Sermon: All Saints Sunday

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 30th October 2011
Venue:
Wakefield Cathedral
Service:
Patronal Festival Eucharist
Readings:
Rev 7: 9-10

‘After this I looked and saw a vast throng, which no-one could count, from every nation, of all tribes, peoples and languages, standing in front of the Throne and before the Lamb’, or as the King James Bible has it, whose 400th Anniversary we’re celebrating this year, ‘After this I beheld, and Lo, a great multitude, which no man could number’. 

What a marvellously encouraging picture this is from the Apocalypse of John!  More encouraging than another verse earlier in Chapter 7: ‘I heard the number of them which were sealed and there was sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel’.  This is a rather more ecclesiastical piece of mathematics, totting up the tribes of Judah.  It’s the outcomes form, the box ticking, the bureaucracy which bedevils the Church of England now, as much as it snarls up the doctor in his surgery and exhausts the teacher in the classroom.  But later, ‘a great multitude which no-one could number’, ‘a vast throng for every nation, of all tribes, peoples and languages’.  This is more friendly, because less precise, more human.

So, today we ask ourselves, ‘what are saints like?’  There are two kinds: there’s the friendliness of holiness and there’s the stern reserve.  Last Sunday I was with the Guildford Cathedral Boys Choir and the Lay Clerks in Leeuwarden in Friesland, singing in the morning in the vast Roman Catholic Church of St Bonifatius.  Pastor Buter, the parish priest, invited us to Holy Communion, an invitation which is officially now discouraged, indeed forbidden by the present Holy Father.  When I teased Pastor Buter about this afterwards he said, ‘I think it’s better not to know the rules’.  By contrast, on the same day in the evening we went to the Gereformeerde Bond.  The Gereformeerde Bond is the most extremely conservative of the Dutch Reformed Churches.  The minister wore a collar and tie, and was surrounded by a phalanx of serious-looking men to take the collection – women were not allowed to take the collection in the Gereformeerde Bond.  They were all very astonished to see Choral Evensong put on for them, for no cassock or surplice, those rags of popery, had been seen in the Gereformeerde Bond before.

There was frankly something a bit stiff and starchy about it, as compared to the welcome from the Roman Catholics in the morning, where, although I was in a collar and tie sitting in the congregation, I was welcomed as the Dean of Guildford, who ‘we knew had already arrived because we saw him yesterday sitting inside a walrus’.  The explanation for this is that we’d taken the children to a Science Park on Saturday and on elevated stilts there was a railway (I think against all health and safety requirements in this country) where you could sit inside a tortoise or a walrus, and a picture of the Dean with some small boys sitting inside a walrus had already gone on the web and reached Leeuwarden and St Bonifatius.

So, back to the saints.  There are those rows of stern bishops, and indeed Saxon kings, in that Hardman glass you get in Victorian windows – you might have some here.  All the faces look much the same and they don’t smile.  They don’t smile, of course, because people were not very confident about their teeth in those days.  It was also thought more manly not to smile.  Compare and contrast with St Teresa of Avila, a picture of whom I have as an encouragement to my priestly life in the Deanery at Guildford.  When she was tipped out of a coach and ended up in a stony stream bed, she looked up and said, ‘If this is how you treat your friends, Lord, it’s not surprising you have so few’. 

Or, on the credit side, again, Blessed John XXIII, the most wonderful Pope of the 20th century, who called the Vatican Council.  Having been written off as a safe conservative, he threw open the windows and let in, not a little breeze, but a vast gale, the effects of which are still confounding and dividing the Roman Catholic Church today.  There are so many funny stories about him, but one of my favourites is, soon after he’d been made Pope, he was lying in bed worrying and said, ‘I ought to bring this up with the Pope tomorrow.  Ah no’, he said, ‘I am the Pope’, smiled seraphically and went happily back to sleep.  Compare and contrast him with his predecessor, the Pope of the Second World War, Pius XII, carefully presented asceticism, carefully groomed, the last great absolute autocrat, or was he?  Anyway, you wouldn’t warm, most of us, to Pius XII, as you would to the outgoing, confident friendliness of his successor, John XXIII.  And what about a living saint?  Desmond Tutu, who’s just had his 80th birthday to international acclaim, surrounded by world-wide affection.  He is a man of immense courage, who makes Christianity attractive to all and whose signature tune is helpless laughter.

So, we have two pictures – the bureaucratic anxiety of the hundred and forty four thousand precisely, the stern faces in the Victorian stained glass windows, the cultivated asceticism of Pius XII, and I could go on.  But then, Teresa of Avila and John XXIII and that living saint, Desmond Tutu.  They share warmth, humour and humanity because they are the friends of Jesus and they point to Jesus himself.  The picnics, the walks in the country, the teaching on the hillside, the meals with friends, the exasperated irony, the teasing, the sheer friendliness of Jesus of Nazareth, which has gone deep into the DNA of what we mean by sanctity; encouraging and enlarging and deepening, opening doors, embracing, welcoming and beckoning on. 

That’s what All Saints-tide does – it points us to Jesus and the Church of Jesus which still teases out the answer to the great question, ‘What is God like?’  The saints, when they are unselfconscious, courageous, funny and friendly, always point us back to Jesus, of whom the New Testament theologian wrote, ‘He who has seen me, has seen the Father’.  Not Daniel’s ‘ancient of days’, but ‘the man who stands at the door and knocks’; one whose little fist gripped the cradle and whose tortured hand grasped the Cross, that we might become fully human.

‘After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues stood before the Throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes and palms in their hands, and they cried with a loud voice saying, “Salvation to our God, which sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb”’.