Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on All Saints' Day 2025

Some of you already know that, when I get leave, I demonstrate an appalling failure of imagination and quite often go to look at old churches. Oxfordshire perhaps, and last week Derbyshire, but best of all, and always, I might go to Norfolk. Five hundred years ago Norfolk was rich—the heart of England’s wool trade. There was money and the money built churches. And, what churches they built—Salle, West Walton, Walpole St Peter. Muscular towers, wide windows, broad naves full of light. Now, if you are minded, you can push open some old oak door and step back into a church where, once, they knew the saints.

There are all kinds of reasons to visit these churches, but I go, most of all, for their rood screens. A rood is a cross. A great wooden cross with Christ hanging from the nails towering over the people up on a beam where the chancel met the nave. Below there was a screen, graceful tracery, six or eight huge window frames without glass so that you could see the altar beyond and beneath that a wooden fence, waist high, with doors in the middle and panels painted with the saints. Five hundred years ago you would not have sat in your pews, you would have been hugger mugger up here next to the saints. You would be on the floor, eye level with Peter, Andrew, Thomas. In church you worshipped with the saints, you joined your prayers to theirs, you were numbered with them.

And, if you are the kind of man who visits fourteen Norfolk churches in three days, you think these screens are fascinating. You will find the saints you would expect—the apostles, Peter and your Thomas, James the Great and James the Less. Alongside them, saints that perhaps we do not know as well Lucy, Agatha, and Barbara and sometimes an even more unfamiliar name, like Walstan. You can find Walstan at Barnham Broom, Burlingham, Ludham and at Sparham. Why? Because Walstan was a local boy from the Norfolk village of Bawburgh. He was there beside you, and next to Peter and Thomas, because, in a way, he had always been beside you, he was a Norfolk man; kith and kin. One of us. The saints, apostles and a local boy.

I am afraid, we all too often think the saints as set apart, seen in stained glass, encountered as a statue or a painting, a far off, unfamiliar figure, another time and other place, a life apart from ours. The saints surely are super-human, super-holy. But that is to get the saints utterly back-to-front. Saints, in fact, are bone of our bone, the saints are family, women and men who you might find in this time and this place. That really matters. A church that knows saints who come from round here, a faith that kneels with the saints, that looks them in the eye, that’s a specific kind of faith. It sees holiness as human and sees holiness here.

Bear with me, as I try to explain. A few days ago, I was listening to a recording of Alan Bennett’s diaries. He was talking about sheep being slaughtered near his home in Yorkshire in 2001 because of an outbreak of foot and mouth. He was talking about the fact that years and years of breeding was being lost—breeding that equipped sheep for their life on the Dales, the places to be in bad weather, the places for ewes to take lambs, all would be lost as a bloodstock was lost. A memory, a way of life, bred-in-the blood. We could talk about the saints in the same way. We are blood and bone of the saints. They lived our lives and lived them well, lived them holy. That possibility is in us.

We need the saints, need to bring the life of grace near and make it real. A child is killed in an accident—flowers will appear and cards. The cards might say things like ‘Gone to join the angels’, or ‘shining with the stars’. I know why it feels important to say that, but the language of the saints is not angels and far off stars. Heaven comes much closer than that, you can see the footprints of the saints in local soil, you can feel the glory burn beside you. To know the saints is to know that holiness comes close. It is possible, possible here, possible now. That is part of the mystery of the communion of the saints, it is the part that says it is not a mystery at all. 

Saints came from our community; they were lives seen and known. They have gone before us and assure us that by talking about what we have known, we can begin to talk about the things that will be. The language for heaven is the language of this place, these people, it is a life we can describe.

This is John Donne,

we do live together already, in a holy communion of saints, and shall live together for ever, hereafter, in a glorious resurrection of bodies. …if the dead, and we, be not upon one floor, nor under one story, yet we are under one roof. (Sermon XX)

Here is a community that sweeps up the living and the dead, saints and sinners in a shared experience and a shared hope. Saints beside us living life so we don’t have to make guesses in the dark. John Donne goes on:

This is the faith that sustains me, when I lose by the death of others, or when I suffer by living in misery myself, That the dead, and we, are now all in one church, and at the resurrection,

That is a big part of the Feast of All Saints. Their holiness and ours, a shared faith. A faith here, a faith now. A faith for us and the saints together.

The saints are the company we keep, they make holiness possible. The saints—our past and our future. The saints are the shape and colour of our hope.