The Unknown Saint

At the West end of Westminster Abbey, set into the church’s floor, there is a tomb to the unknown warrior. This unnamed, unidentified soldier was given a state funeral on Armistice Day 1920, the ceremony having been the brainchild of Reverend David Railton, an army chaplain who had served on the Western Front, and had seen while serving a grave marked simply ‘An Unknown British Soldier’. Following the unprecedented slaughter of the Great War, the symbol of the Unknown Warrior was a both a rebuke and a promise:  the rebuke, that human life was not merely expendable, and the promise, that every life was precious in God’s sight.

The Christians of the Fourth Century were faced with a similar problem. The persecutions of the early Church by the Roman Empire had been so widespread and so bloody that it was no longer possible to keep track of all those who had died for their faith. While local cults and saint’s days had proliferated, there was still an anxiety that the martyrdom – that is, the witness – of some was not being given due consideration. Their individuality, their personalities, their failings and their foibles – all these had been lost as they were transformed into mere statistics. And so the commemoration of All Saints sprang up, a recognition that even though the names, the individuality of the dead might be forgotten, their lives and deaths kept them intimately connected to the life of the church. In this commemoration was both a rebuke and a promise: the rebuke, that no human forgetfulness on the part of the church should be allowed to undermine the reality of the communion of saints, and the promise, that the living and the dead remain part of one another through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

As we celebrate this feast today, we do so as part of the double commemoration of All Saints and All Souls. These two feasts became connected to each other around the turn of the first millennium, several centuries after the first celebrations of All Saints. It is one of the most powerful feasts in the Church’s calendar, a moment of communal grief in which we acknowledge the universal experience of death. We grieve, and we entrust those we love into the all-encompassing love of God. It joins us closely together with one another, but it also joins us closely together with those believers in the Early Church, who first commemorated the Unknown Saints. For what were they doing if not grieving? Grieving the wholesale slaughter of their fellow-believers, entrusting that the faith they had shown even to death was not in vain. The grief of All Souls is not just our grief – it’s the grief of the whole church, living and departed. It’s the grief of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a sword pierced her own heart at the foot of the cross. It’s the grief of Christ, weeping at the tomb of Lazarus. All Saints and All Souls, therefore, come rather to feel like two sides of the same bridge. On the one side, we stands God joyfully welcoming his blessed, beloved creatures across the bridge of life forged by Christ on the cross. On the other side, on All Souls we stand, trusting in that welcome, but also feeling the inescapable human woe of separation. Since God’s grace is always at work before we notice or respond, it’s right that God’s part in this should be recognised and celebrated first, before we move on to the human experience of grief. But they both have their place, and they are part of the whole.

But if this is the case, if All Saints and All Souls together make up a whole, today’s celebration contains a promise, and a rebuke. In our gospel reading today, we heard Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, more familiar to us from Matthew’s gospel. Matthew’s version is generalised. ‘Blessed are the meek’, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, etc. They are abstract. Luke’s version is far more direct. ‘Blessed are you. Blessed are you who are poor. Blessed are you who are hungry. Blessed are you.’ But then also, ‘Woe to you. Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are full. Woe to you.’

The promise of these words is that we, too, are part of the communion of saints. We are among those who are blessed. We are poor in the eyes of the world if we choose the riches of Christ. And the rebuke is that, no, we therefore cannot leave sainthood to other people. We, too, are those to whom woe is ascribed. Woe to us, who in the fulness of our lives, do not look beyond ourselves to what God is calling us to do. We cannot leave it to others. 

So what does sainthood really look like, if we are to partake in it? In C.S. Lewis’ fantasy of heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, the narrator is introduced to a saint. From the procession that precedes her, the music and the dancing, the narrator assumes that she is someone he will have heard of, perhaps even the Virgin Mary herself. But no, his guide says. ‘It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’ Despite her anonymity in her life on Earth, in Heaven she is known as one of the great ones. 

Sarah Smith is renowned in heaven for her love. All those who came into her presence – children, adults, animals – knew that they had a place in her love. And when they left her presence, they went on their way more loving, healed somehow in their own relationships. The figure of Sarah Smith is deliberately generalised. Her name is generic, her origin mundane. We’re not told how she came to live a life of such loving virtue, merely that she did. She is, if you like, the Unknown Warrior of sanctity. But we’ll all have our own specific examples – acts of love and altruism that have stayed with us for years afterwards, or those who merely by their presence and the action of their love upon us have changed us for the better.

This is one kind of sainthood, the example and love of those who push us with their love to be who God has intended us to be. It’s sainthood enacted through blessing, through insistent goodness and love. This is one kind of sainthood that is open to us, and no, we cannot leave this kind to other people. But there is another kind of sainthood, a sainthood that is equally open to us, the sainthood of woe. The sainthood of being a bloody pain in the neck. The sainthood of not giving up, of refusing to take no for an answer. The sainthood of seeing the brokenness of the world around us, and being determined to do something about it. And no, I’m afraid we can’t leave this kind of sainthood to other people either.

So let us approach the altar today, where earth and heaven meet, renewed in our determination to be numbered among the saints. We bring all of ourselves, our blessings and our woes, our griefs, our bereavements, and our joys. We come to be nourished in our love, and inspired in our hunger for justice. May God grant us grace to follow his saints. Amen.