferings we bear.

The Gospel reading with its list of beatitudes from the lips of our Saviour is exactly about the now and the not yet. Those like us who realise they are spiritual have-nots with no righteousness of their own so they hunger and thirst for God are to see him, be comforted by him, inherit heaven and attain the full potential of a child of God.

There’s a now and a not yet about our faith.

Last Sunday’s presentation on George Herbert led me into an interesting conversation. One member shared her struggle with the Prayer of Humble Access which says we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under God’s table. We are worthy, and have been made so by grace, the member rightly said. Yet, as George Herbert and the liturgy affirm, we need to know our need of that grace get on our knees so to speak to receive it on or under the table.

God has a sameness to us – we are made in his image to become his children – but he has a difference from us as almighty, holy and everlasting God. He calls us now to accept his Son Jesus and so be made his children but all who have this hope in [Christ] purify themselves, just as [Christ] is pure.

On All Saints day we recall how each Christian is a saint, literally one set apart to be different with God’s holiness, but how only some are evidently so. The Saints with days in our church calendar and images in our church windows are women and men who evidently became so in their lifetimes which may not yet be the case for you and me.

This morning we have a reminder of how for people of Christian faith what’s now is in creative tension with what’s to be

Whenever I come into St Giles the first thing I do before I take my place to pray is go down on one knee towards the Aumbry where the consecrated Bread of the eucharist is stored and the everlasting light burns. That practice is to mark God’s objective presence before me. It doesn’t deny God’s subjective presence within me but that that, is less certain to me than God’s objective presence where he’s said he’ll always be. As Queen Elizabeth the First once said. Christ was the Word that spake it; He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it; I do believe and take it. The Spirit within me is God’s presence now, if you like, in creative tension with his presence before me, the not yet, the Communion to be, or the word of God in scripture or beauty of creation around me that has his ‘come forward’ invitation

Our first reading from the great seventh chapter of the Revelation to John has a number of verses we use in worship and scholars believe were used in the earliest worship of Christians, so that the vision of heaven - the great ‘not yet’ - marries with earthly worship in the here and now.  Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb we say, as also. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! 

The invitation to Holy Communion today is a direct quotation from the book of Revelation only Chapter 19 verse 9  Blessed are those who are called to his supper.

The now and a not yet of our faith are made very evident at this service for the supper of the Lord we share now is like the cinema trailer ‘a preview of a forthcoming attraction’ namely the supper of Jesus, the Lamb of God on that day when we will be one with a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.

Those so gathered will be lost in one-anotherness in the way of Saints capital S. We saints little s are one with them even now, being drawn by God into fuller self-forgetfulness. As we ponder the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’ of Christianity there’s no more comforting doctrine than that of the communion of saints. If we feel here at St Giles - as we did especially as James shared last week - an overflowing of spiritual riches from one another as earthly saints how much more, today’s Feast announces, do we sense, in the poverty of our spirits, the continually overflowing  richness of those already made perfect.

We are the church militant marching on to what is not yet. They are the church triumphant awaiting us, ready to welcome us. For them we can change the pronoun and tense of the second reading and say they are like him and they see him as he is. They are different to us with God’s own difference but remain the same as us with his sameness, as human beings in his image and likeness.

Now we stand with their sameness and a sameness to God but now, unlike them, we also kneel so to speak as those knowing our need of grace to become as they are since all who have this hope in God purify themselves, just as he is pure.

God is in us subjectively but he is before us objectively, in word and sacrament and the holy lives of those around us on earth and in heaven. Most loving Father, grant that your beloved Son whom I, an earthly wayfarer, am now to receive in his sacramental guise, may fit me to be part of his mystical body and one day give me sight of his face and let me gaze upon him for all eternity; who is God, living and reigning with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.