All Saints 2009 - A selection of homilies given on the feast of All Saints over a number of years
October 2009
What is a saint?
A saint is a person who tries to live like God.
If I want to live like God I must know what God is like.
So, what is God like?
God gives things away.
Everything God has he tries to share it with others.
Do you know someone who likes to give things away?
Do you know someone who likes to share what he or she has with others?
Then you know some saints.
Those people are saints because they live like God. They like to share what they have with you and me.
So today, the feast of All Saints, we thank God for all those people who are saints. We thank God for all those people who like to give things away.
What about us? What about you and I? Do I think that you should try to be a saint also? Do I think that I should try and give things away?
Think of the things, which we can give away. Think of the things that we can share with others? Our time, our expertise, our knowledge, our skills, our labour, our sympathy, our support, our presence, and of course the easiest (or hardest) of all – our money.
So today we thank God for those people who are saints – for those people who like to give things away and we ask God to help us to be like them, that is to share what we have with other people.
Today’s Gospel gives us the blueprint for sainthood.
The interesting thing about this gospel is that it says nothing about external acts like common prayer, attending church, giving alms, having been baptised, being an Apostle, being a religious leader, being a founder of a religious group, being a builder of many churches, etc, etc.
It is all about what you are inside.
The great thing about being a saint is that anyone can be a saint.
You don’t need to be very intelligent, or strong, to healthy, or to be good with your hands, or to be a leader, or to be able to talk, or to be able to see or hear. You don’t need to have a job or be married or single or have children or have no children.
All you need is to be a good person. All you need is to live in union with your God who dwells within you.
The secret is to find God within you.
Today we celebrate the feast of all saints. As you can see on the church calendar, during weekdays throughout the year, the church celebrates and remembers various people who have already died (read out some names from the calendar), and presents their lives to us as an example which we should strive to follow. The latter have been declared by the church to be saints (officially) because of the extraordinary effort they made to live as followers of Jesus Christ.
This is not to say that these people who have been ‘declared by the church’ to be saints are the only people who are ‘saints’. On the contrary, St. Paul, in many of his letters, addresses the ‘ordinary’ Christians, like ourselves, as ‘saints’. And as we know St. Paul made a habit of calling ‘a spade, a spade’. So in the early church anyone who believed the Good News of Jesus Christ and tried to live in accordance with it was automatically a saint. It was only much later that the church began to apply the term ‘Saint’ only to those who showed ‘extraordinary zeal’ in their Christian life.
Today we remember with joy all those who have entered eternal life before us but have not been ‘declared’ saints by the church either because their sanctity was not extraordinary or was not ‘known’ to be extraordinary. 99.9 % of the saints must fall into this category, for although the church has declared many people to be ‘Saints’, it has never declared that anybody is not a saint. Therefore we are free to believe and in fact should believe that all our ancestors have been granted eternal life through the mercy and love of God. We have no reason to fear them for they love us and wish us well in all things. We should ask them to help us and to pray with us to God who is our Father and their Father. We should look forward to the day when we will meet them again in Eternal Life just as they look forward to meeting us.
When we think of the saints perhaps some favourite saint comes to mind. Anthony or Patrick or Mary the mother of Jesus or Theresa of Liseaux or Francis of Assisi. Or maybe some of the Apostled like Peter, Paul or John. Some of these have attracted notice beyond their immediate circumstances and helped shape the faith of millions around the world.
When I think of saints I remember the handful of people that I have met in every parish in which I have worked.
These people (and I call them ‘giants of faith’ also) have been ordinary people, who for the most part were unheralded and unknown, except to those whose lives they personally touched and to whom they gave hope. They are those quiet saints who have visibly manifested the qualities Jesus pronounced blessed in the Beatitudes—poverty of spirit, humility, gentleness, mercy, hunger for justice, peacemakers and the willingness to inconvenience themselves for the sake of others. We have all been enriched in our lives by contact with such people .
Bible Teaching on Wealth
“Happy are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. The Bible teaching on wealth and possessions can be summed up in the following three propositions:
- All wealth and possessions belong to God.
- God loans his wealth and property to me, for a time, so that I may use it for my own good and for the good of others.
- All wealth and property must return to God.
If I believe and follow these three propositions, my wealth and property will be of great benefit to me as a Christian.
If I do not believe and follow these three propositions, my wealth and property will be a great hindrance to me as a Christian.
This means that everything I possess, (and this includes all my faculties and abilities) is on loan and can be repossessed at any time.
This means that only part of this loan can be used for my own and my family’s benefit. The rest of the loan must be used for the benefit of others. So when I give to others I am not doing them a favour. I am merely giving them what belongs to them.
Therefore when I give help to my local school, when I give to a local charity, when I give to help the war victims in the Sudan or the Balkans, when I give to fight Aids, when I give to fight crime, when I give to my local church, when I give to the beggar who comes to my door, I am merely passing on to them what God gave me for them. If I do not do this, then I am a thief, for I am embezzling other people’s money, which was entrusted to me.
What percentage of my wealth and property belongs to others? Abraham gave Melchizedek a tenth of everything. When Zacchaeus said “Look Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” Jesus did not discourage him but said, “today salvation has come to this house.” It goes without saying that despite his generosity, Zacchaeus remained a wealthy man. Jesus told the rich young man, “if you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”
How do I learn to give? How do I learn to share what I have? How do I learn to put my hand in my pocket and give to those in need? I learn to give by giving. I learn to share by sharing. I learn to put my hand in my pocket by putting my hand in my pocket.
There is no easy way to start. It is always difficult to start but the more you practice it the easier it gets. Eventually I gain so much from giving that from a burden it becomes a privilege and a joy.
Today is the feast of all saints. We are told the names of some of the people who are definitely in Heaven i.e. are friends of God. But nobody has ever been named as not being in Heaven i.e. being an enemy of God.
In the New Testament all the believers (i.e. Christians) were called saints in recognition of the fact that they were already part of the Kingdom of God. (Christians are called ‘saints’ on 44 occasions in the N.T.). As far as the Apostles and the early Church was concerned, if you had joined the Christian community and were committed to living, with Jesus Christ as your exemplar, then you were part of the Kingdom of God, and thus, a saint. The inevitable faults and failures of everyday life were largely irrelevant to ones status as ‘saint’. So if all of us had lived two thousand years ago we would be automatically regarded as, and called, saints.
I must confess that I am both amused and put off by the lobbying and jostling that goes on in the competition between religious orders and national Catholic groups to have their own candidate for canonisation ‘capped‘, (as one might say). The role that money plays in the whole exercise I find a bit embarrassing.
We are encouraged to have a devotion to a saint – to pray to saints for various needs. Some saints are pushed as being better than others for granting certain requests. All this baffles me somewhat. For example why try to wheedle something out of a local parish councillor, when the Prime Minister is my dad!!
I might be a bit deaf but I can plainly hear some of you thinking right now; “the priest does not want us to pray to the saints.”
I did not say that. All I am saying is: God is the big boss. He is also my father. We get on well together. We are in close personal contact all the time. Would it not seem odd to Him if I approached some obscure Italian or Spaniard or Pole or Irishman, or Englishman and requested him, to ask God, for something on my behalf? How would you feel, if whenever your beloved child needed a few quid to buy something, he/she first George Smith down the road, and asked him to come to you and ask you for it instead of asking you directly? Sounds odd, doesn’t it?
I will admit that there are two ‘saints’ whom I admire inordinately. One is John the Baptist. John was at the pinnacle of his profession. He was at the pinnacle of his power and influence. He had so many followers and was held in such high regard by the people that he could openly call the Pharisees and the Saducees ‘you brood of vipers’ and publicly denounce King Herod for adultery, and they did not dare to arrest him for fear of the people. Yet when Jesus appeared on the scene he proclaimed him to be the Messiah and insisted that his followers should now follow Jesus. When his close disciples questioned the wisdom of this, John replied; ‘He must grow greater, I must grow less’. Eventually of course, as John well knew would happen, when most of his followers had become followers of Jesus, Herod had him arrested and executed. Very few people can step aside when they are at the pinnacle of their power and influence. That is why Jesus described John the Baptist in these words; ‘I tell you, of all the children born to women, there is no one greater than John.’
The other ‘saint’ I admire inordinately is the widow we read about in Mk. 12. “Jesus sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the treasury, and many of the rich put in a great deal. A poor widow came and put in two small coins, the equivalent of a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, `In truth I tell you, this poor widow has put more in than all who have contributed to the treasury; for they have all put in money they could spare, but she in her poverty has put in everything she possessed, all she had to live on.’” There is nothing special about giving what you have to spare; what you can afford. The trick is to give what you cannot afford.