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In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost.
Today we are keeping the Day of All Saints, of all
those who have heard Christ speak, whose hearts and minds have been set
afire, and went out into the world to bring to the whole world the good
news. The news that God has so loved the world, that He has entered into
it never to leave it, and that in His Resurrection He has taken all that
is the world - in His Flesh the whole visible world, in His soul all the
human world - and has established it on the right hand of the Father.
This is not only the glory of the Church, it is a
call addressed to each of us. To-day we are called by the Gospel, we are
encouraged by the Epistle, so to love God as to become truly His
disciples, and that means that our faith in Him must be and become, day
after day, more truly faithful, so that seeing us, seeing how we live,
seeing who we are, people could believe that Christ has come to save the
world and is worth following as a Master and as a Friend.
St James, speaking to people of his time said: If you
want to show me your faith without your works, I will show you my
faith by my works… Let us then go into the world to bring to a
world which is in great misery now, in distress that it has lost its
way, the good news. Not only the news that God has come and is in our
midst, that He has shown us the way, that He is the way and He has given
an example for everyone to follow, not in a slavish way, not as a
hireling, but with the joy that following this way means that we are
fulfilled and that life is deep in us and it can flow on to others.
This is the message of to-day's feast. In the next
two weeks we will keep more particularly the feast of the Saints of
Russia, and the feast of the Orthodox Saints of these islands, - people
of our blood, our flesh, our kin. Let us think of them and let us try to
live in such a way that they may rejoice that they have a following
worthy of Christ and worthy of their lives. Amen.
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