A Sermon preached
on Sunday 03 November (All Saints) at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9, Revelation 21:1-6a, John 11:32-44
All Saints Sunday can be quite an emotional rollercoaster. We started, triumphantly with Vaughan Williams’ beautiful hymn “For all the Saints,” focusing on those great women and men “who thee by faith before the world confessed.” In a moment we will not only renew our Baptismal vows, but joyfully celebrate a baptism at which Pendukeni Abigail will be incorporated into the communion of saints, past, present and future. And then the mood will change to one of sadness, as we turn to remembering the dead, the souls of all faithful departed, first by silently lighting candles at the side altar and then by reading the names during the Eucharistic prayer of those who have passed on in the last 12 months. That prayer of thanksgiving is also full of mixed emotions, retelling and reliving Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection.
We see this mixture of emotions in today’s readings: sadness and joy, loss and triumph, fear and hope, grief and comfort. The author of Wisdom, not Solomon despite the traditional name of this book, it wasn’t written until 30 – 20 BC at the earliest, and Solomon’s reign is usually dated to 970 to 931 BC, that anonymous author offers words of reassurance. The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, he writes, refuting the traditional ideas of death as torment, or as simply complete destruction, an absolute end. The vision of Revelation renews the Old Testament promises that the faithful departed will be in the presence of God. God will dwell with them, death and pain will be no more. And as a symbol of God’s power over life and death, Jesus brings Lazarus back from the dead to live again, if only for a while. Though it’s important to note that Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved both by the death of this friend Lazarus, and by the reactions of this other friends, Mary and Martha to that loss.
And in between all this seriousness, all these deep emotions, I had us all sing a quirky, quaint, almost childish hymn, with simple, sing-song rhymes: “I sing a song of the saints of God.” I won’t say that I had to fight for this at the hymn selection committee meeting, but let’s just say it is not one of the favourite hymns of professional musicians. It was written by a British woman Lesbia Scott, whose husband was an Anglican priest. She often wrote hymns and songs for her own children, and this was one of them. Her hymns were first published in England in Everyday Hymns for Little Children (1929) and in the United States in the Episcopal Hymnal 1940. Given the song’s humble and domestic origins, the author was, and I quote, “a little disconcerted by its popularity,” since this was neither her favourite hymn nor the favourite of her children. Evidently this was a concern held more broadly, as according to British hymnologist Richard Watson, the seemingly irreverent hymn “has disconcerted others too.”
People make fun of it and even parody it, for example the line “one was a soldier, and one was a priest, And one was slain by a fierce wild beast,” becomes “And one was a soldier, and one was a beast, And one was slain by a fierce wild priest.” The hymns we sing often inspire joy or hope, they can move us to tears, or enable us to praise God, but usually they do not motivate us to smile or even laugh out loud.
And yet, this is a hymn with a serious and important message. The saints that Mrs Scott has chosen, the doctor, the queen, the shepherdess on the green are wonderful examples of distinguished and exemplary Christians. The doctor is St. Luke the Physician, author both of the Gospel named for him, and Book of Acts, that chronicle of the early Church. The queen is tenth-century Margaret of Scotland, who encouraged the founding of schools, hospitals, and orphanages and had a very positive influence on her husband, King Malcolm of Scotland. According to one biography of Margaret, “[Malcolm] saw that Christ truly dwelt in her heart;…what she rejected he rejected;…what she loved, he for love of her loved, too.”
The shepherdess on the green is Joan of Arc, who went from being a herder of sheep to French national hero, and martyr. And the saint who is killed by a fierce wild beast (not priest!) is the 1st century Ignatius of Antioch, famous for his seven letters written while he was on his way to his martyr’s death in Rome in the arena, letters that include this reflection: “I am God's wheat, ground fine by the lion's teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.”
But the most important line in the hymn is I think
“They lived not only in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still, the world is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus' will. … for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”
The Communion of Saints that we celebrate today is not just made up of heroes and heroines, of monks, nuns, soldiers, kings and queens, and prophets but also, in fact mainly, of ordinary Christians. All of us who struggle to love God and to love God’s people, to live as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, to fulfill our baptismal promises, and to make the world brighter … although we also frequently fail at doing so.
The feast of All Saints reminds us that God is with us at all times, in joy and sadness, in triumph and defeat, in life and death, in happiness and in suffering. It tells us that God is in all people, the special ones, the saints with a capital S, and the ordinary ones. And it allows us to praise God with music written by great composers, in beautiful melodies both ancient and modern, and even in a sentimental hymn such as this one.
Amen.
