Sermon preached on 1st November 2020 at St John the Evangelist, Bexley:
All Saints’ Day: Family Communion:
Revelation 7:9-end; Matthew 5:1-12
Look around the building, where can you see saints?
In the windows? Up in the ceiling? Sitting all around us (very good if you got that one)? And of course, in our Reredos – Jesus surrounded by His disciples at the Last Supper, all but one of whom got to be a Saint!
Our reading from the Book of Revelation also described the saints gathered around Jesus, the Lamb of God. But when artists think about the Saints in Revelation 7 they tend to create something like this:
Notice the Daz-Doorstep-Challenge-White robes; nice bit of upholstery fabric above the throne there; soft lighting; laminate-smooth, holier-than-thine-instagram-filter faces and expressions…
But let’s compare that with this scene around Jesus at the table: The saints who travelled with Jesus:
Most of them seem to be arguing: Matthew and Thaddeus seem to be having a proper go at Simon, this one’s getting right in his face!
Over at the other table Andrew is telling Bartholomew and James the Less to back off. Peter’s nagging about something in John’s ear, and John looks like he wants to be somewhere else.
The fact that Peter seems to be brandishing a cutlass as well (which you’d think would be Judas’s thing, but Judas has got his hands where we can see them, clutching his moneybag!).
Then we’ve got James the Great, Philip and Thomas who look like I feel when I’m complaining to the council about bin-collections!
And as for the ‘great saintly-banquet’, there are no show-stoppers on the table – no roast swan, white truffles, caviar, or even a Vienetta, just these rather rough looking rolls and the occasion beaker: You’d get a classier spread at the Wimpy’s in Bexleyheath!
Now imagine you were the CEO of a major company, and this was your boardroom: Is this what you’d want your meetings to look like.
(And if you are a CEO of a major company and your boardroom looks like this… WHAT?!)
In fact, if you ran one of those big giant corporations and you needed to pick your corporate ‘saints’ to sit round you at the boardroom table, what qualities would you look for?
Maybe someone:
Rich in character,
Cheerful and positive,
Confident and assertive,
Someone satisfied with the party line,
Competitive,
Who can be a bit devious,
Good at winning arguments (maybe even a bit aggressive!)
Someone who can stand up for themselves (or has lawyers or ‘contacts’ that can help),
Someone popular.
(If you’re on the PCC, remember we’re meeting this week)
But when Jesus set out the qualities of the saints, as we heard in the Gospel, he said:
Blessed are:
The poor in spirit,
Those who mourn,
The meek,
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
The merciful,
The pure in heart
The Peacemakers
Those who are persecuted,
Those who are reviled.
And oddly enough, when you line those up next to each other (for those reading this online, there was a powerpoint slide), we see that the qualities Jesus wants in His Saints, wants from us don’t match up with all those things that spring to mind when we think about who’s going to get ahead in the modern world.
But when you look back over the history of the Saints from these disciples to the present day, we find people who fit Jesus’ set of criteria and really don’t fit the other set:
St Jerome, who lived in the desert with only a lion for friends.
St Barbara, whose over-protective father kept her locked in a tower.
St Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa who at times, confronted with all the suffering she saw among the people she worked with admitted that at times she wasn’t even sure about God’s existence.
Blessed Carlo Acutis One of the most recently recognised Saints, a teenager with cancer who used his blog to encourage people to go to church.
When we think about the Saints, we don’t think about the sort of people Alan Sugar would pick as his apprentice, or the sort of people who would get places in top board-rooms, or might be considered the ‘influencers’ of today’s world. We think instead about people who were very human, often lived with great difficult, had the same struggles we struggle with…
Sometimes the Saints are more like you and me than we’d expect… I
Fr. Edward 