Sermon for ALL SAINTS SUNDAY 2007

Michael Paterson

    In the name of God who makes saints out of sinners. Amen.

These first few days of November with All Saints on the 1^st and All Souls on the 2^nd always take me back to my student days in the early 80’s.  In my college, the Feast of All Saints marked the beginning of the annual week of retreat and was something to which we really looked forward.  It wasn’t that we were a particularly holy bunch of students, desperate to spend hours on our knees in the chapel, that made retreat time so popular, so much as having a week off lectures, the chance to catch up on overdue essays, read the odd novel and, when we had run out of every other way of avoiding getting holy, clean our rooms.  But one year the retreat director put all that to a stop when in his opening talk, he handed out pens and paper and asked us to write our own  obituary – the short summary of our lives – that we would like to appear in the local newspaper after we had died.  As a bunch of 20-something year olds in our prime it seemed a daft thing to be asking us to do but what came out of it was fascinating.  At least four of my friends were going to lead Scotland into victory at Hampden or Murrayfield.  Several would marry beautiful women and have large families, one would invent a cure for malaria, and another sail around the world in his own yacht.  Not bad for a bunch of trainee Roman Catholic priests who would never earn a salary, be forbidden to marry and never travel further than the Diocesan boundaries of Croy or Clydebank!  Amidst the laughter and the competition to see who would lead the most exotic life, it soon became clear that what we were actually being asked to do in writing our own obituaries, was to make a decision as to how we wanted to live out the rest of our lives and then, having decided, to knuckle down and get on with living in that way.  Clearly none of us would be able to control the time or the circumstances by which we would die, but if we wanted our obituaries to say that we had lived cheerfully, with never a bad word to say against anybody, that we had been real friends to those who were sick or in need, then we had better stop being so crabbit, start guarding our tongues and practice looking out for others while we had the chance.

People’s lives are remembered for all sorts of things, some true, some stretches of the truth and some nothing like the truth.  Among public figures Margaret Thatcher will go down in history as the lady who was not for turning, Bill Clinton as the president who left his mark on Monica Lewinski. Diana will for ever be the Queen of Hearts and Nelson Mandela the victim who became the victor of apartheid. And the Saints we remember today are no different.  Some of their lives read like the scripts of Rambo films in which the gung-ho hero narrowly escapes death over and over again, rescues the beautiful lady from danger only at the last minute to leave her jilted at the altar as he disappears into some monastery to answer the call of the cloister.  Some accounts of the martyrs are so sugary-sweet and vomit-inducing that you are left wondering why it took the folk around them so long to bump them off!  And some supposedly edifying stories about the saints leave you creased up with laughter and belong more to the realms of Monty Pyphon than to Christian testimony.  One of my favourites is the story of St Catherine the Astonishing who at her own funeral is said to have risen out of her coffin and levitated like a yo-yo somewhere near the rafters of the church because she couldn’t bear the stench of sin that was coming from the mourners in the pews.  According to the story, it wasn’t until every member of the congregation had been to confession that they were able to get her down and back into her coffin to proceed with the funeral.

Saints come in all shapes and sizes.  Some like Anthony of Egypt fled into the desert to save themselves from the temptations of the world while others like Charles de Foucauld took the opposite journey and exchanged the sand of the Sahara to look for God among the bricks of the inner city.  Some like Thomas More lived in palaces as advisers to kings while others like Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador abandoned their palaces to live in shanty towns where they could fight for the rights of the poor.  Some like Francis Xavier travelled to the ends of the earth to make Christ known while others like Margaret of Scotland never budged from her own home and fed the hungry from her own doorstep. 

But however different their stories, the one thing saints have in common is that they didn’t wait until they were on their death beds only to look back with regret over their lives but rather each one of them in their own particular circumstances, and in their own unique way, took stock of their lives, saw the bigger picture and made a decision to lead a life worth living in and of itself without a thought as to whether they would be remembered later on. And it was that decision - to love God and to love their neighbour - that became the driving force in their lives. Some days they excelled themselves and met their target.  More often than not they failed miserably. But rather than wallowing in the impossibility of the challenge they had taken on they simply got up again, dusted themselves down and made a fresh start. Down through the ages, from Adam and Eve to this very day, each person who has made a decision for God has given holiness a human face and a local accent and has shown the world that being a Christian is a real and genuine possibility. 

And so as we go into this week leading up to Remembrance Sunday, whether you are 24 or 84, I would like to encourage you to have a go at writing your own obituary, realistically imagining the kind of person you could be for what remains of your life and then, with all the saints cheering you on, decide to make a new start on a path that puts God and other people before self.  You can be sure that God will make the journey with you and that you will walk in the good company of the weird and the wonderful, the wise and the wacky, the mixed bag of saints and sinners that make up the company that God calls blessed.

Amen.