From the Minister
Saints 'R Us
By the time that this reaches you, we will have reached the middle of October. Our harvest festival will have come and gone, and we will be just a couple of weeks away from altering the clocks as we move from BST to GMT and begin to prepare for shorter days and colder weather. Some of us will be looking forward to autumn colours, to bonfires, and nourishing soup, and to crisp, frosty mornings. Others will be dreading the winter darkness and we wary of slippery pavements!
In the Church calendar, early November brings us the feast of All Saints, kept on the first of the month. I wonder what we make of the Saints – if, indeed, we make anything of them at all?
For us they may be figures from the very remote past, captured in stained glass poses and useful mainly to distinguish one parish Church from another.
The lives of the Saints of the early and medieval church were written with great gusto and imagination by people who thought that, piety had to be demonstrated by miracles, so they now seem very strange to us, and hard to take seriously. In similar vein, I recently heard a speaker point out John Wesley’s many human failings and concluded: 'We think of him as a saint but he wasn’t – he was a human being!'
The writers of the New Testament would be puzzled by that distinction between a saint and a human being. For Paul, and Peter, and John a 'saint' just means a Christian – a person who is in relationship with God through faith and in Jesus Christ.
When Paul and Timothy write to 'the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae', (Colossians 1:2,) or to 'all the Saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi' (Phil. 1:1), they are addressing the whole Christian community in those places. Not the super-spiritual or the extra virtuous but all the believers in Christ.
To be a saint in the new Testament sense, then, doesn’t require a formal process of canonisation, with duly attested miracles. It doesn’t need a carefully created biography or an ability to look good in a halo. It simply means faith in Christ, lived out in membership of the Christian community, the Church. This is life set apart for God, or dedicated to God, which is what the New Testament understands by sanctity or holiness
And the community matters. Every time the word 'saint' appears in the New Testament, it’s a plural - 'the saints'. There’s just one exception to this and that’s in Philippines 4.21, where Paul writes: 'Greet every saint ...' It's in community that we find support to live in God‘s way, and it’s in community that the essential Christian quality of love is nurtured, tested, and expressed.
The feast of All Saints offers an opportunity for us to thank God for all the exemplary people we’ve known, as well as for those who stories continue to inform inspire us. It reminds us for the shared diversity of the People of God, across space and time. And it reminds us too that in working out our faith today we are 'all saints' – or, in the modern idiom. 'saints 'r us!'
Yours in Christ,
Martin Wellings.
Last Updated: 23 November 2024
