Feast of All Saints
Shelagh Balfour

Ephesians 1:11-23

So, how many saints can you name? We probably all know a few of the standards. The Anglican Church has a well-established tradition of naming churches for saints, so we could just think our way through the city and we’d come up with a few. The other night as I was thinking about this, I tried listing all the ones I know. I didn’t get far. Apparently, making a list of saints is better than counting sheep. However, I would never have named them all, even if I had stayed awake. Since the beginning of the Christian church there have been something like 10,000 people officially named as saints.

Today, we are celebrating the feast of All Saints, or, if you like, the feast of all those 10,000 saints. In the Anglican Church, this is one of the days that is considered appropriate for baptisms; the others being Easter, Pentecost, and the Baptism of the Lord. While there isn’t a baptism today, we can take this opportunity to look at why the feast of All Saints is a time for baptisms, which can help us form a deeper understanding of what baptism is and why it matters throughout our lives.

A good place to start is with what saints actually are. We’ve probably all heard the expression “she’s such a saint” used to describe someone people think has exceptional patience or someone who devotes their lives to a kind of work other people couldn’t imagine doing.

Then there’s the opposite expression – “Well, he’s no saint”, which is a way of judging the person whose life contains some unsavoury elements, or past bad behaviour, which makes their current motivations questionable. But then, I think most of us would look at our ordinary lives, with our own mix of good and bad, and think “I’m no saint”. But are we sure that’s true?

A common definition of saint is “a person who is recognized as having an exceptional degree of holiness or likeness or closeness to God”. Or “a person acknowledged as holy and virtuous and typically regarded as being in heaven after death”.

The earliest saints we can think of – the ones who come most easily to mind - include apostles like Peter or Paul, early church theologians like Ignatius or Augustine, martyrs like Stephen. These, and others, modeled this exceptional holiness or closeness to God in the initial formation of the church. For most of them, their work, and their standing as saints, was evident in the growing life of the church. Over time though, communities named local saints and, in some cases “sanctified” local heroes or Gods. Scholars suggest that St. Brigid of Ireland might be one of those. As a result of these ad hoc additions, the field started to get a bit cluttered and the qualities that made someone a saint because less clear. So the process of determining sainthood – called canonization – became more structured.

By the 10th century there were formal criteria. The process of canonization could take years, or even decades. It required, among other things, evidence of miracles during the candidate’s lifetime. One of the results of this process was to widen the gap between saints and ordinary people. Saints had to be dead, for one thing. For another, this exceptional degree of holiness became something so far above the ordinary person that they were simple not like us. They were believe to have the ear of God in a way that you or I could not.

This definition of saints as exceptional has its value, and I will unpack that a bit more in a minute, but there is another definition of saints, which pertains more nearly to our own life in Christ. And it tells us something about baptism. Here’s the definition: “in Christianity, the word ‘saint’ refers to any person who is ‘in Christ’ and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or on earth.”

Let me read that again - “in Christianity, the word ‘saint’ refers to any person who is ‘in Christ’ and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or on earth.”

The passage we read in Ephesians today tells us something about saints in the church, and what it says resonates with this definition. The passage refers directly to saints twice. The first time, the author commends his readers for their faith in Christ and their love for all the saints. In the second, he speaks of the richness of God’s glorious inheritance among the saints. Who, then, are all the saints? And what is their glorious inheritance? Listen to what St. Paul says:

In him (in Christ) you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory.

There is a lot packed into this one sentence, but let’s begin to break it down using language we’ve heard before. As we do that, think of the ‘you’ Paul is referring to as you and me, right here. So, here we go: In Christ, you, having heard the good news of Jesus Christ and believed it, were baptized and marked as Christ’s own forever. Does this sound familiar? In our liturgy of baptism, having confessed belief in Jesus Christ as Saviour, we are baptized in the name of the Trinity, sealed with the sign of the cross, and we become God’s own people.

But there is in fact more to it than that. In Ephesians, Paul speaks of that glorious inheritance, our inheritance toward redemption, and he is clear that God’s work in us is only getting started with baptism.

In his book about baptism, Remember Who You Are, William Willimon says ‘baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime sacrament that takes one’s whole life to finish’. This is God’s work in us. It is God’s pledge of our inheritance. And it is a once-in-a-lifetime sacrament, an unrepeatable act. God has claimed us and we have the assurance that God will not let us go. We are God’s own people.

But the rest of the passage from Ephesians, tells us this isn’t the end of the story. The apostle Paul prays that God will give his readers, these new saints, a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that:

• they may come to truly know the scope of their new life in Christ,
• they may learn the extent of their inheritance as God’s own people, and
• they may understand the immensity of the power of God working in and among them.

Baptism is the beginning of a lifetime commitment, a lifetime of formation into the body of Christ. Having given our lives to Christ and received the promise of salvation through Christ, we are called to live into our inheritance as God’s own people. In the early church this was strongly emphasised to anyone desiring baptism. Christians, at that time, were coming out of a clearly pagan world, a world where the dominant values and political and social structures were clearly at odds with the Gospel. Becoming a Christian meant leaving that all behind, often at great personal cost.

The disconnect between the dominant culture and our faith may not be as obvious to us today, especially after centuries of Christendom. But living into our inheritance as those ‘marked as Christ’s own forever’ does call us to an actual and even radical change of life compared to the world around us. Each time there is a baptism at St. Peter’s, as well as at feast days like All Saints, we are given the opportunity to renew our baptismal promises. This is a good thing for us because these promises are our template for this radical change of life. They are real and concrete expectations for the way we go about our day-to-day lives as members of the body of Christ. We promise that we will:

• Gather regularly as the body of Christ to worship, to learn, and share the Eucharist
• Do our best to resist the evil influences of the world and, when we do, inevitable fall into sin, repent and turn back to God.
• With our words and by the actions in our daily lives, we promise to proclaim the good news
• We promise to love and serve all people as though they were Christ himself
• To work for justice, peace, and dignity for all and
• To care for and safeguard creation.

These are big promises, life-changing promises that demand every ounce of our attention. They are meant to be lived in every relationship of our lives. Which sounds pretty daunting, until we remember a couple of important things. The first is, that we are a community. William Willimon says, “The Christian faith is a corporate endeavor, a way of life together under Christ, with his holy ones….. there are no solitary Christians.” It is Christ’s work that we do and we do not do it alone.

The second thing is that we do not do any of this under our own power. Paul emphasises this repeatedly in Ephesians. It is God who accomplishes all things, God who marks us as his own. It is the immeasurable greatness of God’s power that gives us our glorious inheritance with the saints. Keep this in mind as we say the doxology after communion, the doxology which also comes from Ephesians – Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more that we could ask or imagine.

So, when we reaffirm our baptismal promises, as we will today, we follow each statement with the response, ’we will, with God’s help’. Our promise is that, with God’s help, by the power of God working in us, together, as a community, we will do the things we are called to by our baptism. And we know God’s power working in us is everything we need.

What then, is a saint? It is “any person who is ‘in Christ’ and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or on earth.” Saints are you and me, baptized Christians, forming the body of Christ and living into our inheritance as God’s people.

A saint is also “a person of exceptional holiness or likeness or closeness to God”. Rowan Williams, in the book Uncommon Gratitude puts it this way: saints, holy people, are those “whose ordinary life[s] so shine with God for those around [them] that they make possible new things [we] couldn’t dream of”. They may be official saints in the calendar of the church, they may be exceptional public figures of our time, like Desmond Tutu or Mother Teresa, or they may be someone who sits next to us in church. They are not perfect and may in fact be very flawed human beings. What makes them saints is that they live in a way that allows God’s light to shine through, and they change our understanding of what is possible.

We give thanks for these exceptional saints of God because they are exemplars, witnesses to the power of God and what can be done in our lives. And we give thanks that, by virtue of our baptism we are called into a lifetime of growing into our glorious inheritance as saints, as God’s own people.