Sermon, Ninth Sunday after Trinity: The Communion of Saints

Whenever we say the Apostles’ Creed (as we do at Evensong every day), we affirm that we believe ‘in the communion of saints.’ In other words, that we—God’s people on earth—are one with those who have gone before us—God’s people in heaven. The theme gets picked up elsewhere in worship. Later, we shall hear in the Eucharistic Prayer:

Send the Holy Spirit on your people 
and gather into one in your kingdom 
all who share this one bread and one cup, 
so that we, in the company of [N and] all the saints, 
may praise and glorify you for ever,

One of the best ways of understanding theology is through the hymns that we sing, and one of the greatest of the hymn-writer theologians was Charles Wesley, sometime member of Christ Church. Here’s what he had to say about the communion of saints:

Let saints on earth in concert sing 
with those whose work is done; 
for all the servants of our King 
in heaven and earth are one.

One family, we dwell in him, 
one church, above, beneath; 
though now divided by the stream, 
the narrow stream of death.

This morning’s New Testament Reading, from the 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, is one of the great passages of Scripture. It offers a long list of what we might call the ‘pre-Christian saints,’ the holy men and women of the Old Testament, who stood as faithful witnesses to God through thick and thin. And as the writer says, ‘Time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson…’ and so on. This is quite some list: a catalogue of people who, because of their measure of faith, have gone down as God’s saints. And finally, after a whole chapter of listing the names and the escapades of these people, the author gets to the punch line:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. (Hebrews 12.1,2)

When we take on faith for ourselves, we join this enormous company, this ‘cloud of witnesses’—if you like, we connect with the lives of those who have gone before us.

One family, we dwell in [God], 
one church, above, beneath;

But why and how? Another very fine hymn—this one by Isaac Watts—unfolds very clearly what the ‘communion of saints’ is about. [You might like to turn to it now – number 216 in the hymn book.]

The first verse sets the tone; it’s a prayer that we may be given the eye of faith to see something of the life of those who have gone before us.

Give us the wings of faith to rise
Within the veil, and see
The saints above, how great their joys,
How bright their glories be.

That all sounds good, but perhaps a bit high and lofty – a bit removed from life as we know it. What is the connection between us and them?’ We often think of saints as being special – the sort of people we commemorate in stained glass and fine music. Even people like our own St Frideswide were significant in their time—a far cry from ordinary folk like us trying to live as Christians today. But to see it like that is to look at it the wrong way round. We tend to look back on the great figures of the faith and see them as they have become, and as history has made them. Instead, perhaps we should try and see them as they were. No one starts out a great saint – and usually the greatest saints turn out to have been the most ordinary of men and women.

And so to affirm that we stand together with this great company of saints is to say that we stand together with a great company of rather ordinary people whom God has used for his purposes. And that’s a great encouragement to us.

The second verse of Isaac Watts’ hymn makes this ordinariness very clear.

Once they were mourning here below,
And wet their couch with tears;
Thy wrestled hard, as we do now,
With sins and doubts and fears.

The saints, in their day, struggled with living a godly life - it wasn’t an easy option. Like us, they knew what it was to be discouraged, to get things wrong, and to fail. Like St Paul in one of his most impassioned bits of writing to the Romans ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’

Each of us, if we take our faith seriously, will find it a struggle. The values of Christ are seldom the values of the world around us, or of the prevailing culture. And to remain faithful to Christian principles will sometimes be costly. One of the most horrific trends in recent years has been the snowballing of a culture of blame – the view that, whenever something goes wrong, it must be somebody’s fault, and that someone must be made to pay. Now while no Christian is ever called to turn a blind eye to evil, we nonetheless follow a Lord whose dying word was ‘Father, forgive’, and who preached about the need for us to recognise the log in our own eyes before trying to take the speck out of someone else’s.

And of course, we fail, and we will continue to fail, for such is human nature. Like St Paul, we have good intentions, but we lose the plot. And in so doing, we stand with generations of Christians who have discovered the same – that being God’s people is a struggle, but a struggle worth taking part in.

They wrestled hard, as we do now,
With sins and doubts and fears.

But the following verse of the hymn balances this struggle with the assertion that the saints are those who have conquered – who have somehow remained faithful to God. And their secret? Not some secret inner strength (because they were just like the rest of us), but the power of Christ living within them.

I ask them whence their victory came;
They, with united breath,
Ascribe their conquest to the lamb,
Their triumph to his death.

These saints were not ‘spiritually super-charged’ but ordinary, fallible men and women, who had learned that their only source of strength was God. And more than that, their victory was focussed on Christ’s death on the cross. It’s there that we see the paradox of God’s strength made perfect in weakness. The defeat of evil, death, darkness, failure and despair carried in the tortured body of Jesus, and absorbed and blotted out by the infinite and victorious love of God. The saints were not ‘self-made’ people – but sinners loved, forgiven, re-made and empowered by God – to live for him.

Watts ends his hymn with another reference to Christ – that his is the pattern of living that we are to follow, and that those who have gone before us point the same heavenward path.

Our glorious leader claims our praise
For his own pattern given;
While the long cloud of witnesses
Show the same path to heaven.

And the tense of that last line is important. Watts does not write that the saints have shown us the path to heaven, but that they show the path (that is, they do so here and now). The saints of the past are a present reality – they haven’t ceased to be—they still are.

In some Christian traditions, it’s quite normal to pray with the saints. The previous Bishop of Oxford always maintained that St Lawrence the Martyr is the patron saint of car parking spaces, and that he has never let him down yet! But on a more serious note, some people find prayer to named saints—for healing, for instance—to be immensely helpful. And whilst some Christians react against this – it does seem strange that, if we believe in the communion of saints, we can’t engage with them in this way. If we would have prayed with them while they were alive, then why do we have to stop just because they’ve moved on?

The writer to the Hebrews uses the image of us running a race. It’s a helpful image. It’s as though those who have gone before us in the faith are the crowd. We are the athletes in the thick of it all, running the race set before us, and looking to Jesus. The saints are our supporters, cheering us on with their prayers, and the assurance that ‘in Christ’s power, we can do it.’

The Communion of Saints is a doctrine for living. Each day, as we try to ‘run that race with perseverance,’ let’s have in mind all those who have followed the same path in times past. We can draw strength from their example: of ordinariness, of Christ’s strength given them despite human weakness; and from their fellowship with us: their support and their prayers.

Almighty and everlasting God, 
you kindled the flame of love in the hearts of the saints: 
grant to us the same faith and power of love, 
that, as we rejoice in their triumphs, 
we may be sustained by their example and fellowship; 
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.