"For all the Saints"

 

Sunday 1^st November – All Saints day

Revelation 7: 9-17. Who are the great multitude John sees in heaven? If the 144,000 just referenced in verses 4-8 are Jewish, the great multitude by contrast would be gentiles. God’s true chosen people are from all the nations on earth and most importantly they are all Martyrs who hold a special significance for the seer. John extends the meaning of the Greek word “Martus” meaning a witness, to mean specifically someone who witnesses through death, who has shared in the suffering of Christ and have won salvation.

1 John 3: 1-3. However fully “realized” the fourth gospel may be, meaning that the presence and salvation of God are fully here now – the first letter of John holds out the vision of a future yet to be revealed. And that future aspect holds out the glorious hope of a spiritual union with the divine (“We will be like him”). This doctrine of growing more God-like ending in unity is known as Divinization or theosis in the East and as Sanctification in the West.

Matthew 5: 1-12. The statements in the first half of the beatitudes refer to everyone who is to enter the coming age, not a set of alternatives – we are all poor, meek, mourning for the way things are in the world, longing for God to rule, abandoning status and privilege, peacemakers and you will be persecuted. Similarly, the reward contained in the promises are in effect all one reward, entry to the kingdom of heaven!

 

 In the Apostles creed we currently recite every Sunday we all affirm that we believe in the “communion of saints” but it is not something we pay too much attention to on a day to day basis.

The communion of saints is the church triumphant – those who have died and the church militant – an old-fashioned way of referring to ourselves, the church still here on earth.

So, it is a communion of the still alive and the faithful departed and no-where is this more true than in the sacrament of Holy Communion – where we enact the mystical union between God and ourselves through Jesus Christ.

This mystical union joins us with God and “us” in this case includes all those who have gone before us in this spiritual union.

This is brought alive to Orthodox Christians every time they step inside a church because the Sacred architecture of an Orthodox church.

Every Orthodox church is a representation of the entire universe, with the Dome representing Heaven usually resplendent with a icon of Christ Pantokrator (meaning almighty or all powerful.)

Then depicted are the saints and Angels cascading down the walls, a riot of colour to enclose the congregation who are joining in with what is happening eternally in heaven here on earth.

You are enclosed, held, safe, in the ever-loving embrace of Christ and it is in this arena that the participants commune with Christ which is a communion with everyone standing around you and everyone symbolically depicted on the walls.

Christian experience of communion is expanded beyond the purely private and personal and becomes corporate and the church becomes what it declares itself to be – the body of Christ.

In the letter to the Hebrews the author describes in chapter 11 all the heroes  of the faith starting with Abraham running through Isaac, Jacob, Joseph through thousands of years of Hebrew history and all the prophets, who despite their faith never saw the true messiah, and in chapter 12 he describes them as a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us.

So who gains access to the kingdom of heaven?

Well in the gospel reading today Jesus gives us the characteristics of a follower of the way of Christ and they share these traits;

The poor in spirit, the meek, those who are constantly mourning for the way things are in the world, those longing for the rule of God, those who don’t depend on status and privilege, those who are peacemakers.

Jesus in the beatitudes is describing the disposition of people who want to follow him on the way that leads to God.

Jesus says himself that it is a narrow way and few find it as he says a little later in chapter 7 of Matthew.

Those that are not sharing those characteristics shown by his followers logically need to “repent” which means we should change our hearts and minds so we too start to become more Christ-like, that is exhibiting the same character that Christ describes in the blessings. But repentance is a process not a once for all event so what helps to encourage that change?

You encourage that process of change by doing what we are all doing here this morning – hearing and responding to the word of God and participating in the life of God through communion and practising the presence of God in our prayer lives.

It is a short step of faith to realise that in Holy Communion we are communing not only with God and your neighbours but everyone that has died and gone before us in a mystical union.

Amen