St. John, Burgess Hill All Saints 31.10.21

Introduction

There’s a culture clash keeping All Saints on Hallowe’en. As the world around parades spiders and witches the Church of Jesus Christ celebrates ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. 

As that faith has waned around us pagan New Year’s Eve has revived. When Christianity came here the Celtic Festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-in) celebrated new year 1 November linked to the start of winter cold associated with the increase of human death. On their New Year’s Eve Celts believed the worlds of the living and dead got blurred with ghosts returning to earth. 

As we keep the Solemnity of All Saints we go beyond that blurring into the actual identification of living and dead, the ‘knitting together of God’s elect in one death-defying communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ’ (Collect). 

This morning we celebrate our fellowship beyond death with the saints and faithful departed blurring heaven and earth as expressed in our second reading: ‘the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people’ (Revelation 21:3). 

Such is our faith, forward looking, death-defying and in solidarity with all those ‘upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no one can number, whose hope was in Jesus and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are for ever one’.

Sermon

In the end we face one of two alternatives: to have God, and in him everything, or to have nothing but ourselves. Such is Christian faith and it has never changed. The Feast of All Saints and Tuesday’s Commemoration of All Souls are the annual reminder of the call to selflessness foundational to the universe. 

God who gave life to all things including you and I has offered us his life the humble welcoming of which is the remedy for mortality. ‘To all who receive him, who believe in his name, he gives power to become children of God… born… of God’ (John 1:12-13).

All Saints Feast is a reminder of the death defying dignity implied in today’s Gospel of the raising of Lazarus in which Our Lord, having promised to be our life and resurrection, goes on to demonstrate the same by raising his friend from death. 

Those committed to a relationship with God in Christ can never be lost. Death cannot steal them from the One whose glorious resurrection establishes him as our ‘Alpha and Omega, (our) beginning and (our) end’ (Revelation 21:6a). ‘The souls of the righteous’ - right related to God - ‘are in his hands’ we heard in our first reading from the book of Wisdom. ‘In the eyes of the foolish’ that is materialists who deny the supernatural ‘they seemed to have died… but they are at peace… their hope is full of immortality’ (Wisdom 3:1-4). Such is Christian faith, grounded in the risen Lord Jesus, who gives us a purpose for living and a reason for dying.

The Solemnity of All Saints sets our sights upon the Christian distinctive. This isn’t doing good to others - how patronising to see Christians as unique in that realm! Our Christian distinctive, stated in Ephesians 1:10, is the invitation to be part of the aspiration and accomplishment of ‘gathering up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth’. The gathering of people into the communion of saints is itself part of God’s overarching plan for a wider gathering that brings all things in the cosmos or, as we might say, multiverses, into universal love as shared by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with all the saints.

Today’s Feast reminds us we are never ‘in it on our own’ as Christians. Just as the social engagement of St John’s is teamwork - and we always need more hands on deck for outreach - the work we do for others as individuals is part of something beyond us but absolutely beside us. That is the work alongside us of the invisible fellowship of the saints in light towards bringing the universe together in Christ. Each day I invoke the prayers of my own favourites. Our Lady for trust in God. St Francis for joy. St Vincent de Paul for love for the needy. St. John Vianney inspiring me to be  a listening priest. St Therese of Lisieux warming my heart to God. St. John Henry Newman helping me give answers to questions I get about Faith - and so on. 

Contemplating God alongside the saints is a welcome school of selflessness. Anglican teacher, Eric Mascall expresses this well in his book ‘Grace & Glory’: ‘It is by becoming progressively more self-forgetful, and not by becoming more self-analytic, that our love of God grows in strength and depth. And perhaps the most effective way of imitating the saints is the indirect way of thanking God for the fact that they have served Him so much better than we. For in the Body of Christ we are not simply concerned with achieving our individual perfection but with making our own small contribution to the perfection of the whole body. And in its organic union with the holiness of our fellow-members and, above all, with the supreme and spotless holiness of Christ who is the Body’s Head, our own feeble essays in holiness are clothed with a glory and stamped with a value of which in isolation they would be utterly incapable’. Mascall goes on to quote Thomas Merton on the challenge to self-forgetfulness behind today’s Feast, a quotation which will be followed by a short time of reflection on the word of God. ‘The saints are glad to be saints, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else’. 

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.

All Saints Feast 3rd November 2013 8am

At a time of economic hardship unprecedented in recent years or decades even it is inevitable that we find something of almost an over concern with material things from energy costs upward or rather downward if you live at the Rectory!

Many of us are feeling the pinch and we’ve a duty to be alongside the most vulnerable.

Sometimes though, I get troubled as a priest by what I call the over concern for this world’s goods and their security.

Why? Because of the truth enshrined in this weekend’s liturgy of All Saints, namely this:

The most meaningful thing in life is what conquers death.

Earthly life is a prologue. The book of life proper starts beyond the grave with Christianity’s Founder who is the life, the truth and the way.

Christians live knowing their homeland is in heaven. We come to church to develop a taste for that homeland through bread and wine that anticipates the heavenly banquet and through the word of God which promises the same.

If people around could really see this they’d fight to get a place at this celebration! It’s our failure, my and my predecessors, your and your predecessors as worshippers failure, to believe and to communicate this that is robbing them of this privilege.

The most meaningful thing in life is what conquers death.

I go to the Chemists and see a rack of booklets on how to overcome various conditions - arthritis, indigestion, osteoporosis, stress, varicose veins and so on.

One question not addressed is how you deal with dying.

Perhaps you wouldn’t expect doctors to have much to say about how we deal with death.  Maybe they see death as the ultimate defeat for health professionals.

Yet the whole of life leads up to death.  It's something quite natural, in a sense.  The end of man - but in which sense - 'end' as 'finish' or 'end' as 'fulfillment'?

Dying is just as much a daily medical condition as arthritis or indigestion.  Yet how do people find a consultant who can advise them on how to die?

Where do people facing eternity go to for help?

Our Christian Faith is built upon the risen Christ. He is our Consultant.

Who else can advise and prepare, console and strengthen in the face of death than Jesus?

Jesus, who in dying bore the agony of death for us.

Jesus, who in rising burst open the gates of paradise!

Our Consultant writes these words for us in his manual - though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil. I am with you.

This church points up to a world beyond this world because it is the church of Jesus Christ

We are one today also with our beloved dead - our families, friends, benefactors - those who have inspired us or enriched our lives, who now pray for us wrapped in the mantle of God’s love for all eternity.

That oneness with them at the eucharist is no better described than by a person who attended the Divine Liturgy in the icon filled Cathedral of Kiev in the Ukraine:

‘There is always a crowd’, he said, ‘ a promiscuity of rich and poor, of well dressed and tattered, a kaleidoscope mingling of people and colours - people standing and praying, people kneeling, people prostrated... There is no organ music, but an unearthly and spontaneous outburst of praise from the choir and the clergy and the people worshipping together...

‘And from the back and from the sides - and from the pillars and from the columns, look the pale faces of antiquity, the faces of the dead who are alive looking over the shoulders of the alive who have not yet died...All praising God, enfolding in a vast choric communion the few who in the Church have met on the common impulse to acknowledge the wonder and the splendour of the mystery of God.

‘You lose the sense of Ego, the separated individual, you are aware only of being part of a great unity praising God. You cease to be man and woman and become THE CHURCH (the Bride of Christ)’

And that is what we are this morning – the church, the community of Jesus - stretching beyond these four walls into eternity - living with lives that gain meaning from the conquest of death which brings and should bring our humanity into its right mind.