All Saints

 We the Church of England have had a hot and cold relationship with saints: Article 22 of the articles of religion found in the back of the Book of Common Prayer says:

“The Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration as well of images as of reliques and also invocation of saints is a fond thing vainly invented and grounded upon no warranty of scripture but rather repugnant to the word of God.” 

Which you may agree is extremely cold indeed. The Catholic church on the other hand has had no doubts about this subject and venerating the saints has long been an element of their devotions. Following Pusey, Newman and the Oxford movement, Anglicanism has as ever tried to follow the via media restoring some recognition to the saints in modern times. The general argument is that saints are close to God because of their holiness but also accessible to man whose nature they share. There was a feeling that the worshipping community on earth was but an outlying colony at some distance from the true worshippers who we read about in the book of Revelation. 

“There was a great multitude, that no-one could count from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne, before the Lamb robed in white with palm branches in their hands.“

As my schoolboy nuns taught me “seeing God is heaven” and recognising this as we hear in this passage is a far cry from invoking saints’ interaction with the living. Yet this was previously so much the case that relics were moved from one place to another where it was thought that they might do more good. In Anglo Saxon England for example, St. Oswald was moved from Tynemouth to Gloucester and St. Judoc from Cornwall to Winchester. Sometimes the demands made on the saintly remains were more specific: Otto the 1st who was fighting in Magdeburg moved the body of St. Maurice the soldier saint from Burgundy to be among his troops in the field of battle. More prosaically but still current is the thought that we should pray to St. Anthony when we lose our car keys. 

Opinions have ever wavered on this,  St. Augustine himself changed his mind about saints being effective in the present, coming to this positive conclusion only much later in his life when he made use of the relics of St. Stephen. These  were brought to Africa to work daily miracles in St. Augustine’s growing congregation. So there is a range of views. 

In this church - All Saints Burnham Thorpe, you will observe the clear Protestant emphasis. There are no images of any sort, we are undistracted from our focus on God who is the only object of our worship. (Article 22). On this festival of All Saints, here, hearing again those words from Revelation we consider and reflect upon the examples of the so many faithful servants of God who have gone before us. Servants of all ages, sexes, races and conditions. 

Yet whatever their origins they are there “before the throne of God and worship him day and night.”

Here surely is the saintly example which we might all agree on , that above all we are to constantly give thanks and praise to God.

Amen 

Being Holy

 Knowing that I needed to talk to you about this passage from Leviticus I set out on Monday morning to be holy; I sprang from my bed with holy intentions, I said to myself, yes I will try to spend a holy day. By 7.35 - AM that is, the enormous red digger that was there, right there against the garden fence roaring and crushing great stones and boulders and being shouted at by the foremen of the site and disturbing my reflections was already causing me irritation. Moreover it was a chilly day and the best place to sit was in the sun facing the monster leaving me the impossible choice of being either cold and irritated or deafened and irritated. All attempts at holiness had leached away and my love for my neighbour, now an ugly red digger was non-existent. 

Yet Moses when speaking to the congregation of Israel, the nation set apart by God as his special people, is told to tell them “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God is holy.”  Which begs the question who shall we emulate? We hold an advantage over the Israelites of Moses’ time for we have Jesus Christ as our example and we may and I would argue we should set our sights on him. Faced though with inevitably falling short, what do we understand holiness to be? The book of Leviticus famously telles us many things that holiness is not of which only a tiny number are mentioned in this morning’s reading. It is not judging unjustly, and we might say in the light of Jesus’ teaching that it is not judging at all. You shall not hate your kin, and again in view of what Jesus tells us we shall not hate anyone at all even our enemies. 

Emulating God, “be holy for I am the Lord your God”, seemed too much for me and I am  not sure that Jesus makes it easier. A priest friend of mine used to say they preferred to emulate Peter, at least he had made notable mistakes and so there may be a sporting chance. I continue to say we should try to be like Jesus, after all he came to show us the way. But then what would it be like to try to be truly holy by being like Jesus? It seems I have to first love myself. This I can assure you is not easy, for I know, or think I know, or think I might know the terrible things in my heart, all the pent up unholiness past and present.  It would seem much easier to love someone else, Frances, my children, you, of whom I know comparatively little. 

Still there is that line from Plato to consider:

“Is that which is holy loved by the Gods or is it holy because it is loved by the Gods?”

So there we are, If God can love me despite those things that I know, think I know, think I might know but God does know then, maybe that makes me holy as a creation of God himself. So it is important for me to tell myself every day “God loves me” otherwise I shall forget and then red diggers or not I have no chance to be holy at all.

Amen

The Vineyard

I have been waiting for this reading from Isaiah ever since Frances and I visited Bulgaria over a year ago. We were staying in the Balkan foothills and our billet was at the top of a hill above the town, so each day we began downhill in the heat and the dust to perhaps catch a bus or to forage for lunch and on the way we passed small holdings which frequently were walled vineyards. The walls were protected by barbed wire not watchtowers and you could see the vines climbing trellises and strings, their grape clusters shining in the hot sun. In corners were primitive water butts and buckets, half drain pipes for irrigation. I recognised then more fully than before that each of these was a labour of love, the terrain, climate and soil needed to be harnessed, needed work and dedication to produce good grapes and that this was individual or family work. Later we would see men on motorbikes or a small car pulling little trailers filled with grapes taking them to the collective distillery to be made into their own wine. 

Isaiah  describes a perfect vineyard, on a fertile hill, well dug, cleared of stones and protected - his listeners would have understood as easily as my Bulgarian friends what this meant and would have shared in the frustration of the result Isaiaih describes of the well chosen vines being overwhelmed by wild grapes. 

The parable of the vineyard carries over from the Old Testament times to the New, where we recognise the care of the viticulturist, and we share the sense of anger at the injustices meted out by the tenants of the landowner’s vineyard to the slaves and most outrageously to the Son. These stories are universal, understood by any culture and any age group.

Isaiah speaking God’s words asks “What more was there to do for my vineyard?”

In 1968 Bill Anders on Apollo 8 took the photograph that has ever since captured our imagination.  “Earthrise” , a picture of our own planet rising with the grey surface of the moon in the foreground. The astronaut’s famous  picture is said to have changed our view forever and has been credited by some with the launch of the many environmental movements we are familiar with today. This is the vineyard we have been given, in all its beauty and diversity.

I have given up watching David Attenborough, not because I disagree with him bit because it is all so sad: the retreating ice caps, the breaking icebergs, the polluted oceans, savaged rain forests diminishing species numbers - actually it makes one cross:

“And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard, I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured. I will break down its wall and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste, it shall not be pruned or hoed and it shall be overgrown with briars and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. “

As tenants of the Lord’s vineyard, as stewards of his creation, the Church is rightly putting its weight behind increased responsibility to the earth itself - that's the one in the famous picture, the one that is permanently under threat - and we are urged to do all we can to help.

Amen