ALL SAINTS (TWENTY FIRST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST)

Second Reading: 1 John 3:1-3                                                                                                  Gospel Reading: Matthew 5:1-12

NOTES ON THE READINGS

WE STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF ALL SAINTS

INTRODUCTION

All Saints is one of the most powerful celebrations for us as Christians when we remember that we stand on the shoulders of our Christian ancestors of the faith. We can draw strength from the “great cloud of witnesses” mentioned in Hebrews 12:1.

The reality is that the Early Church had a much better relationship with Creation than we often do these days. Consider St Basil the Great- AD 329
“O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of humans with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail. May we realize that all creatures live not for us alone but for themselves and for thee, and that they love the sweetness of life.” St Basil the Great AD 329

Would we be raising animals in cruel industrial farms if we had the theology of Saint Basil?
St. Bernard of Clairvaux noted that “Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters,” while St. Hildegard of Bingen urged, “The earth should not be injured. The earth should not be destroyed”. And of course St. Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of ecology.

Caring for creation is not “new age” it actually means going back to our spiritual roots from which we have strayed. Maybe we must take our ancestors hands and learn from them as we face the triple challenges of biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change.

A World Wildlife Fund concludes that humans have “wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilization.” , “the vast and growing” “consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.” (The Living Planet Report)

We urgently need to embrace again the spirituality of the saints of the past.
Notes on the readings (from https://www.preachingforgodsworld.org/all-saints-day-twenty-fourth-sunday-after-pentecost/ )

Revelations 7:9 – 17

The worship of God is sustained in Rev 7 by those about whom John hears (the 144,000 who are the true Israel) and then by those whom he sees (the great multitude from every nation). They are in white, the colour of victory, because they have experienced the coming (in history) persecution and have emerged the other side, into Life. Their robes are white in colour, not because their actions were intrinsically pure or holy, but because they have washed them in the dark red of the blood of the Lamb, whose purity has covered their own impurity.

Psalm 34

This is not a claim (v.10) that everything in the garden is rosy for those who fear the Lord. The first thing to recognise is the background. Those who fear the Lord are, in this case, David’s “holy ones” (for that’s what he calls them) in 1 Samuel 21. They do indeed suffer hunger, but they find it satisfied when they eat the bread of the Presence of the Lord, contrary to strict Torah. Those who fear the Lord are thus the desperate, those who have no resource except the Lord himself. For such as these, God is himself the resource. David in the psalm commends that we should recognise our desperate plight and we will then be in a position to recognise God’s goodness when it meets us.

1 John 3:1-3

Stott comments that potapen in v.1 means “of what country” – that is how foreign to our norms the love of God is. “The world” as in all Johannine writings does not mean “the inhabitants of the planet” but “the inhabitants of the planet insofar as they are spiritually caught up in being opposed to God and his ways”. Opposed to the world are God’s children, who, being born of him, are characterised by a life that is “doing what is right”. That does not mean every thought and action, but whatever flows from the basic fact of being born from above by God’s Spirit.

But what it means to be children of God is not in this life given a defined and predictable shape (lest it be short-circuited by an ambition for, say, justice or generosity), in order that God may guard to himself the provision of all that is needful and may be varied from generation to generation – when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

Matthew 5:1-12

All commentators speak of this material as being “in contrast to” or “opposed to” the wisdom of the world.

SECTION TWO: SERMON

We mark the feast of All Saints, and those of us committed to Creation Care hit a problem. By definition, we are committed to care of this creation that we see. Yet everything about today’s readings is about another world entirely.

Psalm 34 – David is reflecting on the ways in which God has rescued him and his men (the “holy ones” of 1 Samuel 21) from the ordinary expectations of the religious world. “Holy” always has the sense of “separate, set apart, different from” the environment around.

1 John 3 – those to whom John is writing are not like the rest of the world. They have been born of God, precisely not something true of the rest of the “world”, They are the “pure”– they are set apart, and different. They belong to a wholly different country (see potapen above).

Matthew 5 – the disciples of Jesus are to inhabit a topsy-turvy world, in which everything they have been taught may be wrong – see the “you have heard / but I tell you” moments of the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes note God’s blessing, giving value to those who may appear to be without it.

How can we commit to Creation Care, when these readings tell us of another world, a new Creation in which what we know now will be no more? How can we care for the plastic in our oceans, when Revelation tells us that all life in the seas will die? While parts of Revelation may need to be taken at a non-literal level, our other readings make clear that there is a whole strand of Scripture concerned with another world entirely. Are we wasting our effort?

Well, consider how we act in other areas. 10 years ago, you helped an older person to cross the street. Now, that person is dead. Had you known, 10 years ago, that, 10 years hence, the older person would be dead, would you have left them to cross the street alone? Of course not! Jesus says that those who gain eternal life will be few. Should you stand back from speaking with your neighbour about the Good News because there is a statistical uncertainty about the outcome? Of course not! We act within the Creation because the mandate concerns what is, not what shall be. And part of that mandate is to be the stewards to whom God has entrusted the creation (Psalm 115). Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that the world would tomorrow fall to pieces, I would still plant my tree today.”

Some of us will be familiar with an old tag-line, that we, as God’s people, are called “to be in the world, but not of it”. Perhaps we can expand the tagline and re-commit ourselves, alert to the full picture of Scripture, saying “God’s saints are to be in the world, not of it, but born of him, and therefore for the world.”
Remember that one day you will be someone else’s ancestor! What will be said about you?

Rev Sue Parfitt (over 80s old!) said when asked why she is still protesting on the streets – “I could not bear to leave a bare and barren earth for my beautiful grandchildren”

What will you leave?

Introduction by Revd. Canon Rachel Mash