Saints - living, working, in our world

 

Reflection 1^st November 2020

 

Relationship is at the very heart of the nature of God. The Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one and one in three - shows us this. As we are made in God’s image, God wants us to be in relationship too. With him and with other people. None of us is an island. We are not made to live only for ourselves. We are made for relationship, both with God and with each other and God's world. And for many of us of course Covid is all the more stressful because we cannot participate in relationships as we would normally do.

Perhaps more than other people, we in the Church turn toward each other almost instinctively as we celebrate our joys, mourn our losses, and when we need support through tough times and transitions. But even outside the church no person is an island. People work together to accomplish goals; we look to each other for reassurance that we're on the right track or for guidance if we're not; and we scarcely ever in adulthood make a decision that does not take somebody else into consideration. We look to our parents, grandparents, and mentors for wisdom; we look to our children for zest and inspiration; we look to our friends for help in sorting through the muddle of our daily lives. None of us is an island and thank God for that!

On the first of November every year, we in the Christian church remember that we are not islands, and give thanks for that, in the celebration called All Saints. As the name of the day suggests, it is a time for recalling all the "saints,"; saints known and unknown, who have preceded us, marking our way.

Who is a saint?

In the Roman Catholic Church saints are those who have been especially recognized by the for their exemplary lives. Protestants do not officially recognize saints in that sense, we have a more generalized vision of a saint as someone who is loving and Christlike, who not only knows what God wants them to do, but who always does it. A saint in this definition is an exemplary (and probably unreal) model of faith, whose example may make the rest of us feel like failures, or at least may tempt us to think that, since we're never going to be in their league, it really doesn't matter how we live.

There are other ways of describing saints. Paul's letters to his churches often begin with greetings to "those called to be saints," and those greetings were addressed to the entire congregation — in other words, to any and all Christians.

The word "saint," simply means "holy": one like, or one set apart for, God.  Frederick Buechner says, "A saint is a life-giver ... A saint is a human being with the same sorts of hang-ups and abysses as the rest of us, but if a saint touches your life, you become alive in a new way." Faith in fiction

This is like the definition of a saint given by a child who had been told that the figures in stained-glass windows were saints: "A saint is someone the light shines through.". And I’m sure we can all think of someone like that we know or have known.

It is people like them we remember, and who give us the courage to face our lives. We all have such saints in our lives — perhaps a much-loved grandparent, or admired mentor, or the friend who wouldn't let us be less than God called us to be. Such everyday saints help us to remember that it matters that we are faithful today; and they show us how to be faithful. We need them. We need to know that we are not alone, that we are not little islands. We need to know that we are part of a great community of saints who have kept the faith throughout history and who even now are doing so around the world.

That's what the communion of saints, the community of saints if you prefer, does for all of us. It reminds us of who we are, it gives us pictures of faith in action, and it encourages us to keep living out our calling in Christ Jesus.

We need that, because when we are baptized into Christ, although we remain part of the human family in the same way as everybody else, we are inducted into the Christian family, which has a unique way of looking at, and living in, the world. In fact, Christians look at the world in a way that the World thinks of as odd.

Nowhere is the oddness of the Christian outlook more clearly displayed than in the Beatitudes Matthew 5: 1 - 12. Blessed are you, says Jesus — or, according to some translations, happy — when you are poor, mournful, persecuted, hungry for a justice you don't see. That's hardly our society's usual definition of happiness. Blessed are you, says Jesus, who go ahead being meek, merciful, and peacemakers in a world where such efforts are doomed to failure and their doers to mistreatment.

None of us is such a saint that we can keep doing these things without support. We need the communion of saints to remind us that we are blessed when we live as if the love of God were the most important and the most reliable reality in life. We need the community of saints, and the community of saints needs us. With each other's help, we can live the life to which Jesus calls us, the life of God's kingdom on earth. “Living working in our world”  as Brian Wren’s hymn puts it.

None of us ever does that perfectly. But enough of us do it enough of the time that, over the centuries, the church has — through the daily life of its members as much as through its preaching and teaching — been able to nurture a distinctive vision, a unique outlook on the world that results in a different kind of living in it. That's a pretty remarkable achievement.

As Christians, we were never intended to go it alone. We are not islands; we are part of the body of Christ. We are part of the community of saints.