Today we join with Christians all over the world to celebrate one of the seven Principle Feast days of the Christian year, the feast of All Saints. (BCP 15).
The day means a lot to us. Some of the most beautiful hymns that we have in our Hymnology have been written to honor this day and to honor God’s holy saints.
One such hymn is Hymn 293: “I sing a song of the saints of God.”
This hymn reminds us of our childhood. It reminds us of when the Church taught us that we too can become saints of God; that every person has the potential of achieving through the course of his or her life true communion with God.
But to grow in holiness we must see life through the eyes of Jesus. We must look at our daily work, even the hard labor we may face, the untimely decisions that pressure us, the things peculiar, along with the demands of all activities as God-given occasions to foster spiritual renewal and deeper union with Jesus Christ.
Now this may sound strange, especially if you think over what your average day is like. But it’s true that we are to sanctify what we do and even time itself, learning to serve God and our neighbor at any given hour.
Those daily needs of family life, what we do to maintain a healthy and committed marriage, having the moral courage to make hard decisions and raise our children in the Christian faith and life; along with all of our activities; everything is God-given to us to see as opportunities for imitating Jesus Christ: such as charity, patience, humility, diligence, integrity, cheerfulness, faith in God, and so much more. We must bring before the Holy Spirit life in prayer and discernment and ask Him to guide us, bless us and help us to be good stewards of life.
This is how saintly Christians grow in grace and holiness, each learning to work with the spirit of Jesus Christ to live life competently with the aim that through life we love God and we can reach out with Him to His broken world.
God’s hope is that we learn to approach life in this way to sanctify the world from within. Prayer becomes the venue to bring the daily structures of life into our heart, and we use this ¬life-heart connection to expose the Gospel as a living presence in all activities whether they are outstanding or humble or even hidden.
By utilizing this life-heart connection we are able to put love into life. Once we come to grips with this, and begin to do it, we are on the pathway to becoming a great saint!
There is another hymn and it’s one of my favorites: Hymn 287: “For all the saints.” Now here is a hymn. It has everything right about it: good theology, beautiful words and a wonderful composition.
This hymn was written to celebrate the rich and beautiful hagiography we discover in a vast list of thousands of souls that have been canonized or elevated to some dignity by both the Church of the East and of the West.
These dear souls are what the Book of Revelation this morning referred to as the
great multitude of people so enormous that no one could count, representing every race, tribe, nation and language, all standing before the throne of the Father and before the victorious Lamb, His Son, Jesus Christ; each dressed in a white robe holding a palm branch in his or her hand… (Rev 7:9)And do you know that this great multitude is resting now “under the heavenly Altar of God” (Rev 6:9), resting and being healed of the wounds received during their earthly life. Man will suffer in-one-way-or-another if he lives his life for God. But of course, it’s also true that if you don’t live your life for God you will still suffer and this suffering will only get worse and will carry over into eternity.
But for those who whose robes have been washed pure in the Blood of the Lamb the divine Physician prescribes rest.
He says to those resting under the Altar of God:
rest a little longer until the number of fellow servants and brethren, who were to be killed even as they had been, should be completed… (Rev 6:11)Ecclesiasticus this morning calls this multitude
famous men, and our fathers in their generations. God apportioned to them great glory, His majesty from the beginning. (Sir 44:1)The “famous men” we know about; they are people like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Moses and Aaron, Rebecca and Deborah and many others. The second part of that sentence which reads “and our fathers in their generations” are those whose names and deeds of virtue we know nothing about.
History leaves us with
no memory; they have perished as though they never existed; as though they were never born, they and their children after them. (Sir 44:9)The end of verse 9 reads they and their children after them? This portion of the verse speaks to those who simply lived life. They lived in humble surroundings, sacrifice was a daily occupation. Some of them were obviously baptized and yet many over the centuries were not. Yet each lived and died in earnest pursuit of the good that is God alone.
A saint is a child of God, someone who has set his or her heart upon God and has released their stubborn will into His loving influence. This allows God at every time and in every place to draw close to His children.
And He does this; He speaks softly but firmly, much like what Elijah heard at the mouth of a cave (1 Kgs 19: 9-18). God calls us, He bids us to seek Him every day, to know Him and to love Him with all of our strength of heart and will.
Why should we consider this an odd thing for God to call to us, to want us? Are we not made by Him to share in His divine and blessed Life?
St. Peter writes of this in his second letter
[God’s] divine power has bestowed on us everything that makes for life and true devotion, through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and power. Through these, He has bestowed on us the precious and very great promises, so that through them you may come to share in the divine nature, after escaping from the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire. (2 Pet 1:3,4 NAB)So the way we “escape the corruption that is in the world” is to become a saint.
But here is the deal. Saints are not “double agents;” we don’t live a double life, where on the one hand, we have this wonderful spiritual life, a life of union with God and His will; and on the other hand, we live a separate and distinct professional and social or family life.
This is not Gospel living. Gospel living is all about integration. The Gospel tells us that we have just one life and that life is made of flesh and spirit… of body and soul.
This one life we have been given to live and become in soul and body, holy and filled with God.
That is our earthly calling: to be filled with the fullness of God. Our earthly life of obedience prepares us for our heavenly life of eternity.
Is there any better definition of a saint but someone who is filled with the fullness of God? By our very nature we are a religious being. We have the capability of entering into communion with God. This communion confers upon us our fundamental dignity. In the first chapter of Ecclesiasticus we find that this desire for God (our dignity) is created in the womb. (Sir 1:14)
Closing
Because God’s saints are scattered through-out the world, nothing need be foreign to Christ’s care.
Being a saint means not fearing life but approaching life as opportunity to work with God to sanctify it.
Once our heart has matured under the Word of God, and we have felt hunger and thirst, worked with tired and labored hands, experienced the cry of a child or the sorrow of a loved one, or shouldered the burden of the suffering and cared for the dying; then we are in the position to use that life-heart connection and live as a saint of God.
Each situation is unique; each offers a unique call which we must learn how to live out; but we should live our call intensely, giving expression to the spirit of Christ
Through our life Christ is present to anyone.
So I end where I started, by saying that to grow in holiness by grace we must see life through the eyes of Jesus. We must realize that we will struggle as saints in this world.
But be of good courage my friend; the struggle is OK because it’s part of the purification process that will fix our heart upon God alone; and we know the end of the story, don’t we, that in the end our Lord has won the struggle for us.
Amen.
Hymn 293 is one of my favourites!
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