Sermon by the Rev. Andrew Swift

It a great pleasure to be back here is St Aidan’s after an absence of over ten years – and when we left Clarkston for Bristol in 2000, I did not anticipate that when I eventually returned it would be under these circumstances.

This was a very important church in my Christian journey, and you are a very important church family on that journey. It was while we were in Clarkston that I rejoined the church after nearly 12 years of absence. It was in this church, in May 2000, that I was received into the Anglican Communion by Bishop Idris before we were headed off for ten years in the mission fields in England.

Today, as we celebrate the feast of All Saints, and also the closely coupled festival of All Souls – we are encouraged to think about those Christians who have gone before us, setting us an example of how to live a life of faith – it isn’t giving too much away for this talk by saying that I consider the good folk of St Aidan’s among the number of those saints, certainly from my perspective.

In the wider population, an understanding of All Saints is rather problematic. Today is Halloween – a day that has taken on the trappings of a major commercial occasion, filled with parties, costumes, images of all sorts of strange stuff. I’m not sure how threatened I should feel that there are lots of people dressing up in strange clothes in Clarkston tonight, rather than just me!

I did a brief sample of the wider public perception of Halloween, All Saints and All Souls in a tiny little primary school in Cowal last week. The school was decked out in orange and black with pipe-cleaner spiders hung everywhere and occasional paper pumpkin lanterns.

A brief interrogation showed that no-one knew that the ‘Hallow’ meant holy – the saints – and that it was about All Saints the next day. Someone knew it was something about remembering the dead – a vague association from the past with an All Souls’ service or remembrance of some kind.

We have a danger that All Saints and All Souls are sandwiched too convincingly between mock-spooky Halloween and bonfire night, another festival whose original meaning – celebrating the protestant monarch surviving a catholic attack – has also been lost. But what do we, as the modern church family, hold onto in these feasts?

All Saints is a chance for us to focus on those holy, special people who have inspired the church over the years. There are ‘types’ such as Abraham or Moses from the Old Testament, the ordinary but inspired fishermen and peasants of the gospels, and the many, many holy men and women since them, who have searched diligently for God’s purpose, and as a result lived lives of holiness and wonder. All Souls is a chance for us to face the very real pain of human death, the pain of losing a loved one, and also of remembering all those that have died in faith. All Saints and All Souls together give us the ‘cloud of witnesses’ that have gone before us, for two thousand or more years, who by their lives and deaths have shown us God’s love and the ultimate hope for the world: salvation through Jesus Christ.

But there is a real danger that we can merely gather in our buildings, especially built for that purpose, to explore these fundamental principles of our Christian faith. We can examine the deeper meaning within the biblical accounts, we can examine the Greek tenses in Matthew’s version of tonight’s beatitudes versus Luke’s, we can discuss what it means to be a saint, a holy person. We can reflect on a theology of life, death and salvation. These are all good things, and things we should do.

But how do we take our message, our vitally important message, outside these church walls and into the streets of Clarkston?

Most of those people outside here would, if they listened to the gospel message, probably agree that it sounded rather good. Take tonight’s gospel – a promise that those who are suffering now will have their suffering relieved. The four blessings that Jesus promises are for the poor, for the hungry, for the sad, for the reviled. The woes that follow: for the rich, the full, the joyful and those held in high esteem – wrapped in implied poor ethical behaviour – that rings true and just. The final line is, ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you.’ I’ve had people come up to me for the ‘I’m not religious, but…’ conversation – and say, ‘…I just believe that we should do to others as we would have them do to us.’

Ordinary people out there are living embodiments of the gospel values that Jesus proclaims: love, justice, peace, a desire for wrongs to righted. But they need to hear that the love of God, through Jesus Christ, will deliver this gospel of love, mercy and justice.

Our challenge, as we face a society that can seem indifferent to our church, is to focus on the values, the transformation, that the gospel brings to human existence. If we are open to the transforming power of God in our lives, just as He acted in the Saints, in the faithful departed, the light that shines from us will light up the lives of those around us. They might just be distracted from carving pumpkin lanterns and lighting sparklers long enough to see what God can do – and they might just say, ‘I want to be like them!’ Amen