Bible reading: Revelation 7:9-17.

Message.

On All Saints’ Day it’s only natural to look back at some of the great Christians of the past. Here in Cardiff we have several to choose from. There’s Edeyrn, who founded his religious community on the banks of the Rumney river in the 6^th century and later became a hermit in Brittany. During our holiday there this summer we made a point of visiting his alleged grave in the church at the little village of – yes! – Lannedern. There’s also Teilo, originally from Pembrokeshire and a friend of Dewi Sant, who is often considered to be the second bishop of Llandaff (after Dyfrig) and who built of the first church there.

In the 1500s we meet Rawlins White, an illiterate fisherman who was burned at the stake during the reign of “Bloody Mary”. There was a plaque to him in the old Bethany Baptist chapel which improbably ended up as the menswear section in Howell’s department store; I don’t know what has happened since the store closed for redevelopment, which seems to have stalled. A century later – and ‘evening out the score’, so to speak – there were the two Catholic priests Philip Evans and John Lloyd, hung, dawn and quartered at “Death Junction” in Roath. I’m sure most people who pass by never notice the memorial plaques on the wall of the old bank there.

Finally I must mention the Methodist hymnwriter William Williams Pantycelyn who did so much to advance Welsh language and culture. He didn’t come from Cardiff but his statue stands in City Hall. More appropriately, a memorial to him was recently erected in Llandovery.

None of us, of course, actually remembers any of these people. We never met them and we don’t know what most of them looked like; they are part of our shared history, not our personal experience. But many of us – especially if we are older – do recall, even after decades, the Christian men and women who taught and shaped us, set a good example of discipleship and left an enduring and fragrant memory. So we might think of Mrs. Williams our  Sunday School teacher, or Miss Brown the Guide leader, Mrs. Evans down the road who always had time to listen, Mr. Jones who was always ready to clear the snow from his neighbour’s front path, Reverend Owen who led us to faith, and unnumbered shopkeepers, bus-drivers, teachers, nurses, musicians, in fact folk from all walks of life who showed and taught us how to follow Jesus. Saints don’t have to be famous, just faithful disciples; they may not be known outside our church or family circle; their lives may only be marked by a few lines on a gravestone or an entry in a crematorium register. But thinking back to them makes us feel good.

Our reading from Revelation, however, ask us to look ahead rather than behind us. It tells us that present troubles will be replaced by future glory, that hunger and thirst will be a distant memory and that God “will wipe away the tears from all faces”. We must remember that John wrote these verses as an elderly man imprisoned on the island of Patmos at a time when the early Church was being scapegoated for the Roman Empire’s troubles and undergoing persecution. In the vision which he believed to be God-sent, John was offering his readers hope, encouraging them to not abandon the faith even though it meant they faced challenges and hardship. It would be worth it in the end!

I think that, for some saints – I use the word as the Bible does, simply to mean “Christians” – it’s this future hope which keeps them going. They may be the only believers in a hostile family, finding it difficult to hold on to their faith, even being ostracised for holding such heretical and shameful views. Or they may be those who decide that they must leave a secure job because they know that their company’s business model is unethical, or because they are constantly being asked to lie or cut corners in safety. They may be courageous people who believe that it’s necessary to publicly critique an oppressive and corrupt political regime (of course it’s not only Christians who do that): that doesn’t usually end well for them, as Oscar Romero in El Salvador and Janani Luwum in Uganda discovered. And let’s not forget other ‘ordinary’ saints who devote their lives to teaching in tough schools on bleak Council estates when they could easily move to the leafy suburbs, or working as doctors in the slums of some Third World city or under fire in a war zone when they could have been respected consultants in a teaching hospital, or who simply keep following Christ even though their bodies are crippled by disability or a painful disease.

I wonder if we should regard saints like these as gifts from God? By that I’m not just thinking of their earthly achievements, although some obviously have left legacies of better justice, improved factory conditions, children rescued from the streets or whatever. But that’s by no means true of every person we call a saint – indeed, some may not have “succeeded” in any measurable human sense, or may even be regarded as glorious failures, misguided zealots who threw their lives away for nothing. No; when I say that these saints are divine gifts to us, I’m thinking of their example, their ability to inspire us by their firm hope of future glory which seemed so tangible that they were willing to undergo hardship, exhaustion, deprivation, criticism and persecution in the name of Jesus and for his Kingdom. To put it in a nutshell, they felt that all that suffering was worthwhile.

Well, we may be inspired, even excited, by these modern saints. But, if we’re honest, most of us would say, “I could never be like them. I’d run from that inner-city estate as soon as I was threatened by drug-dealers or loan sharks, I’d recant my faith as soon as the secret police mentioned ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, I’d do all I could to justify myself if I was faced by an orchestrated barrage of criticism, I’d complain loud and long to God if I was struck down by a chronic and painful disease. In any case, what’s the point of putting one’s trust in an airy-fairy promise of ‘pie in the sky when we die’ which we cannot prove and may not even be true? No; you can stuff your saints: I want to eat, drink and be merry now, not go through hell in the vague hope that I’ll end up sitting on a cloud with Jesus in heaven”.

Hmm … if that’s what you’re thinking, I can see where you’re coming from and I sympathise – after all, I’m not exactly brave! But I’d like to remind you of a couple of verses from Hebrews 12 which you’ll know well: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” – so there we have the saints who have gone before us – “let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” – yes, the word “us” came no less than three times! – “looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith who, for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God”. Even for Jesus it was future glory (together with obedience to his Father) which motivated him to go through dark times and even, in the Garden of Gethsemane, weep tears of blood.

Our nonconformist tradition doesn’t really “do” saints, at least not in the traditional sense; we leave that to the Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox. Nevertheless many of us do look back to great servants of God, such as preachers, missionaries or social reformers, from the past. Many, too, follow today’s Christian celebrities who, sadly and too often, turn out to have feet of clay. I can think of quite a number of men (and they usually were men) who were once greatly respected and an inspiration to many but turned out to be corrupt. Saints are never perfect, of course; we only have to look at some of the great characters in the Bible to see that. But these folk not only betrayed God but must have left their followers questioning their own faith.

As a boy I was for many years a member of the local Crusaders Bible class (the organisation is now called “Urban Saints”); I’m grateful for the fun, teaching and Christian nurture it gave me. Crusaders had a badge which we wore with pride; however on printed material there was a motto underneath, written in strange characters which I later found out to be New Testament Greek. These spelled out the words ἀφορῶντες εἰς Ἰησοῦν, not exactly accessible to young boys although perhaps saying something about Crusaders’ original “target audience”! The motto was later changed for the English version “Looking unto Jesus” from the book of Hebrews. For ultimately, of course, it’s Jesus we look to, rather than even the holiest of his disciples. The stories of their lives and deeds can (and should) inspire and challenge us, but at the end of the day they are still, as are we all, followers of Jesus. It is he we seek to emulate: in life, in service, in hope and, yes, even in suffering. As the hymn says, we try to see his footprints and, with his strength, do our best to plant our own feet in them, wherever they may lead us. That is the path of sainthood to which every Christian is called. We believe it leads us to glory.