November at St James

November 1st is celebrated in the church as All Saints Day. In the Apostles Creed we say ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.’ So I wonder who comes to mind when you think of ‘saints’?

Maybe you picture St Christopher, his right hand on his staff and his left arm around the child he is carrying to safety. Perhaps you picture St Francis surrounded by birds and animals, or Joan of Arc who led men twice her size into battle as she answered God’s call. Pictures like these give us the kind of idealised visual image of saints that, for me, get in the way of thinking of them as real people. It would also be a mistake to think that saints only existed in days long gone by: just think of people who have until very recently been living saints, people like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa.

There are many ordinary men and women in our own times whose love for God has led them to do extraordinary things, which means that none of us can shrug our shoulders and say that sainthood is beyond our reach. I’m sure we can all think of examples of ordinary people, the sort of folk you would walk by in the street without giving them a second glance, that we could easily call ‘saints’; people whose love for God is so great that it influences the whole of their lives.

In his letter to the Ephesians (Ephesians 1.13-14), St Paul reminds us that we have all been marked with ‘the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people’. God calls us to be ‘saints’ in our own way, to live to give praise for his glory and to share our knowledge of him with others through the things we say and do day by day. That might involve doing something incredibly newsworthy or dangerous, but in reality for most of us, it’s going to mean something more domestic, more within the compass of our everyday lives. God needs us here just as much as he needs those few global figures out there; there is just as much work to be done in bringing about his kingdom in the streets where each of us lives as there is on far flung continents.

And we’re not doing it on our own. We have the company of the communion of saints (the saints sitting here among us and the ones we know about from the stories told about them down the years), all of them encouraging us on. Because we are all part of the same body of Christ, knit together in that communion of saints.

This month, as we remember all those who have set us wonderful examples of how to live out our faith, let us thank God for the gift of his grace that enables each of us to be saints in our own unique way as we go about our daily lives.