1John3:1-3, Matthew 5: 1-12

Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to how many saints England can boast? The answer is around three hundred of which some one hundred and forty are Cornish saints and over fifty Northumbrian ones and hard as I tried, I couldn’t discover any saints from Surrey. Among those three hundred there are three kings namely Alfred the Great, Edward the Confessor and Charles the First and the most notable women were Hilda of Whitby, Julian of Norwich who was an anchorite for some forty years and Margaret of Clitheroe who in the turbulent years of the Reformation was most gruesomely pressed to death for sheltering a number of Roman Catholic priests.( If you are not squeamish look up the details) And two last facts for now.  The first English saint was St Alban a citizen of Rome who converted to Christianity and was martyred for so doing in his case by beheading.  And according to legend his severed head rolled down a hill and a well sprang up at the bottom which is now known as Holywell Hill . . And our very latest English saint is John Henry Newman who was given his halo in two thousand and nineteen but in without the necessity of achieving sanctification through losing his head.

So, a fair legacy for us to think about and if we so choose to be inspired by, be it Mother Teresa caring for the poorest of the poor in Calcutta or the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe who voluntarily took the place of another prisoner in a German execution cell and was starved to death or St Alban refusing to recant his newfound Christian faith.

Although, I have to confess, that the many ways in which so many of them chose  quite deliberately to mortify the flesh do not have any appeal be it hair shirts or standing in freezing sea water to say one’s prayers and I definitely do not wish to be an anchorite, entombed in a small cell for the rest of my life.. But mortifying the flesh apart what exactly might we be called to do following the footsteps of these undoubtedly holy men and women. And to answer that I have three quotes about what exactly it is to be holy, what in effect it is that creates a saint. The first of these is ‘to be holy is to know that you can easily still be bad and to leave the transformation to God. holiness may creep up on you unaware-it is always a gift.’ I love this idea of holiness creeping up on us unawares maybe even in this service this morning. And as an example of this we can think of St Francis who as a young man led a very dissolute life before holiness crept upon him and he was called by God to serve him and dispense with all worldly wealth.

 And the second quote by Sam Wells is this: ‘a saint is a small character in a story that is fundamentally about God.’ I think this quote helps remind us that compared to the wonder, the majesty, the infinite and the  eternal that is God we are indeed such very small characters, tiny bit parts in the immensity of the story that is His alone, Think of Julian of Norwich, a woman in what was in medieval times was very much a man’s world, walled up in her cell for at least twenty years and maybe as much as forty but through God’s grace  who was given the gift of divine revelations which have helped bring the gospel  of God’s loving purposes for us his children to unknown millions down the centuries we too are infinitely small characters but it is my belief we all have a part to play in the story however insignificant it may appear.

And my third quote for this morning is ‘a saint is not someone who is good, but someone who experiences the goodness of God.’ And here I think of Teresa of Avila who regularly expressed her many failings but also believed without a shadow of doubt that God was always with her as testified by these words: ‘For you are God- — you are not surprised by my frailties, my continuous failures. You are my God, but also my friend. You are on my side you will never fail me.,’ Can we make the same boast, have the same confidence that no matter how often we fail God will still be there beside us?

So reflecting on these we can recognise that a saint does not wake up in the morning and determine’ I will be holy today’ but may well wake up and declare ‘I will do my utmost to be good today and to find the good in others.’  And in that endeavour God may through his grace bless their actions with holiness. And thinking again about Sam Wells’ words those saints surely knew that in their own very small sphere of influence given the wideness of God’s world that they were simply called to bring the message of the gospel to all those within their limited reach.  The message of the gospel that teaches how God so love this world that he gave his only begotten son to the end that we might not perish but have everlasting life.

For at the heart of the gospel is always God’s sacrificial love for us his children. A recognition that John writes of with such clarity: ‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are’. And if this is so surely, we too are called to convey such a divine message to all whom we meet along our life’s road knowing that we are one family just as the saints of old did. That is surely how all the ‘official’ Saints have acted by living lives of service and devotion not just to God but to God’s children in accordance with the two great Commandments. Saints at heart are quite simply ordinary people just like us but whose work for and devotion to the service of our Lord is so richly blessed by him so that the ordinary becomes the extra-ordinary

Thus I am absolutely convinced that each of us inspired by those truly great Saints and experiencing the goodness of God can in our small individual way be ‘little’ saints and play a tiny part in revealing God’s eternal and infinite love for all his children be they saints with a capital ‘S’ or those like us with just a very small ‘s’ Today may we faithfully rejoice and give our grateful thanks for all God’s saints great or small and who knows maybe one day there may even  be our own Surrey saint,