I wonder if anyone here feels as if they have struggled to church today, rather than, say, skipping in joyfully? I wonder if anyone feels a bit as if they are here in body but not in spirit? If anyone is thinking, already, about what they’re going to have for dinner? Or wondering if this is going to be one of those l-o-n-g sermons that make you late getting out of church and force you to gulp down your post-church cuppa? (It isn’t, I promise…) More seriously, I wonder if anyone sitting here today is wrestling with doubt, with the feeling of having hit a spiritual wall, with big questions about why they’re here, or little ones about why our pews are so uncomfortable and our building so draughty?
Well, if any of the above apply to you, I have good news for you. William Walsham How, the first bishop of Wakefield, knows how you feel. His famous hymn, ‘For all the saints’, with which our service opened today contains a verse just for you (and, if I’m honest, also for me on those days when it all feels ‘a bit much’). ‘O blest communion, fellowship divine’, he writes of those saints who confessed Jesus’s name in the world and who now rest from their labours enjoying the benefits of heaven. ‘We feebly struggle, they in glory shine’. They are saints. They inhabit the heavenly realms on the far side of those pearly gates that the good bishop imagines in his final verse. We on the other hand are, well, a bit feeble. A bit… lacking. Saints? You must be joking. We are anything but…
Except that looking up to the saints in heaven, all shiny and holy and amazing while we feebly struggle down here wishing we could be like them is not what All Saints’ Day is all about. Not at all. On the contrary, as our hymn goes on to explain, there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ in All Saints’ Day, but only one big glorious inclusive ‘us’, for we – feeble and saintly alike – are all one in Christ, held in unity by the fact that we all belong to him.
This suggests that All Saints’ Day is a very different festival from the one that the name might lead us to imagine. This is not about celebrating those exceptionally holy individuals who receive visions, perform miraculous feats, found monastic orders, write theological tracts, or die for their faith – or, at least, it is not only about celebrating them. No, in the New Testament, saints are, quite simply, followers of Jesus. St Paul addresses the letter to the Romans to ‘all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints’. He writes, too, to ‘the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints’, and again ‘to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi’, and so on. And here’s the good news for us, because if followers of Jesus in Rome and Corinth, Philippi and Ephesus can be called to be saints, then why not followers of Jesus in Whitkirk too?
And is this not also what Jesus is pointing to in our Gospel reading? Surveying the crowd which has followed him up the mountain – people clinging to his promise of good news, people whom he has healed, people who want to see the world transformed – he declares them ‘blessed’. And I wonder if any of them questioned this, if any pushed back against his words of blessing. ‘Who? Us? We’re just here struggling feebly like everyone else… there’s nothing special, nothing blessed, about us!’. But if the followers of Jesus in Rome and Corinth, Ephesus and Philippi, and, yes, even Whitkirk, are ‘called to be saints’, then how much more appropriate is it for Jesus to describe this community, gathered at his feet, his very first community of followers, as ‘blessed’.
And it is important to note that Jesus blesses these first followers of his just as they are. He looks at them, knows them, loves them, and blesses them. He blesses their poverty of spirit, their sadness and grief, their humility, their simplicity and their willingness to forgive one another. He blesses their desire to see a better world, to build a better world – a world of peace, justice and righteousness – even when it will cost them to do so, even when they will face persecution, hatred and discrimination for attempting to do so. He blesses their pain, their weakness, their feebleness. And in so doing he transforms these ordinary feeble people into saints.
A blessing, you see, is not just a statement, nor even a prayer. A blessing is what the philosopher of language, J. L. Austin, refers to as a ‘performative utterance’. That is, it is a form of words that does not just describe something that has happened or will happen, but which actually makes it happen. Religious language has several examples of such forms of words. Next Saturday, I will have the great joy of marrying Millie and Rory. When I do, my words ‘I now proclaim that you are husband and wife’ will have a legally binding force. My words – amazing as that is! – actually make them husband and wife. We could say the same thing about the words of the Eucharistic prayer, where – even more amazingly – the priest’s words of consecration, echoing the words of Jesus himself at the Last Supper, effect, we believe, a real and meaningful transformation in the bread and wine. And so it is with a blessing. It is the putting-into-words of the blessing that actually makes the object of the blessing blessed.
Jesus looks at his first followers, then. He knows them, loves them and blesses them, and, through his words they become blessed. His words both call them to be saints and declare that they are, in fact, already saints, bearers of his blessing.
But this is not the end of the story. Each of Jesus’s beatitudes contains both a blessing and a promise and the two are inseparable from one another. Jesus’s followers, the saints gathered there on the mountainside, are blessed just as they are, feeble, meek, poor in spirit, grieving, and so on. But they also receive a promise, a promise that the blessing that they have received from Jesus will, ultimately, be fulfilled, brought to perfection in God’s new creation, in that kingdom that lurks behind William Walsham How’s imagined pearly gates, in that golden Jerusalem of which we will sing shortly and which the author of the book of Revelation sees, in his vision, so vividly.
To know oneself to be blessed here and now is also to know oneself to be part of that ‘blest communion’ in which all are one, in which we are joined with those who sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to his Sermon on the Mount, and with all who have followed him between them and us… the famous and the forgotten, those whose names are celebrated in the Bible and the history of the church, who have days dedicated to their memory in our liturgical calendars, and whose images appear in our stained-glass windows, and those whose names are known only to God.
The book of Revelation presents us with a glorious image of the saints – all of them – gathered before the throne of the Lamb, just as the crowds gather before Jesus to listen to the sermon on the mount: a great multitude, so many that no-one could count them; people from every nation, tribe, people and language, gathered in worship, singing words that we too will sing at the end of our Eucharistic prayer, words which acknowledge the blessing that they have now received in full, and which we, here and now, receive only in part: ‘Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever. Amen’.
We may feel feeble, we may feel unworthy, our faith may struggle and we may despair of seeing God’s kingdom come in our broken world, and yet, as we gather, let us not forget that we are one with the ‘blest communion’ of all the saints, we are blessed as they are, and let us raise our voices in worship with them as we pronounce our great ‘Amen’!