ALL SAINTS

2^ND November 2014

Readings:

Revelation 7: 9-17

Matthew 5: 1-12

Revd Andrew Bain

One of the things I like about saints is their sheer variety. There’s no sort of one size fits all way of being a saint. At Holy Trinity I worked with a team member one of whose duties was to compile a list of saints to be commemorated at our Wednesday service. This could result in my turning up of a morning to find that I was celebrating, for example, the feast of Sts Boris and Gleb. Who? Boris and Gleb were Ukrainian princes, considered martyrs by the Orthodox church, having died by the command of one Sviatapolk the Accursed (not a nice man by all accounts) – Gleb we’re told, having his throat cut by his own cook.

Now you may well ask, who needs to know that at 9.15 on a Sunday morning a thousand years on, or at any time. But these commemorations are an invitation to join in that great cavalcade that streams through those gates of pearl – all those whom Jesus calls blessed and invites us to be one of them. And it’s like they call back to us over their shoulders: Come and join us. Join the pilgrimage. Put your feet in the footsteps of the Man of Galilee.

A few years ago I saw a film of the art critic, Brian Sewell making the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James, Santiago de Compostela. He aimed to end up in that amazing cathedral famous for its huge hanging censer, the one that takes a whole team of beefy men to swing it from one side of the cathedral to the other and which Pope John Paul memorably watched almost as if he was at Wimbledon. But Brian’s pilgrimage was extraordinary. Much of it done in a Mercedes, be it said, but nevertheless he made an amazing journey. Not just to the shrine of the saint, but meeting saints along the way, and indeed making a journey in his own heart.

At Lourdes his aesthetic soul was appalled by all the tackiness of the shops with their holy trinkets: Luminous blessed Virgins; holographic pictures of Jesus that show him crucified if you hold them one way and risen if you tilt them the other; or wind-up holy grottoes that play the Lourdes hymn. But still he could see beyond that to the faith of all the people with broken bodies or minds who find their way there and the compassion of all the helpers there to care for them (like the Duchess of Kent who after her conversion to become a Roman Catholic went to Lourdes as a helper and was happy to clean loos).

Lourdes is a place of joy. It’s a place where one peasant girl, Bernadette, met another peasant girl, Our Lady, and had an encounter that literally opened up a well of healing and joy for millions. So it’s a place of a love and a faith so alive it makes saints. It’s a place for going beyond yourself, which is what saints do.

By the time Brian Sewell reached Compostella he was beginning to see this. The pilgrim route is punctuated by amazing buildings and shrines, but far more moving than any architecture was the experience of meeting so many people travelling with joy. At journey’s end you see him, his mind not much changed intellectually about Christianity, but his heart reached and touched to a depth that truly astonished him.

The saints say to you: Get on the pilgrim way. You don’t have to physically go anywhere to follow the saints. Brother Laurence, author of The Practice of the Presence of God, worked in his monastery kitchen for 15 years and he says: "The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament."

You can be a saint in the kitchen. And you can be a saint in the lion’s den of worldly power if that’s where God takes you. Like Sir Nicholas Winton, aged 105, honoured this week for rescuing nearly 700 children from Nazi occupied Czechosovalia in the kindertransport.

Ukrainian princes and peasant girls, kitchen saints and unsung wartime heroes, we need them all – we need us all - and they say to us: join in the pilgrimage of saints, even if the travelling’s in your heart; be open to being reshaped and turned upside down and emptied until you know truly the joy of the blessed who see God. Amen.