Rev Andy Braunston
When we think of the saints different images appear in our minds. We may think of the people commemorated in the stained glass we see in churches, we may think of those whose statues are around this church, we may think of particular saints we were taught about as children. I grew up as a Roman Catholic and the stories of the saints were a large part of my introduction to Christianity. Some were really nice saints – like St Francis of Assisi, a brave evangelist with a simple lifestyle and love of animals, or St Theresa of Liseaux who preached that God was love in an age where God’s justice and anger against sinners was proclaimed. Then there were the rather more gruesome saints whose symbols always were the instruments of their death – St Lawrence showing the iron grid on which he was roasted to death, or St Catherine and her wheel. Then there were also the living saints – people like Mother Theresa who worked with the poor in Calcutta or Brother Roger who founded the ecumenical Taize community. Of course there were the first rank of saints – those who appeared in the Bible, Mary, Joseph and the apostles. The church I grew up in was very simple but had large statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus and St Joseph.
I grew up being inspired by
the saints. These were people who had managed to live a life of great
holiness, who had followed Jesus in their own culture and who had, in many
instances, been martyred for their faith.
Then I started to attend an
Anglican Church which despite being named after a saint, St John the Baptist,
didn’t have any statues, not much stained glass and didn’t really seem
interested in the lives of the saints. I had discovered evangelical
Protestantism!
What is a
Saint?
In the Catholic tradition a
saint is a Christian who has followed Jesus, lived a life of great holiness, has
died, and whose intercession with God has led to a miracle or two.
Actually it’s a four stage process to be recognised as a saint. First one
has to be dead, second, one has to have lived a holy life, third people on earth
have prayed to you to ask you to pray to God for a miracle. The first
miracle makes you a “blessed” and then, after another miracle you can be
declared a saint. It takes quite some time.
In the Protestant tradition
the saints are all those who have been Christian and have gone before us.
They, out of custom, might refer to some people as “saint” but generally
don’t. There is no Protestant way of making or recognising an individual
as a saint. Protestants instead point to the pages of the New Testament
where St Paul referred to all Christians as saints. My new evangelical
friends patiently tried to explain to my teenage mind that I was a saint
too.
We’re
Saints!
The trouble was I didn’t
feel very saintly. The rages I would get into with my mother and
stepfather weren’t very saintly. My lack of application to a regular life
of prayer wasn’t quite what a saint was about and my feelings towards other men
weren’t at all holy! Like many Christians I had fallen into the trap of
seeing the “saints” as perfect people.
Now I am older I realise
that the saints, like the rest of humanity, are complex people. It helps
to think about two recently departed great Christians who many people are sure
were saints. Mother Theresa did excellent work amongst the poorest of the
poor in Calcutta, resettling lepers, helping people die with dignity, raising
money for the poor. Yet her attitudes were really very conservative, her
nursing care skills rather basic and she spent most of her adult life – we found
out this year – with profound doubts as to God’s existence. Yet her great
faith meant that whilst she never overcame the doubts she had faith.
Brother Roger was a Calvinist who worked in Burgundy, in France, near to the
Swiss border. During the war he helped Jews escape France and after it he
felt called to start a monastic community in the little hamlet of Taize.
Now at this time Calvinists didn’t found monasteries. As the years went by
he was joined by Anglicans, Catholics, Orthodox and other protestants.
Taize became a vast meeting place for young Christians from all over the world
and a place where the divisions between Catholic and Protestant were broken
down. The pope even allowed Protestants to receive Holy Communion from
Catholic priests here. Brother Roger was committed to working with the
poor and his order became a fast growing one which helped renew worship and
church music around the world. Yet he was very much a prisoner of his
attitudes on women – women couldn’t join his order but he set up another one
whose mission was to tend to the needs of the male order! I met him when I
was a student and found him to be very spiritual but rather detached from the
pressures and issues that young people actually faced. I don’t say all
this to criticise two extraordinary people whose lives and holiness did more for
the Kingdom of God than I will ever do but to show that even the most holy of
people have feet of clay. The saints are also sinners.
Saints and
Sinners
We see this in Scripture
time and time again. We know that Simon Peter was the leader of the
disciples after Jesus died. Yet he had denied knowing Jesus three times,
was impetuous, and lost his temper easily. James and John, like Peter,
followed their Lord but disputed about who would be the greatest in the Kingdom,
Thomas went to preach to India but doubted the resurrection. Judas, well
we know about Judas, yet Jesus chose him and trusted him so he wasn’t all bad,
he just didn’t manage to turn around from his despair and seek forgiveness.
The saints are human.
Like us they have the capacity for extraordinary works of holiness and
extraordinary sinfulness. Maybe that’s why Scripture calls us all
saints. We too are complex people with an amazing capacity to bring good
into our world and an alarming capacity to sin. I think of the
extraordinary people who gather here to worship week after week, teachers who
work with really difficult and challenging children, nurses and midwives who
bring calm, order and healing in the most difficult of crises, people who
against the odds have revealed the truth about themselves to help others find
their freedom. People who have helped change the world by campaigning,
marching, writing letters, demanding justice. Those who have given hope to
the hopeless, the despised and those on the margins. Others who have over
come their personal disadvantages to help others.
We are in communion, or
relationship, with each other – and with all those complex saints who have gone
before because we are in relationship with Jesus. The theological term for
this is the Communion of Saints. It’s a complex way of saying that the
Church is like a mighty army stretched out through space and time and made up of
all those who confess and believe in Jesus and seek to follow him. We only
see the Church in our own age, but God can see us as we really are united with
those first followers of Jesus, and all who have gone on before us. We may
not feel like we are saints, but there again I suspect that Mother Theresa
didn’t either.
Holy
The key to being a saint is
not to get hung up on our own notions of holiness, but to follow the example of
those who have gone before us and see how they sort to follow Jesus in their own
ages and cultures. The saints did many different things – from lives of
silent contemplation to lives engaged with the grittiest social problems.
But they had a common pattern of developing a spiritual life. They prayed,
they prayed daily. They may have prayed in different ways but in the midst
of their lives they found time to pray and be with God. They also read and
reflected on the Bible. They didn’t just read it, they tried to put the
truths of the Bible into action in their daily lives. They reflected on
the message of the Bible and tried to apply it in their own age – even doing
radical things. Francis of Assisi, for example, read of Jesus’ command to
travel light and left his wealth to live a life of absolute poverty in order to
win the poor to Christ. The saints were counter cultural, signs of
contradiction in their own world. They went against the established wisdom
of the age and showed the topsy turvey values of the Kingdom.
The saints were evangelists. Even those who stayed in contemplative orders prayed for those outside to find Jesus. They lived their lives trying to always be more like Christ; they changed the world.
This is our calling
too. We too are called to be more like Christ, to show the values that we
heard read to us from St Matthew’s Gospel.
We too are called to find
time each day to pray, to spend time in God’s presence and let God’s values and
love surround us and inform us.
We too are called to read
and reflect on the Bible, not to treat it as a paper pope which can answer all
our questions, but to understand it, how it was put together and how God speaks
to us through its human words.
We too are called to put into practice
that which we read, so that we follow Jesus into the mission fields of our
world, trying to be more like him and seeking to change our world.
We are called to be saints –
nothing less. That doesn’t mean being perfect, but it does mean living
lives of holiness which seek to emulate the example of our Lord and
master. It maybe that like Mother Theresa we battle with doubt, it maybe
that like Brother Roger we struggle to leave the limitations of our culture, it
may be like Thomas More we have views which are not politically correct, but it
does mean we seek to follow Jesus as best we can, knowing that He calls us to
meet, follow and love Him in this world so that we will be happy with Him
forever in the next.
(Rev Andy Braunston)