Called to be Saints
‘Called to be Saints’
A sermon by The Reverend Maggie Guillebaud
Revelation 11:1-6
John 11: 32-44
One of the saddest events I have ever had to attend was the opening of a community centre in Aberfan some years after the terrible disaster of 1966. Many of you will remember how an enormous mountain of spoil slid, with no warning, down the hill into a primary school killing children and teachers, as well as others in the town.
I was there with my late father-in-law, Glyn Simon, the then Archbishop of Wales, who was to open the centre. He had had the heartbreaking duty of taking the mass funeral of nearly all of the 116 children and 25 adults who had been killed, a test of faith if ever there was one.
The new community centre was full of adults, but very few children. Some children had been pulled alive from the black mud or had been off school for various reasons on that fateful day. But most of these parents were there without their children. What could possibly be said to this group of traumatised and grieving relatives?
‘Called to be saints’ was what Glyn chose to talk about, a quotation taken from Paul’s introduction to his First Letter to the Corinthians, where he greets his brothers and sisters as ‘those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ….’ In effect a greeting to all those called to be friends of God. Called not necessarily to the heady heights of martyrdom, or lives of remarkable piety, or brilliance in preaching or teaching or founding religious orders. No, simply called to be friends of God in the everyday lives most of us lead – as children, as adults, however long or short our lives might be. The call that evening was to those stricken parents to remember that their children, who had been friends of God, were safe in the company of all the saints, friends of God, who had gone before them. We were all deeply moved.
However, the term ‘Saint’ with a capital ‘S’ has over the years caused a certain amount of strain to some Anglicans, and to many Protestants. Those sanctified by the Catholic Church as the heroes and heroines of the faith, who are venerated on special feast days, and through whom some intercede, were all but expunged in Northern Europe in the Reformation. But the veneration of saints, with both capital and lower-case S, was there from the very beginning of the early church. Before Christianity became legalised within the Roman Empire in 313, thousands died for their faith, in the arena, by execution and crucifixion.
The veneration of these early martyrs was one of the building blocks of the early church. Indeed, the Pantheon, still standing in what would have been the centre of Imperial Rome, was a temple to all the gods, as its name implies. But in 609 it became a Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. And the first thing Pope Boniface lV did was to order 68 cartloads of holy relics and bones to be taken from the catacombs and placed under the new high altar. It was from these early holy martyrs that the cult of saints, both lower and upper case, became firmly embedded in the church. But surely these heroic, self-sacrificing saints have nothing to do with us?
I think they do. Most of those early martyrs were ordinary people just like us, except they chose to sacrifice their lives for their faith. Thank God we live in a country where it is safe to be a Christian. But we are called, like them, to be saints, called to be friends of God, called to live lives underpinned by all Jesus taught us, in the knowledge of, and witness to, the living God who came to earth in his Son, Jesus Christ, that Christ who conquers death and points us to eternal life.
Which is why our reading from John this evening is so important. It focuses on the resurrection of Lazarus, who is brought back from the dead to an earthly life. It pre-figures Christ’s own Resurrection, where he is called to eternal life. Here the overwhelming grief of Lazarus’ sister Mary, and indeed Jesus’ own intense grief and perturbation of spirit, leads him to perform perhaps the most astounding of his miracles, bringing back a greatly loved friend from the dead.
But we note that the motive for this miracle is not just grief, but a prayerfully sought-for vindication by God, before the gathered crowd, that Jesus is indeed sent by God to the people of Israel, and that through him they will see God’s glory revealed. They saw and believed.
We have not seen, but we believe. And all of us gathered here this evening come to celebrate and give thanks for the glorious throng of billions of saints, both upper and lower-case, who have gone before us, and whose number we hope one day to join. To give thanks for their witness and their examples as friends of God. May all our friendships with God be similarly long and faithful.
Amen