All Saints Year C (with adult baptism)

Ephesians 1: 11-23; Luke 6: 20-31

I was part of a group of people recently when someone asked: ‘who is your favourite saint’? It’s the kind of question I can never answer. A bit like ‘what’s your favourite film or book or poem’? I usually want to say: it depends.

As people began to make suggestions, the first names were fairly predictable to be honest, they were the big beasts in the world of sainthood. And people talked about being inspired by something they had said or done, perhaps an example of how they had made choices in their life. It wasn’t long though before we found ourselves in quite tricky waters. You don’t have to delve very deeply into the lives of those familiar saints to discover that they were, or are, complex human beings, just like the rest of us. Some of those whose later lives were exemplary lived early lives that might generously be described as hedonistic and often were simply immoral.

And then, inevitably, we moved into a discussion that allowed people to talk about individuals they had encountered and by whom they had been inspired. Very ordinary people with all their strengths and weaknesses who had found themselves doing quite extraordinary things and being an unexpected inspiration for others.

So as we gather to celebrate the festival of All Saints, we’re here to celebrate the names that we might all recognise as saints and the names that most of us won’t recognise. At its most simplistic, this is a day when we’re given permission to pick and mix. To take an idea from here and an image from there and to allow them to speak to us and influence us and inspire us. Different saints speak into our lives at different times and in different ways. That is some of the richness that they bring. We think about the saints residing in heaven, but they lived their embodied lives on this earth, sharing much of what we experience day by day.

One of the gifts of the saints is that they help us to hold the space between heaven and earth – between the God who is pure mystery and the God who lives and moves among us. This idea is perhaps brought into focus if we look at the work of a couple of well-loved saints. Hildegard of Bingen who wrote this:

Listen; there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself, but because the air bore it along. Thus am I a feather on the breath of God.

Hildegard helps us to understand something of the God who we can’t see but can experience, the one who supports us and holds us.

Let’s contrast that quote from Hildegard with a quote that may be a little more familiar. It’s from Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.

Here we have Teresa engaging with our call to be the Body of Christ, to serve the one who lives and moves among us. The one in whose footsteps we aspire to follow.

In the space between those two quotes sits perhaps all that is really crucial for our lives of faith. A reminder of the complexity of who and how God is, a glimpse of how much we don’t know or understand and at the same time a reminder of how fully God, in the person of Jesus Christ, knows us and understands the challenges of our lives.
All Saints reminds us that there are those who have walked this path before us, and who may offer some encouragement or inspiration as we fail, and fail again, to meet the standards to which we aspire. So if the saints inhabit that liminal space between earth and heaven and invite us to join them there, what do we need to do to recognise them and to identify the spaces we are being called into? I think that this brings us back to Hildegard and Teresa. Hildegard helps us to focus on the experience of God, on knowing in our beings rather than in our heads. And Teresa then helps us to translate that into how we might live out our lives.

The letter to the Ephesians offers some help here. There’s a phrase in the middle of today’s reading ‘with the eyes of your heart enlightened’ that suggests a pathway. We look around us for saints not with the eyes that observe the world and encourage us to pass judgement on much of what we see in that world. But with the eyes of our heart. This is less about observing and more about experiencing.
We know when we are in the presence of someone who is filled with God’s love and grace. We know when we encounter someone who lives out of their faith-based values, when we encounter or read about someone who lives with and for God. That’s not usually an intellectual knowing, it’s an experiential knowing. And we see evidence of the integrity and integration within a person, when we consider how they live in relation to the guidance that Luke offers us this morning. ‘love your enemies; pray for those who abuse you; do unto others as you would have them do to you’.

Luce, that is the ambition to which you are committing this morning. That is at the heart of the promises you are about to make. God is calling you into those liminal spaces where you can experientially know something of the mystery of God, which will in turn resource you to live out your life with and through that God in the person of Jesus Christ. God is calling you to serve whilst encouraging you to allow yourself to be served. To reach out in love and faith and to be changed by love and faith. To accept with grace the life-giving bread and wine which will be offered to you this morning and to allow yourself to be transformed.

You, along with each and every person in this congregation, are being called to open the eyes of your heart; to recognise the saints who surround you; to find that part of yourself that witnesses to the faith that we all share. And to do all of that with confidence. Confidence in the God whose call you and have recognized, whose presence you have experienced.

In a few minutes you will hear these words:
In Christ God reaches out to us.
In baptism God calls us to respond.

Each and every one of the saints has found a way to respond. With them, I invite you to open the eyes of your heart and to respond fully, confidently and with an aspiration to find and inhabit that liminal space where you can know God and be known by God, where you too will be resourced to experience and share God’s unconditional and eternal love.