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That Extra Dimension of Being

All Saints Day : 4 November 2012

One of the problems with being an Anglican is that our Church doesn’t have a mechanism for making saints. Instead, each Province publishes supplementary books of prayers and readings that commemorate outstanding Christians particular to the arrival of Anglicanism in that part of the world. They also provide an opportunity to acknowledge near contemporary Christians of other denominations who are important for their contribution to twentieth century Christianity.

The advantage of these recent publications is that makes it possible to retire and promote exemplars of Christian living without a long involved process of possibly controversial official Church investigation. Still, it does leave us with the difficulty that what you might call the gold standard saints tend to be pre-reformation ones. Which in a way makes All Saints day even more useful to us than more ancient parts of the Church. It is our opportunity to make sure that in our private prayers and recollections the people who shouldn’t be missed out as unsung heroes and heroines of the faith wont be.

And that is important because the fact is that none of us became Christians entirely on our own. Usually a variety of people in our immediate circle, or even family members back a generation or two quietly, sometimes invisibly, shaped our decision to say yes to God. So this is a day to be quietly grateful for all the unsung exemplars of Christian living who encouraged us to be believers. For the fact is that each one of us stands on the shoulders of others in the decision we made to be a Christian.

But while I am counting my blessings in remembering them, I am also wondering whether it is realistic to think that we might ever become a Saint? The issue is sharpened up for us by the fact that in the New Testament epistles all Christians, every Christian, is called a Saint. Yet is that a title we could lightly apply to ourselves when we consider the character description of such people as outlined in the Beatitudes that we have just listened to? Isn’t this a roll call of heroic actions, and heroic achievements by heroic people? Wouldn’t we be inclined to quietly give up if we tried to measure our lives by this exacting standard? Sainthood, forget it, I don’t care to get myself tied up in such a perfectionist knot and an intense muddle, might be our reaction.

Still, I am reluctant to divide up the Christian world into an A team and a B team, for fear that the elite over-achievers will leave the rest of us feeling utterly discouraged, and not even trying very much. And the possibility that we are all supposed to be Saints has got me intrigued as I try to work out how God sets about generating such a change process in our lives. Christians are supposed to be different in their manner of living - how does God make us different?

When we look back over the years in which we have been trying to be a Christian the chances are that we will notice a subtle change in some of our attitudes and behaviours. In gradual, undramatic ways we have shifted ground in some of the characteristic ways we react to certain kinds of situations. What we say and think and do has acquitted a different texture. This is I think brought about by the company we keep. A good marriage has this effect. Our spouse slowly and subtly changes us simply by sharing in the business of daily living with us. So it is with Christian existence. As we keep company with Jesus Christ our Saviour, in an invisible faith union, we become much more than we otherwise might have become, while at the same time being ourselves, remaining who we always were, in essential terms.

And that helps to shed fresh light on what Jesus was getting at in the Beatitudes. What is asked of us is also given. What we could never do in our own strength has been provided beforehand in order to get us started. The Kingdom that Jesus is always on about is itself a gift from God. It is a new world that we are being invited to live in that has arrived without our efforts. All we are being asked to do is to step into it, and let ourselves be changed by participating in it. Donald Hagner got it in one pithy phrase when he wrote, "grace precedes requirements." The big ask of the beatitudes is accompanied by a generous serving of Divine grace that encourages us, strengthens us, inspires us, resources us, to try living in this deeply satisfying way.

There is a different time dimension in beatitude living too. We are living towards the future, from which fresh resources of Divine grace are proceeding to refresh and renew us. We are growing into the sort of people described in the beatitudes - slowly, and with the odd setback of course - but we are a work in progress. The beatitudes aren’t the entrance requirements for getting into the Kingdom. They are rather a character outline of the kind of people and their behaviours that we become in our fully developed Christian destinies.

We live in a world that is oriented to the here and now. It promises a kind of heaven on earth - if you have a high disposable income, the right things and possessions, a beautiful body, a successful career, and attractive friends. The people of the beatitudes see through all that, and wont settle for these shallow promises and false freedom. They live towards God’s future, not minding too much the uncool diminished circumstances that are the appearances of beatitude living. They have an extra dimension of existence, orientated as they are to a future horizon. This extra dimension of being is brought about by an inner transformation as a result of the action of the Holy Spirit. At times this inner remodelling process can produce a kind of disoriented feeling as our old instincts, habits and affections get knocked about a bit. But that doesn’t matter so long as we are moving towards God, rather than away from him. In fact, at times it can feel as though we are in darkness as our old world of shabby compromises and complacent moral failures are shown up in a new light of shame making illumination. The ability to cope with healthy doses of truth about our situation is a sign that we are on the road to the Kingdom.

Several years ago in Australia I heard a Rumanian Orthodox priest give an intriguing lecture on experiencing the Holy Spirit. "You seem to assume," I said afterwards, "that you have to be a saint to experience union with God." He replied, "There are two kinds of saints, successful saints of the kind I have been talking about in my lecture, and unsuccessful saints like me." On balance I think this is a good analysis, but I have high hopes that we will all grow into becoming successful saints.