I Sing a Song of the Saints of God

Every time you read something in the Bible it says something to you right there in that moment.  And since every moment for us is different from another, when we read that same reading again it will say something different to us.

That is how I understand that great saying that the Word of God is dynamic, sharper than a two-edged sword, penetrating to the soul.  It is not static like some people believe with no room for variation in meaning.  It speaks daily into the constantly changing circumstances of my life.

When I read the passage from Revelation that you have heard today I have to say that it took on new dimensions of meaning for me.  Here I am in this place surrounded by these my new Nuba friends, who themselves have been through the great trial because of their faith.  And each one of them knows someone who has come to the end of their life here because of that great trial. 

And there they stand, among that great throng of witness from every tribe and nation and tongue – praising God in Nuba and Arabic, and Dinka, and Swahili, and Korean, and English ….  These are faces familiar to us.  Faces of those known to us.

And then we read the beginning of what we call The Sermon on the Mount.  This wonderful collection of the teaching of Jesus begins with 8 beatitudes.  When we read these on a normal Sunday they speak to us of God’s purpose that those who are having a hard time in one way or another will ultimately be blessed – or happy.  I remember Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral fame wrote a book about these called The Be-Happy Attitudes, in which he expounded these statements as expressing something of how we should choose to live. 

But reading them today they speak so eloquently of the various dimensions of our future reward – a life that is intimately connected to God and in which we will all be called Blessed – not just the Virgin Mary.

So, here we are at All Souls Day, following on immediately after All Saints Day.  What can we learn from these signature Holy Days in the life of the church?

Let me first clarify some terms.

What do you think of when we speak of Saints?  The people with “Saint” at the beginning of their names, like St Francis?  Well, many of us do, and in many respects the celebration of All Saints Day seems to be focussed on those kinds of saints – I call them super-hero saints because they all seem to have done super-human things in the form of various miracles and mysteries.

But there are places in the Scriptures, especially in the letters of Paul, where all the members of the church are called saints.  Now I can relate to those kinds of saints.  Let me tell you a story:

One day a Sunday school class in a Ukrainian Orthodox Church was discussing the topics of sainthood and saints.  The children were riveted to the teacher’s presentation, as they listened to the wondrous miracles and acts of personal sacrifice which were associated with the saints.  As the presentation ended, it was time for the children to ask questions.  All but one child asked a question and received their answer from the teacher.  Little Suzy was the only child who sat silently in her chair looking around with a puzzled look on her face.  Suzy was normally quite vocal and had opinions about everything, but she sat there silently listening to what the other students had to say.  For homework, the teacher asked the students to answer the following questions - who are the saints and what does it take for someone to attain sainthood?  But before class was dismissed, the teacher took the children to their church next door to show them the icons of the saints they had just talked about.

It was a bright sunny day, when the class entered the church.  The children began to walk around and look closely at the icons placed on stands, painted on the iconostasis screen behind which was the Altar and painted on the walls of the church.  But Suzy wasn’t paying any attention to that, instead she was standing in the middle of the church mesmerized and consumed by something else.  Her eyes were fixated on the beautiful stain-glass windows.  The bright sunshine was piercing through them creating a sparkle of different colours with an unbelievable brilliance of the images of the saints depicted there.  Suddenly, little Suzy raised her hand and excitedly yelled out: “I know who saints are!  They are the people who let the light of God shine through them!”

This definition means that we all qualify as saints.  But it also describes what it is about us that makes us saints – we let the light of God shine through us.

This leads to one of the things that I would like to remember about All Saints Day, and perhaps you will too.  The Saints of God is a collective term for the community to which we all belong – the Church. 

When an Orthodox person walks alone into a church they are visibly surrounded by this vast cloud of witnesses who have gone before them.  They know that they are never alone.  They know that they cannot be the church by themselves.  The community and our connection to it is a vital dimension of our everyday saintliness.

But today is actually All Soul’s Day – so perhaps we should discuss this business of Soul for a moment.  In the old fashioned language of the Anglican Church, when a priest was appointed to a parish the bishop gave the priest a very special responsibility – the cure of the souls entrusted to him.  This was the result of a decision to transliterate a Latin term rather than translate it.  It simply means the CARE OF SOULS.  And in this context, souls means the whole person.

A lot of theological debate has been expended on the idea that we are made up of three parts – body, soul and spirit.  While we might get some sense of the differentiation that is being made, most of us end up still wondering what it all means.  The truth of this idea is that it is actually foreign to Hebrew thinkers.  It is a Greek notion and it underpins the same kind of theological argument in the Nicene Creed about the coexistence of flesh and spirit – humanity and divinity – in Jesus.  For our purposes and in the modern era I would think it is much simpler for us to simply understand souls in the pastoral and nautical sense (the ship went down with 95 souls on board) – the whole person.

In its original institution, All Soul’s Day was a time to pray for the Dead.  A thousand years ago there was only the Roman Catholic Church and with their teachings about Purgatory, people in the church were encouraged to pray for the souls in Purgatory to hasten their arrival in Paradise.  We in the Anglican Church did away with this doctrine as did many other churches that emerged from the Protestant Reformation. 

This brings me to the second thing that I want to remember out of these two Holy Days.  If I was to reframe the Saints of All Saint’s Day as the Big Saints – the CAPITAL “S” Saints; the ones with Saint before their name, and the Souls of All Soul’s Day as the everyday saints – the lower case “s” saints; the ones without the word Saint in their name.  These two days are days to be thankful to God for all those who have gone before us, whose lives and stories have inspired and encouraged us in our faith. 

In truth, none of us would be here without those who have gone before us.  So, on this Holy Day, let us all think of those whose lives have drawn us towards faith, have sustained and encouraged us in the faith, and who inspire us daily to live lives that are increasingly Christ-like.

Are you ready for the Sequel

When I was a child, most of the stories I read had an almost standard ending.  It went something like this:

“And they all lived happily, ever after.”

You remember stories like that, don’t you.

But in our life-time, stories have changed.  First of all Walt Disney decided that there was a very specific formula that stories should follow if they are going to work.  Then the big movie houses decided that a story should never be told in just one movie – and we discovered not just the sequel, but even the prequel.

The Lord of the Rings was written in three volumes, so it made sense for the movie version to be in three parts, but who decided that the prequel The Hobbit needed to be in three parts as well?

The idea behind this is that the ending of a story must always leave open the possibility of taking the story somewhere else.

Our reading today from what many call the Hebrew Scriptures rather than the Old Testament marks the end of the discrete group of Biblical texts the Jews called the Torah – or the Law.  For many years these were all that Hebrew people referred to as their Bible.  Later the Prophets and the Writings were added to what Jesus would then have read as his version of the Bible.

But in the ending of these texts, there is the opening for more.  The story has somewhere else to go.  Before we explore that, lets stand back from this huge narrative we have been zooming over for the past 18 weeks.

Last week we were looking at a reiteration to Moses of God’s promise to be with him, and a very brief and strange (to us) revelation of God’s person to Moses – at least Moses was permitted to see the dazzling light of God’s presence as he had passed by.  And today we are right at the final chapter of Deuteronomy – another 100 or so pages on in my edition of the Bible.

Did someone get bored with the story and jump to the last chapter to see what happened? 

Just so that you are not left in too much suspense, the Book of Leviticus carries on from the end of Exodus by spelling out all the regulations for worship and religious ceremonies in the life of Israel.

The book of Numbers chronicles the story of the 40 years of wandering that followed the receiving of the Law on Mt Sinai, some few months after the people had left Egypt.  It also reports to us the results of two censuses of the people that were carried out during that time.

The book of Deuteronomy (or the Second Law) is really a record of a series of addresses given by Moses after their 40 years of wandering in which he

1.     recalls the great events that God has done through that period;

2.     reviews the 10 Commandments;

3.     reminds the people of the meaning of God’s Covenant with them, calling them to renew their commitment to it; and

4.     finally commissions Joshua to lead the people into the next chapter of their history with God.

The introductions to these books in your Good News Bibles tell us that the key verse in the book of Leviticus is 19:18 where we have the words Jesus called the second great commandment:

 ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

And that the key verse in Deuteronomy is in 6:4-6 where we have that most important saying for Jews that they call the Shemah:

‘Israel, remember this!  The Lord - and the Lord alone - is our God.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.  Never forget these commands that I am giving you today.’

In many ways I think these words sum up the messages we have been considering over these many weeks, journeying with the Great Family.

We have considered the great and wonderful signs of God’s utter faithfulness and dependability, and the often repeated call by God for his people to learn to be just as faithful and dependable to God.  And we saw again and again God’s grace and mercy (compassion) when confronted with the failure of his people to get it.

And God’s final words to Moses were that here, in this moment, God was keeping the promise he had made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – that their descendants would have a place they could call home – the Promised Land.

But in this story, which is more important?

1.     The Promised Land that they would be able to call home; or

2.     The realisation that God’s promises are utterly dependable.

I think the latter is the only possibility for us in these latter days.

And there the story ends.

But wait!  We all know the story goes on.  There was an opening and it went on.  God said “I have let you see it, but I will not let you go there.”  Obviously the people went on under the leadership on Joshua, and the stories of God’s faithfulness and the feeble attempts at faithfulness by the people cycle their way through history – right down to the present day.

So my questions for us all (I include myself in this) are these:

We are now the next chapter in this story.  How is this story going to pan out?  How will we together experience the utter faithfulness of God, and how will we go at trying to be utterly faithful to God and to each other?

I will go with you!

A few weeks ago, I told you a story about my adventures in the Stirling Ranges National Park.  I have to say this is a special piece of country for me.  Every day when I was in High School, the Stirling Ranges and the Porongurups near Mt Barker were part of the landscape I surveyed.

It is a very simple landscape – a single line of craggy hills, lifted up millions of years ago and gradually eroded into what they are today.  When I am there, I feel like I could never get lost.  The hills will always give me my bearings.  Yet nearly every year, someone gets lost there.  They become disoriented or stuck in a place from which they cannot retreat.

This simple but complex landscape makes me think of what it may have been like for the Israelites in their Wilderness Wanderings.  The landscape was straightforward enough for people to have a generally good idea of where they were, yet time and again they got caught up in trouble – not knowing which way to turn.

In this, our final exploration focussed on the OT readings in the Lectionary, I felt like we have a text that is very congruent with what we are doing here today. 

Moses has been leading the people for a while now.  He reassures God that he recognises God’s activity helping him lead the people, but he suggests that it is time for God to let him in on the big picture.  “Tell me your plans so that I can continue to serve you and please you.”

God doesn’t tell Moses what the plan is, but he has a word of encouragement for him.  He says “I will go with you and I will give you victory.”

Today we are celebrating the start of a new phase in Galal’s ministry among us and in particular his Nuba community.  It has been a long journey for him – and for Maryam.  But along the way I am sure he has had little signs that God was travelling with him. 

Many things could have happened along the way that could have made Galal divert from the pathway he started out on.  But those little signs, and the encouragement of others has kept him on track.  And now he is ready to begin a priestly ministry among us.

I would like to think that God’s word for Moses can be given to Galal as God’s word for him today. 

God said to Moses “I know you very well and I am pleased with you.”  I think all of us would like to say this to Galal.  We know you well.  We have walked this journey with you.  We have seen you grow in confidence and ability.  And we are pleased with you and for you today.

But the most important word from God for you today (and for each of us, too, really) is “I will go with you.”  Moses believes this is so important that he says to God that if God would not go with them, they ought to stay just where they were.  He knew how important the presence of God was.

We pray for you today Galal, that you will know that God is with you in your work of ministry among us.  We pray that we will, with you, be confident of God’s blessing and presence in all that we undertake together.  As we journey together may we catch just a glimpse of the glory of God.

Holy Cow, Moses

Imagine, if you will, life for the Israelites in Egypt.

They had been there at least three or four generations by the time Moses and Aaron are raised up to lead them back home to the Promised Land.

Over the previous generation the Egyptian authorities had turned the Israelite community in Goshen, who had originally been refugees from famine in Palestine, into an abundant and absolutely free workforce to drive the Egyptian economy.  In fact, not only was their labour free, they had to produce their own raw materials for brick-making.

As the Egyptians enforce their slavery more and more harshly, the people would have lived in constant fear.  Their lives were in the hands of their Egyptian masters, who could without any fear of punishment strike an Israelite dead.  Maybe they didn’t make enough bricks in the day.  Maybe they were talking too much.  Maybe the brisks were too small.  It didn’t matter.  They were always so close to the terror of punishment or death.

While the Israelites lived in a somewhat segregated area, they could not avoid constant expose to the religious practices of Egypt.  There, they had a myriad of gods – some depicted as humans with the features of animals and some depicted as animals.

They had gods for every situation in life – not unlike the practice some have developed in Christendom of having patron saints that help us in every conceivable situation, which is interesting in itself.  Ra was the most important God.  He was always depicted as a man with a Hawk’s head upon which rested a golden disk of the sun around which a cobra – one of Egypt’s potent symbols of power.

Being a nation dependent on the life given by the Nile River, there were many fertility gods that ensured good harvests if they were properly revered by the people.  One of the most important fertility gods was Apis –a bull.  Apis was represented by a number of other gods, multiplying his power over the fertility of the land.  There were several temples to Apis and numerous shrines all over the place because the fertility of the land meant life or death to the people.

Now, as we enter into the story we have for today, we can carry a little bit of the life that had preceded it and maybe make some sense of it.

After the Water in the Rock story a couple of weeks ago, Moses brings the people to Mt Sinai, which the Hebrew Scriptures sometimes called Horeb, as well.  Moses was told to bring the people to the mountain.  Then he was to mark a line right around the mountain and warn the people that they could not cross that line – or they would die.  He was going up the mountain a little way.  God would cover the mountain with smoke and talk to Moses and the people would be able to hear God speaking – but not see him.

If you reread Exodus 19 you will see Moses going back and forth to the people reassuring them that this will be okay.

Then, as we read last week, God’s talk with Moses begins with his statement that we now call “The Ten Commandments”.  The people were terrified by all this noise of God speaking, and Moses had to go back and reassure them, after which God called him back for more.  Moses told the people “Don’t be afraid: God has only come to test you and make you keep on obeying him.”  He then went back up the mountain – further up this time.  And these instructions take up all of the intervening chapters – from 21-31.  God provided them with rules for many many things.

And all this took some time.

The people waiting at the bottom of a smoking and rumbling mountain found their fears aroused again.  Why is it taking so long?  What has happened to Moses?  Surely he is dead.  So they went and complained to Aaron.

I suppose Aaron thought it would be good to do something – you know what men are like; they have to do something.  So he got the people to bring all the precious gold they had carried away from Egypt, and with this all melted down, they created a golden calf in the fashion of Apis – the great Egyptian god of fertility and life.

Now the Israelites really liked this kind of God.  They understood Apis.  And they could see Apis.  And Apis was not up on that mountain making all that noise.  So they drank wine (not sure where they got that from) and sang and danced in what is described to us an orgy of drinking and sex.

Well, it is not surprising that the story tells us that God was pretty mad about this.  Will these people never learn?  God had just given them a short set of rules to live by and within days they had gone and broken one of the most important – “Do not make for yourself images of anything in heaven or on earth.”  Commandment number two. 

Did you smile when we read the words of God to Moses: “I know how stubborn these people are.  Now don’t try and stop me.  I am angry with them, and I am going to destroy them.”  How human it is for someone threatening something dire to say to those around – “don’t try and stop me” – as if they really want them to try.

Well Moses stepped up to the mark on that one.

Moses seems to focus on the issue of honour in his intercession.  He says that it would be bad form to allow the Egyptians to gloat over the waste if the Israelites all perished in the desert.  The he reminds God of his promise to Abraham Isaac and Jacob – how would he keep this promise if he wiped out these stubborn and disobedient people?

And of course God changes his mind.

In the first place, I think this might lead us to an important message we can take from the story.  Many Christians struggle with the idea of intercessory prayer.  God knows everything and the needs of everyone before we pray – and it is his will that these be overcome – but somehow he wants to hear his faithful people pray.  This doesn’t make God something like a computer which if we program the right inputs he will deliver the right outputs.

The act of intercessory prayer can be the ultimate act of identifying with those in need.  And when we put ourselves in the place of those in need, God hears, and God responds – as he did to Moses’ prayer that day. 

As a second thought out of this, I want to pick up something that may have been a mystery for you in the Gospel reading.  What did you make of that encounter between the King and the guest who did not have wedding garments on?

Most commentators see this story as an allegory in which different elements of the story have meanings.  In this case, they take this reference to a wedding garment to mean discipleship.  The whole of this narrative of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness is about discipleship.  During this time they are learning about the ways of God and how to be faithful to God.  That seems to me to be a perfect description of discipleship.  The question we need to ask is: if the goal of discipleship is to arrive at the Promised Land, is there ever a time in this life when we cease to be a disciple – when we have “arrived”?

Obviously the answer is no!  The work of faith for us in this life is to so live in God that when we die we shall continue to live in God – not as a reward for being good enough (the Israelites never really deserved the Promised Land God had promised) but because God has walked with us and could not conceive of a future without us – that is how big his grace is.

St Francis

Today we celebrate the feast of one of the most beloved saints in Church history: St. Francis of Assisi, whose actual feast day was yesterday, Oct. 4^th.

Francis Bernadone of Assisi may have been somewhat insignificant, but the movement he began has had a great impact on the world for 700 years.

In a vision that got him started on his way, while he was standing in the ruins of an old church, he believed Jesus said to him “Go, rebuild my church!”  While he initially took this to mean rebuild the ruins, he later realised that there were some things in the church that needed to be challenged and rebuilt.

Francis knew one thing for sure though: HE WANTED TO BE POOR – AND POOR HE WAS!  Poor in material things – and poor in spirit!

The life that he created initially for himself and eventually for the communities he founded was expressed in 12 core values:  it was a life

            of prayer.

            of chastity,

            of solitude,

            of humility,

            of creativity,

            of community,

            of compassion,

            of joy,

            of peace,

            of simplicity,

            of appreciating God's creation, and

            of service,

He emulated all of these concepts and activities to an amazing degree!

It is about the last three that I would simply like to elaborate (simplicity, appreciation of Creation, and Service): 

SIMPLICITY – Francis understood that the ways of the world, even in his day, crowded out the life in God we are all called to live.  Christian living should be counter-cultural.  It should be different from the way ordinary people live, and St Francis gives us a few ideas of how this looks practically.  And so do the Ten Commandments when we read them carefully.

If we listened to the ways of our world, they would have us all working 7 days a week to earn the money needed to buy the things they say we need and we would all be stressed out by the fact that we are always not there yet.  The ways of the world also want us to spend, spend, spend – even if we have to borrow the money to do it.

In its own way, this is what life was like for the Israelites in Egypt.  The whole economy was pressured into maintaining the lifestyle of the Pharaoh and the ruling classes by the hard and constant work of the working poor.

When Moses brought back the Ten Commandments for the people that day on Mt Sinai God was calling the Israelites into a radically different way of life than had ever been seen before.

This Sabbath business was an amazing innovation.  It was about demonstrating that we didn’t have to be stressed out all the time earning a living.  It was about trusting God.  Along with the tithe it was a way of saying we have enough.  We don’t need more.  God is good.

Today thousands of Franciscan religious all over the world, as well as many more Tertiaries who do not live in congregations, try to live by this rule of simplicity.

APPRECIATION OF CREATION – You may have heard of the story of St Francis and the wolf.  A wolf had been terrorising a village and the people invited Francis to come and help them.  Francis had a reputation of being an animal whisperer – as we would call it today.  He could understand animals and they were not frightened of him.  He “spoke” to the wolf, and finding out that the poor wolf was simply hungry, Francis got to wolf to agree not to terrorise the people if they would simply leave food out for it each evening.  A miracle.

But Francis also had a profound sense of the connection between God and creation – all creation.  He wrote that hymn we all love:

All creature of our God and King

Lift up your voice and with us sing.

He referred to sun and moon as Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

And this is why his feast makes a great culmination for our celebration of the Season of Creation.

SERVICE –  While Francis and his brothers and nuns chose to live in poverty, they had a strong sense of mission to serve the poor.  Those who were poor through no fault of their own, or because of the ways of the world that seem to need some people doing their work for less money than it takes to live,  these were the ones Francis sought to serve in self-less giving.

It was this vision of his ministry that inspired that lovely prayer we sing that is attributed to him – but is unlikely to have been written by him:

Brother, sister let me serve you

Let me be as Christ to you

Pray that I might have the grace

To let you be my servant too.

It is the witness of Franciscans all over the world over many centuries now that this way of simplicity, of service to others and of appreciation of all creation empowers a vibrant and faithful Christian life.