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Fr David Rocks OP tells the story of how he went into his church school, St Dominics, to talk about All Saints day. The theme for the mass:God calls each of us to become saints. But one young lady from year 4 raised an objection: the saints are made of marble and have to stand getting dusty in churches for ever and ever. This was not, she thought, the way she wanted to spend her eternity. She’d rather go to heaven, thanks very much, rather than be a saint. That’s boring. Heaven can’t be boring since God is there. Much more preferable to a lifetime encased in stone.(1)
What is a Saint?
I could ask my Roman Catholic sisters and brothers, and they would tell me that a Saint has to be made a Saint through a very complicated canonisation process that requires God to have performed at least two miracles through them.
Now I am a firm believer that God does sometimes do the miraculous. Sometimes for example, people are healed in ways that are inexplicable.
BUT
- take St Aaron who when he was poorly Roast Pigeons miraculously flew into his mouth, or
- St Valerie, who after she was martyred picked up her severed head and carried it to a friends house, singing as she went (2)
Well I am not sure I am convinced those stories actually happened. However lovely these people, and however deep their faith, I am not sure why God would want to do either of those miracles
So what is a Saint?
(take suggestions from the floor)
In the bible, for example in Ephesians St Paul writes to “the Saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus”
He doesn’t mean people only people who happen to have been made out of marble. He doesn’t mean only people through whom God has done two or more miracles. He means every Christian.
What is a Saint- You are!
As early Christians died, their friends and family would inscribe on their tombs not just “rest in peace” but also “pray for us”. overtime, when certain Christians were particularly inspirational, the local church would remember them, usually on the day of their death because that was when they went to be with Jesus. Each diocese would have it’s own list of the particular christians, the particular saints it remembered, to encourage the rest of us Christians to be more truly what we already are, to be more truly saints.
And that’s where our Gospel reading (Matthew 5:1-12) comes in. it’s a manifesto of what it means to be a Saint.
“How blest are the poor in spirit” or as another translation put it, “blessed are those who know their need of God, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Imagine waking up with amnesia, and you have forgotten all about the concept of food. You would not eat, and there would be this gnawing feeling in your stomach and you would not know what it was, and eventually you would collapse.
Or take the alcoholic or the addict. They say the first step to getting better is knowing you need help.
“How blessed are those who know their need of God for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
“How blessed are those who HUNGER … and who THIRST… for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
That little Anabelle {being christened today} is what we hope your parents will bring you up to be: to be hungry for God’s will to be done, to know your inner need for God.
For that is the definition of a Christian.
not somebody who is in themselves good or better than everyone who doesn’t go to church, but a broken person who knows they need help. We are all in our own way broken, God sent Jesus to help us, but to get help, we need to know our need of help.
The big name saints we celebrate, weird and wonderful as they are, with all their flaws, are the people whose example helps us to do so. Jesus talks of coming to bring us “life in all it’s fullness, and saints as Fr Timothy Calvert puts it “are those who through God's help, have lived their lives, not simply struggled through them.” (3)
Take Mother Theresa. We could talk about her as a pious person who sacrificed a comfortable life in Europe for hardship in India, because that’s what God wanted. How holy.
Or
We can talk about her as a woman with all her flaws and faults who left a humdrum comfortable life in Europe for the adventure of Calcutta, seeing dying beggars lives changed through what God was doing through her, and constantly meeting Jesus in the most unexpected people from street children to street walkers, where no one day is the same as the next, but God was constantly surprising her.
Does that sound like a boring person made of marble?
to quote Fr Timothy Calvert
“Saints are those who through God's help, have lived their lives, not simply struggled through them. Saints are those who are so in touch with the heartbeat of God's mercy that they express this mercy clearly and articulately with every moment of their journey through this world. Saints are the musicians of God's love….
The Beatitudes announced by Jesus from the mountain-top to his disciples are the score of this new music which must be played. Heard as a list, they could crush and burden us. Who can make themselves pure of heart, or a child of peace? But the Beatitudes are not just a list of commands to batter us from outside. They are words which seek entrance to the doorways of the heart, to reshape us from the depths of our being.
To be holy then is not just to have heard the Beatitudes, or to have struggled with them, but to have become them, to have received the sweet blessings of Christ into our own secret depths. The saints are those who internalise this blessing, the beatitude of Christ, so completely that they are no longer master of their actions or their words, but everything they do comes from a secret internal co-operation with the action of the Holy Spirit, the real musician of human possibilities.”
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(1) Fr David Rocks OP, sermon on www.torch.op.org
(2) Fr Richard Coles, “Lives of the Improbable saints” (DLT, London 2012)
(3) Fr Timothy Calvert OP, sermon on www.torch.op.org
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