Ephesians 1.11-23, Luke 6.20-31
“Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship”. That’s what today’s collect – the special prayer for All Saints’ Day said.
All Saints’ Day has an ancient history. Christians started celebrating those who’d inspired them in their lives and in their deaths from the earliest days of the church. Often they met at the tombs where they were buried, especially on the anniversary of their deaths, so they were as close as possible to their mortal remains. These people whom they’d known and loved now stood, they believed, face to face with God. But though they might have gone from human sight, but they were still very much part of the family, just like those we love are. It was just that the family, “that communion and fellowship” stretched beyond the bounds of earth, beyond the bounds of human time and space. Living and departed were part of one “mystical body” the body of Christ, which connected and enfolded them all in God’s love.
Individual saints usually had a particular feast day, but soon there were more saints than days of the year to celebrate them. What could be done with those who didn’t have a day set aside for them? And what about those who weren’t remembered by name, the ones whose suffering, whose love and devotion, had gone unnoticed? Shouldn’t they be remembered too? So the Church decided to declare a sort of catch-all day – All Saints’ Day – and on this day we celebrate the whole family of God, seen and unseen. This day reminds us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, bigger than the here and now, the world we can see, touch and hear. This “communion and fellowship” is one of God’s gifts to us. We aren’t meant to be trying to live our lives out of our own, individual strength, but as part of a community. Hallelujah! Because if you are anything like me you know that you need all the help you can get!
St Paul says, in our New Testament reading, “I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love towards all the saints…” He’s not talking about those who have died. He is talking about the love the Ephesians have for each other, and for their brothers and sisters in other Christian communities. Church communities, like all groups, can easily get fractious, careless of one another. Rivalries and bitterness can take hold, and spill over into hatreds which can split them apart and set them at loggerheads. At its worst we end up burning each other at the stake, but it all begins with low level meanness of spirit to one another, sniping and spreading malicious gossip. Remembering that the person we are moaning about is, in God’s eyes, a saint, just as we are, his child, his beloved, is a powerful way of nipping that in the bud. The word “saint” comes from the Latin “sanctus” which means “set apart, chosen for something special.” Seeing people like that should transform the way we treat them.
Paul underlines this when he reminds the Ephesians that they are called to discover “the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints”. The blessings of God are not theirs alone. They come from, and are meant to be enjoyed with others - even the others who are difficult to love, or perhaps especially those people!
Jesus makes the same point in the famous passage from the Gospel which we call the Beatitudes. It’s all about community. How can the poor, the hungry, the mournful, the persecuted be seen as blessed, as he says? It’s not that poverty or hunger or grief are good in themselves, things that make us happy – they are miserable experiences which we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, wish on our worst enemies. But Jesus doesn’t say “happy are the poor” ,he says “blessed” are the poor; blessing and happiness aren’t the same thing at all.
Blessing is what happens when we open ourselves up to God and one another rather than trying to go it alone. If we are in need or trouble we are far more likely to do this, and when we do, we often discover love and support which we hadn’t known was there - that’s the blessing that hides in these dark times. That love and support, the knowledge that we matter to others and to God, enables us to keep going, and maybe eventually even to find we are richer because of what we’ve been through.
But Jesus goes on, “Woe to you who are rich now”. “Woe to you who are full, laughing, convinced you’ve got it made”. Why ? Because those people are kidding themselves that they can be entirely self-reliant, that they will never suffer weakness, never need help. They might be ok at the moment, because life just happens to be going their way, but when the wheels come off, as they do for all of us sooner or later, they may find they have no one to turn to because they’ve imprisoned themselves in their own lonely self-sufficiency.
Even our enemies are meant to be part of our community, says Jesus in this Gospel reading, people who need and deserve our care and attention. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you,” he says, “pray for those who abuse you.” It’s very tempting to want to have nothing to do with people we disagree with or who have hurt us, to pretend that we have nothing in common with them, that their lives don’t matter. But it’s never as simple as that. If we treat others badly, whoever they are , whatever they have done , however justified we feel, in the end we’ll do damage to the whole community, the community we all have to live in. That’s something to remember as we approach another General Election in what is certainly the most bad-tempered, vituperative political atmosphere that I can remember in my lifetime.
I came across a wise piece advice from John Wesley, the founder of Methodism earlier this week. In 1774 he gave three pieces of advice to the electorate of his time,”One; to vote, without fee or reward for the person they judged most worthy. Two; to speak no evil of the person they voted against. And three, to take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.” Wherever we stand on the issues that confront us at the moment, these are wise words. As our collect says, we are “knit together”, not just with the saints, living and departed, but with everyone. If we damage others, “sharpening our spirits” against them, we end up damaging ourselves.
As you know, I spent my sabbatical this year studying the way local communities told the stories of their local saints – saints like our own St Edith, who was born down the road in Kemsing. If you were a medieval worshipper here, Edith would have mattered to you because she had lived in the same place you did, walked the pathways you walked, seen the landscapes you saw. And now she stood face to face with God in the courts of heaven, and, in a sense, that helped you to feel that your life, your experience, your concerns were present there too. Protestant Reformers were scathing about prayer directed to, or through, saints – we don’t need them!, they said – Jesus is the only mediator between us and his father! They destroyed the shrines and statues which had meant so much to those who visited them, and many local saints fell into obscurity. Of course, they were right in a way. We don’t need someone to speak for us to God. We can speak for ourselves, but the saints were more than just the divine equivalent of your MP, representing your concerns, they were friends – friends in high places – but nonetheless friends. It was as natural for them to ask the saints to pray with and for them as it is for us to pray for and with one another in the living community of the church.
I’m not a great one for parties or big social events, but I know that I feel a whole lot better about them if I walk into the room and realise that there are some familiar faces there already, friends who are glad to see me and include me in their conversation. Praying with the saints is a bit like that. It just makes prayer more companionable somehow. It’s not just about me and God, in a private huddle, but about me and God and my brothers and sisters in Christ, and the whole of creation beyond that too.
That matters not just for our prayer life, but for the way we live the rest of the time too. Here at Seal Church community is important to us, and we put a lot of effort into building it, within and beyond the church family. But we shouldn’t be complacent. There are still plenty of lonely people out there, people who crave connectedness, but don’t know where to start to find it. We often think of loneliness as being a problem of old age, but recent studies show that the loneliest people in our communities are often young adults, who, disproportionately, have to move often to find and keep insecure jobs and short term rented housing, and maybe work unpredictable shifts or combine jobs in the “gig” economy. How can you commit yourself to a community, join a club, volunteer, come to church, if you don’t know where you will be next month, or what you will be doing next week? People often blame the internet for destroying face to face communities, but in reality, their smartphone may be the only way that some people are able to connect with others at all.
All Saints’ Day might seem like a colourful but rather antiquated celebration, but it seems to me that if we take it seriously, it’s a very precious and necessary reminder of the importance of community. It challenges us to find ways of building and maintaining community here and now, not just through putting on social events, or running clubs, but by the kind of society we shape through our political and economic choices too. All Saints’ Day is a reminder that we’re meant to need one another, that we’re given by God as gifts to each other, that we are not meant to be alone, in life or in death. When we know that, and show that, we discover that we are truly blessed.
Amen
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