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What do the Tweenies, Trick or Treating and Soviet Russia have in common? What do the Tweenies, Trick or treating and Soviet Russia have in common?
Yesterday morning my Henry was watching an episode of the Tweenies. The Tweenie clock went to story time and the Tweenies sat down to listen to the story of Noah. Interesting that the Tweenies should hear the story of Noah. Even more interesting the version they heard. “once there was a man called Noah. He was married to Mrs Noah. One day Noah was worried - he knew there was going to be an enormous flood. So he told Mrs Noah “we need to build a big boat to keep us safe and all the animals we love so much”
How did Noah know there was going to be a big flood? Did he read it in the newspaper? Did he google the weather forecast on the internet?
No children - we are not allowed to know how Noah knew there was going to be a big flood. We are not allowed to know about who spoke to him told him about the flood, and commanded him to build the ark.
God has to be written out of the picture.
Back in 1990 I went on a tour of Russia - it was the time of glasnost, the last days of the old soviet regime. We went around the famous hermitage museum. The guide (a stern middle aged woman in her 50s) was determined to give us the official Soviet line. We went into a room full of icons. “Here” she said “Here are traditional depictions of a young mother and her child”.
But what is that Mother’s name? And what is the name of the child she is holding and pointing to?
No - we are not allowed to know that this is an icon of the Mother of God showing us and pointing to her blessed son Jesus.
God has to be written out of the picture.
And this week - Trick or treaters - knocking at your door, threatening you and demanding candy. Halloween. But of course, we are not allowed to know that Halloween, All Hallows Eve is the day before All Saints Day when we celebrate “ a great multitude that I could not number and they were all praising the Lord with songs... these are they who have put off mortal clothing and have put on the immortal and have confessed the name of God. Now they are being crowned and received palms”.
Halloween has to be about threatening to egg people’s doors if they don’t give you sweeties. We are not allowed to know about the huge crowd of Christians in heaven, there because of their relationship with Jesus who saved them.
God has to be written out of the picture.
1 Peter 2:5 talks about the church being built of “living stones”. Now you might imagine an image of a man trying to build a wall but every time he adds more bricks, old ones vanish... I want you to picture that rather odd image - because that is what the church would be if the living stones were only those Christians present here on earth right now. But of course as the Jesus says in the Gospels (when talking about God’s relationship with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), God is God “not of the dead but of the living” - we don’t stop living when this life stops (Mark 10:26-27). The living stones who make up the church are not just those alive in this life, but those alive in the life to come. The bible is full of pictures like the one we just read in 2 Esdras (or the very similar picture we read in Revelation or pictures we see in Isaiah or elsewhere) of the vast crowds of Christians in heaven.
You and I may be living stones, but we are built on the layers of bricks underneath us - the living stones in heaven, the saints who we celebrate on All Saints day.
In Orthodox custom the most common way saints are depicted is in icons, in Roman Catholicism, the most common way saints are depicted is in statues, and while Anglicans do both, for us the most common way saints are depicted is in stained glass - like that beautiful stained glass window behind you.
I think there is something quite powerful about stained glass. When we see a stained glass window we see light shining through it. When we see the lives of past Christians “the saints” - we see the light of Jesus shining through. St Paul writes “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1) - and if that applies to St Paul, it applies to every other saint too. As we look at their lives we are able to learn how to imitate Jesus.
If we ignore the saints - if we ignore the living stones underneath us in the wall, then like the Tweenies, like Trick or treating and like soviet russia, we are trying to wipe God out of the picture.
You see - you and I are not Christians on our own - our church mission statement begins “to bring people to Jesus and membership of his family”. Being a Christian is about being part of God’s family. You’ll have stories that shape your human family - and our God’s family is shaped too by the stories we tell.
Here at Holy Trinity we can tell stories of Fr Wheatley, the vicar here during the war - the vicar who I’m told quite liked a pint, and because he couldn’t be seen in a pub, his wife would smuggle full pint glasses home to him in a basket with a t-towel on top. But the vicar also who preached passionately about prayer and evangelism. The vicar who planted the St Lawrence church and then took the initiative establishing a church plant at the first class waiting room at Hainault railway station - the church that is now St Francis’s. A radical innovator whose example encourages us and whose prayers sustain us still.
or what of Audrey Campbell. A long time member of this congregation she was inspired by St Francis of Assisi. She worked tirelessly helping the homeless - in soup runs and other ways. One such homeless man she helped back on his feet, fell in love with him and married him. When he died before her and she too died, she did another crazy St Francis like gesture leaving her entire estate to Holy Trinity to further the work of God’s church here. Her only stipulation that there should be stained glass window including pictures of her two favorite saints - Our Lady and St Francis of Assisi.
“I Ezra saw on Mount Zion a great multitude that I could not number and they were all praising the Lord with Songs”
Who is there for you in the great number - Christians in heaven whose lives have inspired you and who in heaven are praying for you now?
They may be Christians who you knew here on earth. I think in my own life of Betty Saunders - who tirelessly ran Sunday School when I was a child, then later when I was a teenager coming to church on my own, welcomed me showing me incredible hospitality and mentoring me. She may not have won me for Jesus - but without her support would I have stayed a Christian as a teenager?
or I think of Bill Dodd - an ex convict, an pimp, who met Jesus in jail - transformed through a dream. I only knew Bill for a year before he died - but in him I witnessed a man whose life had been totally transformed by God from the evil he had lived to the life he was living now. Bill inspired me to see that no life is beyond redemption.
Who are the Christians who you knew when they were here on earth who are important saints for you?
And then of course - in that great multitude we cannot number - there are saints down the centuries.
I think of Bonhoeffer - who stood up to the Nazis, refused to let his church be taken over by them, and was eventually executed for putting his loyalty to Jesus before loyalty to the Reich.
I think of Fr Charles Lowder - the 19th Century priest who took a vow of celibacy and went and ministered in the cholera infested slums of London Docks where no priest with a family would dare go. Who brought colour and symbol and ritual into worship for people whose lives were far from colourful. Who had his faults (when a curate he got so fed up with a troublesome churchwarden that he persuaded some school children to pelt him with eggs) - but who above all loved Jesus and who built a church of 700 people in a cockney slum where not one person had been part of a church family before.
I think of St Dominic- busy doing “important stuff” in the church’s diplomatic service, travelling on a mission from Spain to Sweden - who stays overnight in a tavern in Southern France and discovers a people taken over by the desperately pessimistic Cathar religion. A people who have been put off Christianity by rich prelates riding around in gilded coaches - and whom established church’s response is to threaten them with violence until they return to the fold. Not St Dominic. He spends the entire night chatting to the Cathar innkeeper (presumably imbibing a pint or two) listening lots because you can’t have an 8 hour long conversation without listening - but also speaking of Jesus’s love until the innkeeper is won around. And then he quits his job in the church’s diplomatic service to found an order of poor preachers who will live among these people sharing their lives and their hardships as they preach the gospel.
I could add Clare of Assisi, John Wesley, St Cedd, Corrie ten Boom, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King and many others.
Who are the saints who you never met - who inspire you? look through their lives and see Jesus.
There’s an episode of the TV programme star gate where the team land on a planet and people keep disappearing - but every time people disappear a computer wipes from everyone else’s mind every trace of the people so no one remembers them. A man does not even remember that yesterday he used to be married. Can you imagine that? You’d be less than yourself if that was wiped from you. Yet in the church if we don’t remember our forebears who have made us who we are, we are less than ourselves. We are who we are because we are a family with the saints.
If we cut all trace of past saints from our story - it is like the Tweenies wiping God from the story of Noah. We are cutting out the story of how God has shaped the people that now includes us. The saints story is our story. We are one family, and the good news is that they are not gone, but in heaven they are praying for us still.
“These are they who have put off mortal clothing and put on the immortal and have confessed the name of God. Now they are being crowned and receive palms.” Then I said to the angel “who is that young man who is placing crowns on them and putting palms in their hands?” He answered and said to me “He is the son of God whom they confessed in the world” So I began to praise those who had stood valiantly for the name of the lord.” (2 Esdras 2:46-47)
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This sermon was preached in 2012 when I was vicar of Holy Trinity Barkingside
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