On Sanctification

What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s a simple question which occasionally I still ask myself. Inevitably, it’s the sort of question that comes to mind at the baptism of a little child. We gather today to celebrate the baptism of Nicholas, to pray for him, to celebrate the joy of Felix and Eleanor, to welcome him as part of our community, - and inevitably we find ourselves contemplating all the potential and possibility that the future might hold for him.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I remember a colleague being asked this question a few years ago. There was a moment’s pause, and then he said, much to my surprise (partly because I knew him), ‘I want to be a saint’. To be honest, the surprise lay in the fact that the desire to be a saint had never actually crossed my mind. And yet, I suddenly realized that ‘To be a saint’ is a vocation to which every single one of us is called by virtue of our baptism. You and I are called to be saints.

But what might this mean? Of course, some of our preconceptions about saintliness are often unhelpful – the ‘hero’ or ‘heroine’ of faith, being ‘holier than thou’, the myth making which sometimes attends the lives of saints. One only has to think of another saint called Nicholas to ponder the complexities of all that. Of course, we can rejoice in the witness of others through the centuries who excite in us the desire for holiness, but sometimes saints leave a legacy which is hard to bear. Clambering up the steps of this pulpit, glancing at the roundel of St John Henry Newman, I sometimes have to remind myself that this pulpit is mine now. In a University city, confronted by the twin poles of imposter syndrome, on the one hand, and a sense of entitlement, on the other, most of us struggle to find a happy medium between the two.

So what does it mean to be a saint? The Greek word for a ‘saint’ – hagios – from which we get the word ‘hagiography’ is also translated ‘holy’. To be a saint is to be holy. And yet what does holiness look like? How does it manifest itself? How do we embody the holiness that we find in the scriptures? What might ‘sanctification’ mean for us?

These are the questions that Matthew’s community struggles with. Of all the gospels, Matthew is unique in referring to the ‘church’ – the other gospels never refer to ‘the church’. They are surprisingly unchurchy. But Matthew includes in his gospel material which we often associate with another document from the early church, The Didache or ‘The Teachings of the Apostles’, which is a sort of manual of church discipline. Matthew is clearly exercised by the phenomenon of conflict within the church, those moments when people disagree, when they stop listening to one another. In the gospel passage today, there is a frank and direct acknowledgement of the power of sin, which can sometimes take hold. Matthew touches on the difficulties which can attend the moment when people have to part company in a community. He doesn’t dodge the tricky question of excommunication. Matthew is clear that the gospel makes demands of us. Grace is not cheap.

In the sanctuary, in the Chancel, there is a small bronze crucifix. I often sit in the same place at Morning Prayer each day, in a position where I can see this cross, and I often think of the story behind it. It was given to St Mary’s by the German Lutheran Congregation. Many of you will be familiar with the story of this group of German refugees, who began to arrive in Oxford early in 1938. The number included ‘non-Aryans’ (as they were called), opponents of Nazism, and members of the Confessing Church, which had been established in opposition to the official church approved by the Nazis. Their lives were precarious – persecuted and expelled from home, they were officially counted among representatives of an enemy nation. And yet, they found a welcome here, and on the 3^rd September 1939, the Lutheran Congregation held its first service in the chancel of St Mary’s. This was the day that the Second World War broke out.

During the war, this community grew as others escaped from the Continent. Among them, along with her family, was Sabine Liebholz-Bonhoeffer, the sister of the famous German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Among Bonhoeffer’s writings, we discover many reflections on Matthew’s gospel, particularly in his book The Cost of Discipleship. In the course of his own life, Bonhoeffer had to make some difficult decisions. And what makes The Cost of Discipleship such a powerful book is the knowledge that Bonhoeffer was put to death by the Nazis just before the end of the Second World War. Bonhoeffer wrestled in particular with the task of sanctification. He wrote powerfully about the calling of the church to be holy, to be the communion of saints:

‘The community of the saints’, he writes’, is not an ‘ideal’ community consisting of perfect and sinless men and women, where there is no need of further repentance. No, it is a community which proves that it is worthy of the gospel of forgiveness by constantly and sincerely proclaiming God’s forgiveness (which has nothing to do with self-forgiveness). It is a community of men and women who have genuinely encountered the precious grace of God, and who walk worthily of the gospel by not casting that grace recklessly away.’

And then he says this: ‘In other words the preaching of forgiveness must always go hand-in-hand with the preaching of repentance, the preaching of the gospel with the preaching of the law. Nor can the forgiveness of sin be unconditional – sometimes sin must be retained. It is the will of the Lord himself that the gospel should not be given to the dogs. He too held that the only way to safeguard the gospel of forgiveness was by preaching repentance. If the Church refuses to face the stern reality of sin, it will gain no credence when it talks of forgiveness.’

In our epistle, St Paul is characteristically forthright about facing the stern reality of sin and cultivating a life of holiness. So much of Paul’s letter to the Romans concentrates on the question of justification, being in a right relationship with God, and of course this question was at the heart of Martin Luther’s concerns at the Reformation. Paul argues that justification is offered to us through faith in Jesus Christ. It is not a matter of the works of the law. Whatever the limitations of Luther’s reading of Paul, he saw rightly that we cannot earn salvation or work out our own salvation. The gift of salvation is bestowed on each one of us gratuitously, recklessly, graciously, and abundantly. And yet that poised moment of grace also provokes in us, stirs up in us, the acknowledgement of sin, and the need for repentance. But equally this does mean that our actions do not matter. In these final chapters of Romans, Paul also speaks of the need for sanctification: ‘Let us then lay aside the works of darkness’, he says, ‘and put on the armour of light’. As we contemplate his words, we see the way in which the imagery he uses illuminates the symbols of baptism: the sign of the cross, the light of the resurrection.

We are invited to walk in the way of Jesus Christ, to be transformed into his likeness through the grace of his cross and resurrection. This is the way of holiness. All is grace, and we do not cast that grace recklessly away. Through that same grace, which is bestowed upon us in the sacrament of baptism and then again and again in the sacrament of the eucharist, we receive the strength to grow in holiness, to die to sin, to rise to new life, to put on the armour of light, above all, to love one another, for love, as St Paul says, ‘is the fulfilling of the law’. And in that most excellent gift of love, we discover who we are and who we will become.