Thursday 1st NovALL SAINTS

Fr Alexander McGregor

Daniel 7 : 1-3; 15- 18  ; Ephesians 1 : 11 – 23;  Luke 6 : 20 -31

A few years ago, British Telecom launched a promotion called “Friends and Family”.  A special discount would apply to the ten numbers that the subscriber called most frequently.  The rationale was that those we are more closely in touch with are our friends and our families.  These are, after all, the people that we feel closest to: the people that we are likely to want to communicate with.  These are the people who we know support us and  encourage us; help us and, above all, love us.  Friends and family are vitally important.  They enable us to realise a very basic need we have to exist in community with other human beings.  It is in our relationships with others that we come fully to realise and express who we ourselves are.  The priest and poet John Donne expressed this understanding famously with his “no man is an island”.  More recently, Rowan Williams has spoken of its importance for the life of the Church.  “The slogan of the Church’s life,” he says, “is ‘not without the other’; no I without you, no I without a we.”

Our relationship with God now – and for all of the future – is as part of a community – or communion.

Life in the Church is above all life lived in community.  First and foremost, it reflects the life of God himself – a community – the ultimate community – of persons: Father, Son and Holy Spririt.  But it’s always horizontal as well as vertical: its never just “my relationship with God”; its always “our relationship with God and with one another”.  All the baptised are adopted by God into a family relationship with him, and with all other baptised people.  The relationship is a family relationship – a relationship expressed most plainly when we pray the Our Father.  When we pray that prayer, we never pray it alone – even when no-one else is physically with us – we always pray it as members of a family.  Our relationship with God now – and for all of the future – is as part of a community – or communion.

The old Roman Creed – what we call the Apostles’ Creed – refers in one of its articles to belief in the “communion of saints”.  This is a translation of the Latin communio sanctorum.  Now this can be understood in two ways.  It can be a sharing between holy people.  That’s a statement that says a huge amount about the Church.  All ‘holy’ people – that is, everyone adopted by God through baptism – are and always remain part of one communion.  As the collect for All Saints’ Day in the Book of Common Prayer expresses it, God has “knit together [his] elect in one communion and fellowship”.  I find that image – “knit together” – rather attractive.  It suggests that our relationships as members of the Church community are almost tangible.  It’s a strong, concrete image.  And rightly so.

So where do the Saints – all of whom we celebrate today – fit in?

If the community of the Church is one community made up of all those who have been adopted by God into relationship with him – and into a family relationship with all the other members of the Church – then that relationship and that community must cross the gap between the living and the dead.  In fact it means that in reality there is ultimately no distinction between the living and the dead in terms of membership of the Church – in terms of relationship and of community.  Those on both sides of death remain members of the one community that is the Church.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews understood this very well.  In part of that letter he talks about the lives (and deaths) of a whole list of “saints” from Old Testament times – Gideon, Sampson, David, Samuel and the prophets: all those who were “commended for their faith”.  It is, he says, because we are “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” that we should “run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”   The imagery is clear: we are the runners in the race and the saints are our crowd of supporters: – they are there, surrounding us in a great crowd, cheering us on as we journey through our earthly life.  They are our “friends and family” – we belong to them, and they to us.  We and they are “knit together in one communion and fellowship”.

Christian art is dominated by depictions of the saints.  Our churches – in their windows, their pictures and their statuary – are full of saints’ images.  And quite rightly.  What better reminder could we have of being surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.  Or – looked at another way – these are our family photographs: reminders of our family and friends: those we love and who love us.  The tradition of most Christians includes asking the saints to pray for us.  It seems to me that that is a good thing.  We ask our friends and family to pray for us – we ask the Church to pray for us: the saints are our friends and family too, and are just as much part of the Church as any of us.  We ask for the prayers of the saints because they are our friends and fellow members of the Church.

I said a few moments ago that the expression communio sanctorum –  the communion of saints – could be understood in two ways.  I’ve already talked about it as a sharing between holy people.  But it also means a sharing of holy things.  The Church exists in order to enable us to experience holy things.  It does this in baptism.  It  also does it in the Mass – the Eucharist.  In the Eucharist we are given – here and now – a foretaste of the heavenly feast that awaits us.  The consecrated elements of bread and wine become for us the body and blood of Christ not because we attach a particular significance to them: they are what they become because they belong not to this world, but to the kingdom of heaven.  In the Eucharist heaven and earth meet – the division between this world and the next becomes very thin.  So thin that the kingdom of heaven is breaking through into this world and when we make our communion we are touching heavenly things.

This relates to what I have already said about the Church on earth and the Church in heaven being one – of their being a bridging of the gap between the two.  When we celebrate the Eucharist here and now we don’t celebrate just as the Church on earth: we are celebrating with all the Saints and the whole company of heaven.  That’s why every time we celebrate the Eucharist we sing the Sanctus – “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory”.  This is the hymn the angels are singing to God in the prophet Isaiah’s great vision of the court of heaven.  When we sing it in the Eucharist, we declare that we are doing so “with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven”.  In this great act – the celebration of the Eucharist – the Church on earth and the Church in heaven are united in a way that nothing else can match.  It means that here and now we are already experiencing what we will come fully to experience when we join the Saints and all the faithful departed in the kingdom of heaven.  The Eucharist isn’t a rehearsal: it’s the real thing.  A real experience here and now – in the company of all the Saints – of what we shall experience eternally when we have run the race.  Now, it sustains us in that race: and so does the support of those on earth, and the saints in heaven, who encourage us, help us and love us: our friends and family.