All Saints

SERMON PREACHED on the occasion of the Diocesan Liturgy on the Sunday of All Saints

June 9,1996.

To-day we are keeping the Day of All Saints, of all those who have heard Christ speak, whose hearts and minds have been set afire, and went out into the world to bring to the whole world the good news; the news that God has so loved the world, that He has entered into it never to leave it, and that in His Resurrection He has taken all that is the world – in His Flesh the whole visible world, in His soul all the human world – and has established it on the right hand of the Father.

This is not only the glory of the Church, it is a call addressed to each of us. To-day we are called by the Gospel, we are encouraged by the Epistle, so to love God as to become truly His disciples, and that means that our faith in Him must be and become, day after day, more truly faithful, so that seeing us, seeing how we live, seeing who we are, people could believe that Christ has come to save the world, and is worth following as a Master and as a Friend.

St James, speaking to people of his time said: If you want to show me your faith without your works, I will show you my faith by my works. Let us then go into the world to bring to a world which is in great misery now, in distress that it has lost its way, the good news. Not only the news that God has come and is in our midst, that He has shown us the way, that He is the way and He has given an example for everyone to follow, not in a slavish way, not as a hireling, but with the joy that following this way means that we are fulfilled and that life is deep in us if in us it can flow on to others.

This is the message of to-day's Feast; in the next two weeks we will keep more particularly the Feast of the Saints of Russia, and the Feast of the Orthodox Saints of these islands; people of our blood, our flesh, our kin. Let us think of them and let us try to live in such a way that they may rejoice that they have a following worthy of Christ and worthy of their lives. Amen.