Feast of All Saints
Wisdom 3.1-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21.1-6a
John 11.32-44
Sunday 3rd November 2024
©Suzanne Grimmett
In this story of the raising of Lazarus, found only in John’s Gospel, we witness the humanity of Christ, overcome with grief, and a God who refuses to let death have the last word. It reveals the bigger story of the God who pursues us even to the grave, drawing us always from death and decay to life, love and community.
So as we gather to mark this Feast of All Saints, what we are doing is celebrating those who embody the way that leads to life…those who have witnessed to the power of living by a different way, turning their back on the death-dealing energies that occupy our lives and imaginations.
How do we recognise this ‘different way’? As we think of those we call saints, it could be a good time to recall Jesus’ words that ‘small is the gate or the door and narrow the road that leads to life’ in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels. In Mark’s Gospel we hear the emphasis on denying yourself, taking up your cross and following, being prepared to lose even your life. It does not sound an enticing offer, but we can look through Christian history and find those saints who have done just that- living big lives of love and service, truth and justice, sometimes even to the point of death.
Perhaps this is what gives saints the reputation of being killjoys, party-poopers, where the idea of holiness seem all a bit of a drag when there are so many better, shinier things on offer. It is so easy in our culture to think that life in its fullness….variety, adventure, excitement, passion, imagination and fun… all live on that other, wider, road.
I don’t think we have been good at recognising the energies that take us away from life and freedom, so a look at the lives of saints and the wisdom they have bequeathed to us might be timely. In the reading from the book, Wisdom, we hear that the hope of the saints is full of immortality and that in their eternal lives they ‘shine forth’ and ‘run like sparks through the stubble’. I wonder whose lives you might think of that fits these metaphors; those whose lives shine like the stars and continue to guide us?
In scripture, death itself is seen as part of the ‘wrongness’ that infects our world. Death may seem to make futile our works for justice and peace, for building communities of hope and love of our neighbour. Why strive when in our short lifetimes we can change so little? Why not surrender to the cultural pressure to simply take care of yourselves and your families and try to forget death, and, when you are faced by it, try to make yourself as comfortable as possible, surrounded by your possessions across a lifetime?
Often the most common answer from Christendom is to point to the need to be assured of some kind of ticket to heaven. Aware of the many passages in both Old and New Testaments about judgement, there can be a ubiquitous hope that in performing good works across our lifetime we will end up in heaven. It is the kind of hope I hear from worried families whose loved one has died, when they list off their good works and occasional church attendance. We keep on with this kind of religious insurance policy thinking, despite the words of Jesus that if we are trying to save our life, this is the very way we will lose it. We have these kinds of fears often even when we have heard the good news that the God of all grace came not to condemn the world but to save the world through Christ.
Some of that may seem contradictory and confusing. That may be because in Christianity that we are in another kind of story altogether; something that is not all about us and our individual performance, no pass or fail mark and no competing and comparing for favours. We don’t have a finite story about ourselves but an eternal horizon where nothing is wasted and what we do, however small, matters to the whole. The story that we see the saints telling with their lives is also very different from the zero-sum game we play in our culture where our winning necessitates someone else losing. It seems to me that the way you can spot a saint, is to look at what they desire. Put simply, a saint is someone whose desires align with God’s desires. And we know, particularly from our Gospel reading today, that God’s desires lead to life. Saints see reality as it is, glowing with the glory of God, conscious that there is no such thing as a solitary individual, and aware that their life is caught up in the flourishing of others in the abundant diversity of creation.
But what of fun, adventure and passion? Rowan Williams has said that there is a lot of truth in the saying, “boring as hell”. We heard in the study group this week, using Williams’ book Passions of the Soul, that the diabolic way of seeing and desiring in the world is the opposite to the way the saints and angels perceive and desire. The opposite broad path is to see the world through the lens of ‘a kind of supermarket consumerism in which we experience and assess what is around us simply in terms of its profitability to us, as if it had no meaning except what our wants and fantasies projected on to it: never mind what it is, what can it do for me?’[1] Despite the fact that we all know that being around anyone stuck in self-enclosing self-interest is incredibly dull, we continue to portray hell in our stories, jokes and fantasies as where the cool kids are swinging.
The reality is, that in the hells we create across our lifetime, we are progressively making ourselves less free, building the chains, as Joseph Marley did in A Christmas Carol; chains that robbed him of joy, creativity and imagination in his life, not to mention the possibilities of love. In our portrayals, we neglect to mention that hell in reality is repetitive, narrow and imprisoning. Since it turns inwards, evil, pride and selfishness always end up looking and acting the same. The problem is, there is a strong cultural pressure to accept the lie that a consumerist way of seeing the world and one another is the way things actually are. Yet to be stuck in a world of individualism where the dominant driving desire is to control and possess is to experience death before dying. A life spent trying to save your own life for your own sake, to paraphrase Jesus, is to lose your life.
It is just as well, then, that we are talking today about the lives of the saints and the diverse, abundant and joyful way of embodying the kingdom of God, on earth, as it is in heaven. It recognises that the truest reality and reason for being and creation is the sharing of love. Yet the saints’ lives are not free of suffering- indeed the opposite is more often true. To love is to suffer, but it is never to suffer alone; Jesus grieves and suffers with us, knowing intimately the struggles of a mortal life. The suffering of the saints is not the mindless hell and isolation caused by aggression and greed, and neither do these lives bow down to structures of evil that demean, diminish and extinguish life. Jesus, the human one, instead shows us the way to be fully human, a humanity marked by courage and passion and lives that shine with love and service.
Sainthood has many faces. When you look down the ages, we see the immense diversity and creativity of famous lives such as Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross and Australia’s own Mary MacKillop. These lives are but a few of the great cloud of witnesses, and they could not be more different from one another. Varied and wondrous, too, are the smaller lives, so many unknown and unremarked, who live in quiet faithfulness within a story of originality and acts of great love. As we remember and give thanks for such lives, may we be reminded that what we desire determines the life and love that is possible. May we know that in desiring to control we lose all joy, in desiring to possess we are robbed of our humanity, and in pursuing life for ourselves alone, we suffer the death of all love. We become trapped inside a universe of one.
It is quite simply, boring as hell.
May we instead, find ourselves inside a different story of abundance, community and grace. May we recognise ourselves surrounded by all the saints and angels and joined by love to the endlessly creative one who says, “Come, follow me. I am making all things new.”
+Amen
[1] Williams, Rowan. Passions of the Soul (pp. 14-15). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.