All Saints’ Sunday, 11am Eucharist with baptism of Winifred

Daniel 7.1-3, 5-18; Ephesians 1.11-23; Luke 6.20-31

Today is All Saints’ Sunday – the nearest Sunday to All Saints’ Day on 1st November - and we remember those whose lives show us something of the beauty and holiness of God. Also today we welcome Winifred (Winnie) into the communion of saints through Baptism.

All Saints’ Sunday invites us to think about holiness.

One of the things saints do – paradoxical though it sounds - is to remind us of how unattractive the Christian life can seem; how little, at times, any of us really want to be Christians. I realise this is an odd thing to say at a service when Winnie is just about to be baptised into that Christian life. But the Beatitudes – the Gospel reading we heard today - are particularly sharp in Luke’s version. ‘Blessed are you poor, blessed are you who are hungry, blessed are you who weep, blessed are you when people hate you’.

It’s an unpalatable challenge that almost everything we dread is set before us as a way of being blessed, while everything we would prefer, like being fairly well-off, satisfied, happy and popular is condemned. You might be thinking: what sort of life is in store for Winnie? So I wonder, can Christian holiness be desirable, attractive?

The word ‘Bless’ - whether ‘Bless you’, or just ‘Bless’ -suggests that we sometimes meet in other people something so lovely, kind and generous that we feel humbled and enriched. Grateful that they are alive, glad that we met them. The Christian life sets before us the promise and hope that life is a gift, that it leads somewhere, that we are surrounded by a great company of the saints – that great cloud of witnesses – that who surround our steps and encourage us on our pilgrimage from earth to heaven.

The promise of the reading we heard from Daniel is that whatever turmoil we seem to face - anxiety, sleepless nights, political upheaval, environmental turmoil - that God’s holy ones have a sure and certain inheritance. The reading talks about four rulers, four kings and political instability (something we know about with the politics we’ve lived through this past week) and yet the promise of lasting blessing is for God’s people: ‘The holy ones of the most high shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom…for ever and ever.’

In our second reading the sentences tumbled over one another as Paul tries to describe the inheritance that we have in Christ. We are Christ’s beneficiaries, he has put us in his will, we are going to share with him nothing less than what he has become himself, the fullness of him who is all in all. Sainthood is not an individual possession, or an intrinsic character profile, as much as a vocation which starts, as it does for Winnie today, at our baptism.

One of the lovely things about All Saints Sunday is that we get a glimpse of just how many there are in that great company of the saints, of how different they are, how particular they are, how kind, how broken, how eccentric, how difficult, delightful, creative and faithful are the saints of God. Holiness is like light refracted through thousands and thousands of different human faces, all bearing a facet of the one face, the one shining face of Jesus Christ.

The Christian life starts with a turning away from darkness, evil and death in baptism, and then we learn to turn towards the light more and more, as Winnie’s godparents will help her learn. The thing that unites this great company of saints, of holy ones – which we are called like Winnie to be part of - it is that they all want God. They have tasted God’s glory and they want more of it. And that’s where we come back to Luke’s Beatitudes. ‘Blessed are you who are poor’. ‘Blessed are you who are hungry’. To be saints we have to start by realising that we are not saints. We need more of God.

Jesus is talking to people who know they are not perfect. They are poor, they are burdened, by hunger and taxes and anxiety. Each day is a struggle. No one has ever called them blessed before. No one has ever told them that they have dignity. And yet here he tells them that that they are loved, that they are sons and daughters of the living God, and that God desires that they will be fed, they will be rich, they will laugh.

But Jesus is also talking to rich people, to those who have inherited or acquired wealth and who have squirrelled it away for themselves and their heirs, because they think they are entitled to do what they like. Woe to you who are rich! It was a shocking thing for Jesus to say. What he meant was that to defined by your good luck is not to be blessed by God, but to be on the verge of a nightmare. What does life hold for those ‘who have received their consolation?’ All that can happen is that you get more of the same or lose what you have. It’s not a place of blessedness to live without struggle, with no need to work, with all you want within reach and nothing to do but entertain yourself. Woe to you who are full now. Woe to you who laugh.

But then Jesus is also talking to us, most of whom are neither desperately poor or spectacularly rich, and here he sets out his manifesto of holiness. ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you’.

If it is God you want, become more humane and more human. Train yourself in compassion, purify your heart with prayer. Don’t cling on to things you don’t need, or even to things you do. Turn things round in small ways and God will turn you round in big ways. The good works of the Gospel are not a substitute for faith, they are training exercises in holiness. They help us to want to want God. They are rehearsals for heaven if you like, where the poor are made rich, the hungry fed, where those who mourn rejoice. So it comes back to what we really want.

Every time we come to the Eucharist we come to meet God, to meet him in his Son, to receive from him forgiveness and grace. No matter that, as usual our desires are disordered and confused. We go through the liturgy, confessing yet again our incompetence at the Christian life, praising God for his glory, listening to the promises and warnings of scripture, bringing our gifts and ourselves to his altar. Each time we come to communion here on earth we are brought closer and closer to that communion of all God’s saints in heaven. This is the point at which we are invited simply to accept that God accepts us.

The abundance of God’s blessings are offered to us – and we simply hold out our hands. God sees us surrounded by the great company of the saints and angels: and we are holy as they are holy.