All Saints', Steep
Eucharist
10.30 a.m., 31st October 2004
Readings: Eph. 1: 11-23
Lk. 6: 20-31
Some people have bizarre hobbies and my grandfather was no exception. His pride and joy was a collection of 32,000 moths that he had built up over the years. I well recall the process from my youth: the night-trap with its strong lamp to attract them out of the dark, the regular inspection for possible newcomers, which became more selective as time went on; the killing-bottle, making the whole process 50 years on look now ecologically very unsound; and then carefully setting them, with the antennae and the wings at the proper angles. The fun bit followed: placing them in the correct display cabinet, among the correct species and sub-species. A whole picture of a small part of the life of this planet took on new meanings.
Moths and butterflies, like other insects, depend on the right vegetation for their caterpillars to thrive; and just as vegetation varies, so will the kind of lepidopterae in different parts of the world. For example, the Swallowtail butterfly is rare in this country – but almost as common in Greece as the Green-veined White is here. Then there are natural evolutions; the Peppered Moth developed darker wings in the middle of the nineteenth century in the Black Country in order to adapt to new environments, and, interestingly, has reverted to dark grey in recent years. Then there are some moths that behave differently: a particular sub-species of the yellow underwing can be aggressively everywhere at once, whereas the Cinnabar, with its elegant red colouring, seems to glide around serenely. Most interesting for the collector are two other factors. New sub-species can be detected, like the Crinan Ear Moth, identified at the Crinan Canal nearly 100 years ago. But there are the aberrations; those offbeat colourings that are one-offs, and can only be seen as odd relatives of the common norm. And most baffling are the moths that are male on one side and female on the other: I remember one example where the wing-size variation of the two genders was so great that it would have been impossible for the poor thing to fly.
Now I am not for a moment suggesting that the Christian hope which underpins the feast of All Saints is like a collection of moths. But there are some parallels with the human race – before, that is, that final redemption which is the Christian goal. There are international variations that depends on different kinds of nurture; different groupings and sub-groupings that sometimes appear to merge in and out of each other; new forms that evolve according to circumstances (as a human race we’re getting taller by the century); different behaviour patterns; and there are also those among us whom we marginalise into being ‘one off’, because they don’t quite fit. All this is description, our description of ourselves, our way of coping with a globalised, differentiated world. It can lead to the most awful clangers: an international students’ Chaplain once invited all the Nigerian students in his area to a party, only to find they were as full of historic rivalries and factions as would be the case with a group of Europeans!
The Feast of All Saints started life in the middle of the eighth century as a kind of rag-bag of every saint that had not been recognised, when a chapel was dedicated in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Like that chapel, the feast was tucked away. It didn’t become really significant until the Reformation, when in the Book of Common Prayer the by then very large number of medieval saints’ days was drastically reduced; so that November 1st stood out with a prominence it had never known before. In fact, it wasn’t until after the Reformation that we began to have many churches dedicated to ‘All Saints’, Steep being a notable exception. There are several in the diocese. The most recent is my chapel at Bishopsgrove. This was a deliberate choice, partly because of my love of this feast, and also because it is a way of gathering together all the churches in the diocese, when they are remembered, with their congregations, in the Prayer Cycle that comes around every quarter. So the collection of moths, if you want to put it that way, is rich and varied.
All Saints thus becomes a picture of a world-wide church which is made up of all sorts of different types. A default-mechanism sticks rigidly to preconceived ideas on what the species should be, and blind to evolution - and to aberration. This is what makes this morning’s readings such a refreshing challenge, because they insist that we look beyond ourselves – before we look back to the persons we are, the people God has made us and is trying to redeem.
The epistle comes from the beginning of a round-robin letter in circulation among early Christians which was probably written by one of Paul’s followers (writing in someone else’s name was quite acceptable in those days) – and which in some versions had the name Ephesians added for some reason on the title-page. In this passage we are directed to an inheritance, a hope, to which we are called… which suggests that, while it is laid up for us somewhere else, in heaven, we are not going to ‘arrive’ in this life… which is why our lives are always going to have something of the provisional - and the unsatisfactory - about them. Perhaps some of those ever-buoyant round-robin Christmas letters we get, that tell a story of supposed perfection, and conceal all the sometimes quite heart-rending problems that we all endure, could do with a bit more honesty.
Then we turn to the gospel. Until recently on All Saints’ Day this was invariably the opening words of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5: 1-12), ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit…’ But now we have some variation, even a bit of aberration. For the year in which Luke takes over in the lectionary, which is this year, the gospel passage consists of the opening words of Luke’s ‘Sermon on the Plain’, as it is called. Jesus is not preaching from ‘up there’ on a mountain, as in Matthew: he is on a level with us – in tune with the themes of lowliness and humanity which run through Luke’s gospel. The same basic message is clear, but to the ‘blesseds’ Luke adds the ‘woes’, which Matthew places much later on, when Jesus is tearing into the Pharisees (Mt. 23: 13ff.) We have just heard Luke’s blend of them in sequence: here they are together. ‘Blessed are the poor’: ‘woe to the rich’. ‘Blessed are the hungry’; ‘woe to those who are full.’ ‘Blessed are those who weep’: ‘woe to those who are laughing.’ ‘Blessed are those who are hated and reviled’: ‘woe to those who are spoken well of.’ Here is vintage teaching of a profoundly uncomfortable kind. All the things that we value most, wealth, food, enjoyment of life, and a good reputation, are undermined. It is as if the moth-collector is directed, yet again, to the offbeat, the aberration, and the classy Hawk Moths, or the stylish Garden Tiger Moths, are to be passed over.
None of this is intended to make us find the nearest cross and then nail ourselves to it; nor to denounce out of hand every convenient item in the category of comforts we most hold dear. All Saints is about the hope of heaven, and while one side of the picture is undoubtedly about the contradictions and conflicts of this world - from Iraq to gays - being brought together and somehow made sense of, the hope of heaven must also be about being dissatisfied with life as it is commonly sold to us. Dissatisfaction with this world is therefore part of what it means to be called ‘blessed’ – not a permanent grumpiness, but a lasting hunger for something more Christlike, in our own lives, in the life of the Church, and the rest of the world. All Saints’ Day is an annual opportunity to lay hold of that claim, the vision of God which Jesus gives us where others can only speak of it – and to bask in the sheer fact and the lasting truth that countless others, the saints of God, are cheering us on in that rich and worthwhile quest.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
