In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!
Each time the Eucharist is celebrated in my Cathedral, [and, of course, here in your church] this powerful acclamation – a fact, a proclamation and a promise – is joyfully repeated. Every Eucharist is a celebration, a thanksgiving-filled commemoration of the one sacrifice offered by Christ who died on the cross and accepted by the Father who raised him to new life. This is the fundamental, essential and all-encompassing commemoration which gives the Eucharist its meaning and purpose. As St Paul reminds us: “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:26).
Alongside this, the feasts and seasons of the Church Year help us to focus our thanksgiving on specific mysteries or events in the drama of our salvation. Every Sunday is a “little Easter”, a commemoration of the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ, but on certain fixed days month by month, the scripture readings and the prayers of our liturgy home in on something in particular – the Incarnation on 25th March; our Lord’s birth on 25th December; the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and so on. Advent, which will very soon be upon us, fits into this scheme of things as it is a season of preparation – a sort of gradual “build-up” to the great feast of Christmas. Jesus Christ is Lord of Time and all time belongs to him so this annual round is known as the Temporal cycle. All time is sanctified, made holy, as the whole saving work of Jesus Christ is commemorated in Anno Domini, each Year of the Lord.
“All well and good,” I hear you say, “but what are we doing today? Today is Sunday and yet we are keeping the feast of All Saints. What has this got to do with the commemoration of the saving work of Christ?” How do the saints fit into all this? Surely they are a distraction. I do not think so.
At a specific time in our history and in a particular place on earth, God revealed himself to us definitively in his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. The unknowable God revealed himself to us in a knowable human being who was both all that is God and all that is human. Supremely we know of God’s revelation of himself in Jesus through the words of the Gospels and, because these books were written after the earthly life of Jesus, they are both the record of that life and the agenda for those who would follow after. The very fact that the four gospels differ from one another is testimony to this as each Evangelist took his recollection of the words and deeds of Jesus and applied them to the living needs of the Christian Community for which he wrote. The gospel, therefore, does not just exist as scripture; the good news does not just exist as something written down, finished, over. It exists also as something LIVED.
This is where the saints come in. I can explain this no better than by using the words of another saint, Francois de Sales, taken from a letter he wrote to the Archbishop of Bourges in 1604. “The life of the saints,” he wrote, “is nothing other than the gospel lived. There is no more difference between the gospel written and the life of the saints than between music written and music played.”
The saints are those who, following the gospel agenda, prove that the life of Christ lived, and sometimes as in the case of the martyrs, the death that Christ died, is possible for men and women the world over. The saints were called and are still called from every race and nation and language under heaven. They represent all sorts and conditions of men and women and share our strengths and weaknesses. You have only to read their lives to realize that there is both nothing special about them and everything special about them. They just saw the music written and sang it, giving themselves wholly to God, they not only read the gospel but lived it.
We are all called to be saints. All the qualifications for sanctity are given us at our baptism. All the necessary help along the way is freely available to all. Indeed, there may be saints among our number here and now – not conspicuous to us but conspicuous to God, who knows all and sees all. Those who have been raised to the altar, canonized as we call it, given a feast day and a celebration, are but the tip of an enormous iceberg – just a small part of the multitude which no man can number which stands around the throne of God, praising him without ceasing. Today is their feast.
So, alongside the temporal cycle of feasts of the Lord runs another yearly round of celebrations, the feasts of the saints. Today is the crowning glory of that round. Saints’ days are usually the anniversary of death or, perhaps more fittingly, the heavenly birthday of the holy ones. They dance in and out and around the regular pulse of the Church Year – living the gospel in a sort of musical counterpoint over the cantus firmus of the temporal cycle. Theirs is what we call the Sanctoral cycle and we celebrate it each year not just to honour their memory, not just to join our prayers with theirs, not just to benefit from their example, but to rejoice in the gospel lived.
And are you here a community of the gospel lived? If the answer is a resounding “YES!” then you must do all in your power to ensure you do not just stand still but enable your loving gospel embrace to extend around more and more lives. If the answer is a sad “no” then you need to ask what am I going to do about it – how do I implement the gospel agenda?
Because he says what I have tried to say but says it so much more elegantly and economically, I conclude with some inspiring words of Austin Farrer- perhaps the greatest Anglican preacher of his generation: “A martyr is only a martyr because his sacrifice was the act of Christ in him, and a saint is only a saint because her life is the life of Christ in her. All the feast days of the saints are feast days of Christ – of the Christ in Francis or the Christ in Teresa or the Christ in Paul. They are what they are by feeding on Christ, just as we feed on Christ; having union with Christ in the Holy Sacrament we have union with all his people, all his mystical body. Above all, the Feast of All Saints is a feast day of Jesus Christ, the feast of his glorious actions in the whole body of the people he saves.”
Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Jeremy M. Haselock
Preceptor and Chaplain to HM The Queen, Norwich Cathedral
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
All Saints’ Sunday
6th November 2016