TEXT: ‘Jesus says, ‘’Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.’’ Or in the New English Bible translation: ‘’Blessed are those who know their need of God, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.’’ (Matthew 5)
We live in an age of what is sometimes called the age of the ‘’celebrity culture,’’ where celebrities in sport, theatre, music, pop or whatever are worshipped to the point of idolatry, with many aping the clothes their celebrities wear, their life-style and make-up, the way they speak and the glamorous affairs which they seem to enjoy. Their behaviour has become the bench mark for a seemingly happy, fulfilled life in an age which is hollow and empty, experiencing a moral vacuum waiting to be filled.
But you and I in the culture and context of our glorious worship on our Festival Weekend celebrating ‘’FOR ALL THE SAINTS, PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE, in our heart of hearts know something of another way of life altogether, where glory replaces glamour, and where passing fads and fancies and trivialities are replaced, as the hymn says, by ‘’solid joys and lasting pleasures’’ – the heritage of the children of another culture and another Kingdom – the Kingdom of heaven.
For you see the saints who we are celebrating today are the very opposite of heroes and celebrities.
They don’t need to impress anybody, because they’re just too busy seeking to express the love and grace of God with which, as channels of grace, they are filled and filtering that love and glory of God to a spiritually hungry and loveless world, seriously in danger of altogether losing the plot.
For, people who are so full of themselves, seldom discover the secret of true fulfilment, for which the world yearns, but for which it sadly always looks in the wrong places.
Sometime ago, I was talking to John Lill, the concert pianist, (well known in my country). He told me how for an hour before he goes on the concert platform he insists on being alone in the Green Room – how he empties himself of his own ego, precisely so that he can be a ‘channel’ (his word) through which the spirit of Beethoven, Mozart or whoever can be transmitted right through him – or as that craggy old St. John the Baptist put it, you remember, ‘’I must decrease so that he, (Jesus) may increase.’’ Or as St. Paul said: ‘’Not I, but Christ in me.’’
So today on this glorious festival of the Church’s calendar, we celebrate with thanksgiving the Saints of God – those men and women throughout the ages who keep the rumour of God alive in their respective cultures precisely by being counter-cultural. As St. Paul says: ‘’Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’’
So, we’re celebrating the Saints – for we don’t worship saints like secular celebrities, – neither do we try to copy them – for God doesn’t go in for cloning. Each of us is unique and precious to God: even the ‘’hairs of are head are numbered’’ says Jesus, – admittedly more of a miracle in some cases than in others!
So, we celebrate the saints in thanksgiving to God because God is glorified IN – but better still – THROUGH these men and women who have reached that point in their lives where they have finally seen the bankruptcy of self-sufficiency and all attempts to pull themselves up with their own, moral shoe-strings and have finally – often at the end of their tether – reached that point for whatever reason, when, like the recovering alcoholic on the first step to recovery who says, (Step One) ‘’I am powerless over alcohol,’’ (or whatever happens to be your particular addiction – booze, money, erotomania, drugs, work, gambling) ‘’and in my powerlessness reach out to a higher power.’’ Yes, – like the first beatitude and that first step which needs to be experienced – ‘’blessed are those who know their need of God.’’ Yes, the saints with a capital S are supremely the people of the first beatitude on that first step to recovery, resurrection and a new life.
Such men and women (and they’re a pretty rum bunch, these saints of God if you start looking AT them, rather than THROUGH them): You see, they’ve reached that point when they no longer seek to be self-made men and women worshipping their maker; they’ve reached that point when they no longer rely on themselves, because that they know (as the words of the Collect in the Old Prayer Book puts it): they know that ‘’they have no power of themselves to help themselves’’ – the very opposite of course, of people who are full of themselves – no! saints don’t seek to be self-sufficient precisely because of the all sufficient, amazing grace of God. (In fact it’s those very times of breakdown, when God can breakthrough: when we’re finished God can begin, a new beginning).
And a closer look at these Saints and we see that – at least at the outset of their lives – they’re often not particularly good people (St. Augustine, my favourite saint certainly ‘ain’t no saint, in his early years at least); and they’re not especially nice people. (Wouldn’t it be nice to be nice to the nice – frightfully nice, old chap, but we don’t live in a nice world?).
No! – the ultimate test of the true church of God is not so much whether it can help to make good and nice people better, but rather whether it can make morally fragile men and women like you and me – holy.
But holiness is not something we can acquire. You can be born virtuous and basically good, (if you happen to have the right genes and a loving family upbringing), or indeed you can possibly acquire goodness, if you try hard enough; or even, like Shakespeare’s greatness, you can have goodness thrust upon you, from other people’s projected expectations of you (we clergy suffer from that). But you can’t acquire holiness. Holiness – (and when you see it you can’t possibly mistake it) – holiness, like that other chemically elusive, divine attribute, ‘’grace,’’ is the raw material from which saints are made, but it is supremely, from start to finish a gift: ‘’Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved;’’ it’s God working in you and through you, like clay in the hands of the potter. Our part is simply to put our life in his hands.
So you and I, if we are to grow in holiness must open up to God – open our hearts to God (of if not, have our hearts broken open) – whether from unrequited love, moral failure, perhaps or even from disappointed hopes of our children, our stocks and shares, our ambitions or whatever; – a thousand and one circumstances can bring us to that point (even at the last minute, near death, as with the penitent thief on the cross) when finally, all defences are down, and when, brought to our knees and indeed to our senses – its then – yes then, when that first beatitude or first step to recovery breaks in with the new life, new freedom and new energies of the resurrection life; when, together with those countless men and women, throughout the ages who have finally known their need of God, not just as a nice extra or to top up their achievements, – but no, now, as a matter of life and death – so that, at last, God has finally got a foot in the door of your heart, your life and mine.
Oh, it’s no big deal, but it’s a start – it’s the first step as a disciple or forgiven sinner who is on the way to becoming a saint of God – a saint in the making.
So I ask myself, ‘’Is the church today making saints I wonder, or just grooming and stroking nice people to be a little better than most?”
You know, I often say that if I were psychologically whole (and personally self-sufficient), I would probably be irredeemable. God simply couldn’t get a foot in the door. ‘’How else except through broken heart, may Lord Christ enter in?’’ asks Oscar Wilde in the Ballad of Reading Goal – and goodness knows, he should know.
So now do you see how Saints are the primary forgiven sinners, who prove that the resurrection of Christ is true and that it works? For my belief in the ‘’forgiveness of sins’’ and the ‘’communion of Saints’’ binds both clauses of the Creed necessarily together, with the hope of resurrection. It’s a package deal: the last three clauses of the Creed belong together: I can only ‘’believe in the Communion of Saints,’’ because ‘’I believe in the forgiveness of sins’’; and I can only ‘’believe in the resurrection’’ to new life as a forgiven, forgiving sinner in the process of becoming a saint. That’s the living proof that God’s grace really is all-sufficient, bringing the gift of new life out of death; victory out of defeat and failure; freedom out of the prison houses of our addictions and compulsive behaviour: and that’s good news, in fact the saints are the best news going!
And all that because they know, these men and women we call saints with a small s or a big S – they know, more surely than they know anything else, and often from bitter experience, when all else has failed – yes, they know their ‘’need of God’’ in time and for eternity, and they are not disappointed of their hope. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ! Alleluia, AMEN.
Sermon preached by the Rt. Rev. Michael Marshall
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
All Souls’ Day
2 November 2014