In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
It was a cold, rainy November evening in a small village in Norfolk. The wind rattled around the tower of the parish church and in through the breaks and chinks in the stained glass. Inside, a hundred lamp and candle flames danced and guttered. In the low flickering light, the parish priest could just be seen. He closed his breviary, blew out the candle on his stall and, reverencing the sacramental presence of the Lord hanging in the pyx over the high altar, he made his way quietly out through the screen into the nave. Drawing his cloak more closely around him, he turned and locked the wooden gates of the rood screen. In the dancing glow of the votive lights around the church his shadow leapt this way and that across the painted walls of the church. From every side faces looked down on him – calm prayerful faces, stern accusing faces, above all the familiar faces of a score of saintly friends whose presence always supported him in his pastoral care for his people. High on the rood loft – higher than the six-winged seraphs on their wheels – stood the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Beloved Disciple, St John, maintaining their lonely vigil by the Cross. In their niches around the church stood St Katherine, St Peter, St Martin, and St George, while in the north aisle chapel on a low stone feretory stood the iron-bound box containing the bones of St Edith, Saxon princess, Abbess and now patron of the village.
As the priest’s eyes took in once more the familiar sight, his ears caught the sound of loud voices outside. The church door burst open and almost on the back of a gust of wind which blew out all the lamps and candles, a band of men pushed their way into the church. By the light of the torches they held the priest could see they carried axes, hammers and crowbars. Before a word of greeting or enquiry could escape his lips they had started. The noise of the wind was joined by the scream of rending wood, the crash of breaking glass, the shriek of iron on alabaster, marble and painted limestone. Within minutes the images of the saints, the glass, the relics, the painted screen lay smashed and mutilated.
Standing in that church this summer, with some American friends, looking at the bare niches and whitewashed walls, the plain-glazed windows and the truncated screen, I found myself wondering – nearly 500 years later – what it was about the saints and their cult that could produce so violent a series of emotions and actions in men. As I murmured a prayer of reparation for the sacrilege, I tried in my mind to account for the frenzied reaction which resulted in the destruction of so much that had been fine, noble and beautiful.
It is a cliché with which we are all familiar that saints alive are difficult people to live with. Indeed, many of our favourites must have been almost impossible because of the way in which they kept challenging their contemporaries to go to extremes. I have a great devotion to St John Vianney, the Cure d’Ars, but I suspect, no I know, it must have been very trying to have had him as one’s pastor. Total commitment makes us feel uncomfortable; enthusiasm is, after all, a bit un-British. We are threatened by an example of living holiness as well as edified. But dead saints are surely far less of a problem. We don’t have to live alongside them; we can safely ignore them a dead and gone. But can we?
I think not. All ages are equidistant from eternity, so any human being, in any age, who somehow speaks to us directly, or by example, of the truths of God, will be contemporary for every generation. This truth surely leads us to an understanding of what we mean by the communion of saints and challenges us at this time when we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, to come to terms with what we really mean by THE CHURCH.
Since the very earliest times, Catholic Christians, in both Eastern and Western traditions, have always believed that the saints of the New Testament, the apostles and evangelists and those whom we call martyrs, are closely united with us in Christ. Today’s Collect makes this abundantly clear: Almighty God, you have knit together your elect into one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord. As individual sanctity of life became recognised, those who tried as far as they were able to imitate the life-style, poverty and chastity of Christ and those who made outstanding practice of the Christian virtues came to be included with the apostles and martyrs as saints. Their mortal remains were held in veneration and they were, as we say, raised to the altar, canonised, mentioned in the eucharistic prayer and entered into the calendar of the Church universal and local.
When we look on the lives of those men and women who have faithfully followed Christ in their own age we are inspired with a fresh reason for seeking to follow Christ ourselves in our own time. By their example we are constantly reminded by God that, whatever our circumstances in the world, it is possible to follow in the footsteps of Christ and to grow in holiness in and through him. Those whom we call saints were, after all, ordinary people like us, sinners and weak earthen vessels, and yet they prove that it is possible to live the life that Jesus lived and to infuse our mortal clay with the glory of the divine. God shows himself to us in the lives of those who share our human condition. First, and supremely, he shows himself to us in Jesus Christ, who became man that man might become God, and then again he shows himself to us in the lives of the saints – this is surely what the Incarnation continues to mean.
But we do not seek to honour God only in following the example of his saints, we seek also to benefit from their prayers. Just as Christian communion and fellowship and mutual support amongst men and women on earth brings us all closer to Christ, so our recognition of our community with the saints who have died and are with Christ also brings us close to him. Just as we find it natural to pray for one another so, surely, we should have no difficulty in asking the saints to pray for us and for the building up of the whole body of Christ’s Church. For our own greater good and the good of the whole Church we seek from the saints example in their way of life, fellowship in their communion and benefit from their intercession.
Those whose questioning and reforming theology expressed itself in Europe in the appalling destruction of images and relics and of all the other outward and visible signs of devotion to the saints – those fanatics were victims of their own faulty view of the whole Church. Instead of understanding our communion and fellowship, our solidarity with the saints, they saw the whole host of heaven as a massive barrier between them and God. The saints on their pedestals, with votive lamps burning before, were seen as unnecessary intermediaries who somehow “got in the way” of our direct access to Christ. It was as if prayer and devotion were somehow intercepted by the saints for their own use, for their own glory, rather than for the glory of God and the solidarity of the Church. So the saint on his pedestal was hewn down, his image defaced, his relics scattered as if somehow to make him impotent, harmless, worthless. We know, however, that the saints on their pedestals, far from standing between us and God actually beckon us up to join them. We, my brothers and sisters, are saints in the making. All the saints call us to join them in their unceasing witness to human unity with God in Christ Jesus – to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be all glory and honour now and unto the ages of ages. AMEN.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Jeremy M. Haselock
Precentor And Vice- Dean, Norwich Cathedral
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
All Saints’ Day
1 November 2016