Tonight we are gathered to observe the Feast of All Saints and the scripture readings we have heard in this service force us deep into the Christian theology of the ‘new creation’. John’s vision of a time and a place when the intimacy of God with His recreated humanity is both intense and entire:

‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples. God himself will be with them: he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away’.

In this new and completed creation the purposes and intentions of Almighty God find no resistance in mortality or decay.

John’s vision of a God who is all-in-all, a seamless and masterly potentate, an Alpha and an Omega, finds perfect narrative expression in the Gospel reading. Lazarus comes forth, in fact he is brought forth, summoned from the chains of death by the power of God at work in Jesus Christ that the Glory of God might be revealed through it.  The message is clear: in the new creation the will of God is irresistible, immediate, untrammelled, and unleashed.

Now the Christian concept of sainthood is closely (and appropriately) informed by the picture of the austere and transformational power of God presented in these readings.

Yet there is a peril in pondering saintliness in this form, when we are tempted to move too swiftly into otherworldly and transformational spaces. Often, deploying related scriptural images (such as those encountered in this evening’s gradual motet), we can think too easily and too quickly of great multitudes robed in white, struggling through great ordeals, surviving to receive the prize for which they have suffered and being transformed out of all human recognition in the process into little remote ‘new creations’ themselves.

I think we may be happiest celebrating a feast like All Saints when we allow ourselves to maintain a rather ‘high’ view of the saints, a view that removes us from them and them from us, a cloud of metaphorical incense setting both groups safely apart from each other’s experiences and obligations.

After all, we may feel that it’s just so much common sense, that the saints are just different from us- many of them have funny names, like ‘Ethelburga or ‘Oswine’, many of them die horrible and heroic deaths, like Peter or Polycarp, many of them perform incredible wonders, like Crispin or Agatha, and some of them even sit for years meditating quietly on the top of pillars (Simeon or Alypius.) We don’t often think of them in the same category as ourselves- sloppy, chaotic people sipping our Starbucks, eating our pizzas, sinning daily and falling often, capable of some small acts of kindness or thoughtfulness –yes- but succumbing too much and too often to what the movies call ‘the dark side’.

Yet the saints are like us and it is indeed central to Christian belief that they are.

The Bible uses the word hagios to describe a saint. This word in this context means a person devoted to -and set apart for- God. It achieves its theological ballast from the Hebrew Qadosh.

Hagios is the word used in the New Testament to describe each and every member of the Church, which is to say each and every Christian. Just as there is a commonality of sin in the New Testament (‘All have sinned and fallen short’) so there is a commonality of sainthood, or perhaps more simply of ‘holiness’, among those who in Christ are being saved.

The word hagios is used biblically to describe all of us, then, and not just some of us. The Starbucks drinkers line up with the pillar saints to form a cloud of hagioi witnessing to an essential and bifurcated truth- our common need of God’s mercy and our common receipt of God’s grace.

Now, in the meandering story of the Christian Church, the word hagios has come of course to be applied in a more specific and restricted sense. The mediaeval church commenced the practice of applying it as a distinguishing honorific. Certain figures in Christian history were judged to have displayed such an imprint of God’s grace that their biographies were somehow more elevated, more exemplary, more revered and finally more important than those of the run of the mill Christian.

Politics was often not far away in these judgments and metrics of sainthood were introduced (some persisting to this day): evidences of miracle were to be sought before the Church’s honorific could be conferred and with each conferral came the possibility –at times lucrative- of establishing a new devotion and of forming a new cult.

The elaborate structure of the church’s saintly honours system is an interesting but finally marginal part of the story of the Gospel’s engagement with our world, and the story of God’s engagement with us. Its influence has on occasion been both unfortunate and corrosive. Even in its weakened modern form, it has encouraged ordinary believers to disincline from the view that God expects much –if anything- from them.

If we can turn our eyes to a series of exemplary beings far removed from us, cool and absolute in the marble of their sainthood, then what does God really require from us? What can he require from us? How can he value us? How can we compete with them? Does the Gospel really authorise these demi-Gods of a vicarious panoply? Do they intercede for us and can we then tend their altars, observe their name days, wear their medals all the while getting back to the real business of enjoying ourselves in life?

As St Paul once asked, ‘Shall we sin more that grace may abound?’ It appears we have often recalled his question without often remembering his answer. Mē genoito. Absolutely not.

It is vital that we realise that each and every one of us who is called by the name ‘Christian’ is called by the author of that name to Christian sanctity. And it is vital also to realise that Christian sanctity subsists in human imperfection. We are not saved by perfection and it is indeed unchristian to suppose that we are.

The truth is this: God forgives us what we are. God gives us grace to change what we are. We are called from glory into glory, called to play our distinctive part in witnessing to His gospel of sins forgiven and sinners loved. The cloud of witnesses which surrounds us, envelops and includes us too. We are not bit part players in the drama of our own salvation. We are full and integrated members of a cosmic dramatis personae, creatures of infinite value, infinitely forgiven and infinitely loved –just like the all the other saints we sing about, or pray about, or call our churches after.

At the Feast of All Saints, then, we celebrate ourselves along with those paragons of the faith whose life and witness must needs appear to us both cataclysmically other, and splendidly remote. At the Feast of All Saints we remember that we are saints too and indeed that every saint is actually a sinner in the process of being saved.

As our God does not quantify our sins neither does He quantify our merits. He loves us. He forgives us. He heals us. He redeems us. He spares us. He gives us grace to change. And He makes us at the last His ‘new creation’.

In John’s vision, unfurled at the beginning of this ceremony, there will come a time when God will be all-in-all and importantly a time when “we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is”. Until that day we rejoice with every other sinner on the road to our salvation. So let us celebrate the saints with whom we share a common identity, a common humanity, a common witness and a common need. Let us celebrate the saints among whom by God’s grace we are unthinkably and quite remarkably numbered.

Amen.