01 Nov WHAT IS A SAINT? Notes for a sermon preached at St Stephen’s Church, Exeter on All Saints Sunday, 2025
Today the church invites us to celebrate the Saints—all of them! What, then, is a Saint? As what are sometimes called “Bible-believing Christians” (not, incidentally, a description with which I am entirely happy, since Christians are people who believe in the Triune God rather than merely “the Bible”) you may well answer, “a Saint is a baptised person” or “a saint is anyone who is a Christian”—for that’s how the word is used in the New Testament. St Paul, writing to Christians at Corinth, refers to them as “saints”[1] even though he is in the middle of criticising them for behaviour that is not at all “saintly” in our usual sense of that word! Luke, in the Book of Acts, speaking of Christians in particular places—Jerusalem and Lydda—simply calls them “the saints”[2], and evidently feels no need to explain the word or qualify it. What did they mean by this? They and other New Testament writers understood the word “saint”—or, to be more precise, the Greek word hagios which our English Bibles normally translate as “saint”— they understood it to mean “dedicated,” “consecrated,” or “set apart.” And they used it of any Christian because Christians, in their view, were by the mere fact of their baptism evidently people who’d been set apart by God—one might say, they were chosen, consecrated as God’s own. So it was even with the one whom Christians traditionally recognise as first of Saints and Queen of Heaven (regina Coeli)—the mother of Our Lord. The angel’s first word to her was about nothing that she was to do or be. It was entirely about God’s grace to her: “Hail, O favoured one! The Lord is with you!”
All of that granted, it remains that quite soon in its history the Church began to see some people as behaving in ways that showed particularly clearly that they had been set apart by God. They were seen, if you like, as Saints with a capital S. What is it that led people to single them out in this way?
I would say it’s this: that while being chosen by God is a gift, it is (like all really valuable gifts) a gift that creates new possibilities, new things to hope for, new things to try. And Saints with a capital S are those who seem to the rest of us especially to have embraced those possibilities, fixed their eyes on those hopes and tried those new things.
But that, of course, is how it is—or at least, how it’s meant to be—for all of us who are Christians. Without any particular merit or work on our part we are, it seems, precious in God’s eyes. But that very fact, if we are serious about it, challenges us to do something. To do what? Peter’s First letter puts the answer in a nutshell: “You are,” it says, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of God’s own, so that you may announce the praises of the One who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”[3]
And how do we do that? The church’s calendar of saints is full, of course, of persons of extraordinary courage, wisdom, and ability who proclaim God’s glory in many ways: and such figures may well inspire us. But they may also put us off. “I could never manage anything like that!” we say, and perhaps we are right. That’s why, for what it is worth, I find St ThĂ©rèse of Lisieux so helpful—the little Carmelite who died in 1897 aged 24. In comparison with the great heroes and heroines of Christian history, I tend to think of her in terms adapted from a phrase used early on by Apple to advertise its computers: “the computer for the rest of us.” ThĂ©rèse is “the saint for the rest of us.” She wasn’t a person of great ability and didn’t pretend to be. By some standards, at least, she wasn’t even a particularly good nun: she was known to fall asleep during the liturgy and found the rosary a torment! She was clear, at least to herself, that she was not a heroic soul. On the contrary, she said she felt totally at one with “my brothers, the sinners,” in their doubts and in their wickedness. In the latter part of her life until her death she lived in almost unbroken spiritual darkness, hanging on only by repeatedly making acts of faith, just trying to love Jesus and bring the love of Jesus to those round her. And yet, somehow, through it all that, through that gentle and in many ways very limited and unremarkable life and death, God has become tangible for many in her own and later generations—including me—and that is what Saints do.[4]
To do and be these things is, then, the particular calling of Christians: but our God is generous to and in all, and it appears that God by no means works this grace only through Christians. When Etty Hillesum, the young Jewish writer who died in Auschwitz, was on her way via the transit camp in Westerbork to the train that would take her to the death camp, she wrote a few last notes to her friends. In one of them she tried to explain what she believed she was called to do in that unbelievably evil time and place: “Someone,” she said, “has to take responsibility for God in this situation. That is, someone has to behave as if God were real. Someone has to make God credible by the way that they meet life and death.” And for all that many might have thought her a very unlikely candidate for such dignity, she was so bold as to attempt it: to make God believable by the way she lived out what was left of her short life, and by her dying. And, like Thérèse, she actually did do that, and still does it for many people.
The thing is, despite the demands of a certain kind of rationalist, God doesn’t make God’s self credible by arguments or proofs. Never has and never will! Not because God isn’t real, but because God is too real for any argument or proof that we could formulate or understand. I am reminded of a story told about the great ballerina Margot Fonteyn. She had just completed a wonderful dance, and someone asked if her if she would explain what it meant.  She smiled and shook her head. “If one could explain it,” she said, “there would be no need to dance it.” God draws near to us and dances with us, not by arguments but in the richness of human lives–pivotally, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and again and again in the lives and deaths of those who will be God’s witnesses. How do witnesses establish truth? By giving evidence. It’s as simple as that. The Saints are those who give evidence—who, indeed, are evidence: who make God believable by how they live and how they die.
To celebrate All Saints is to celebrate such lives and deaths—the fellowship of the saints. It is also to recognise that God calls us to be parts of that fellowship. [5] Not necessarily major parts. I doubt if anyone here is going to make it into the calendar of saints, though of course one never knows! ThĂ©rèse said on one occasion that spiritually she wasn’t a beautiful flower, just a bit of moss. But the fact is, moss is very, very useful: moss keeps soil together and enables beautiful flowers to grow. And guess what!–she did make it into the calendar! But then, another fact is, it’s not up to us to decide whether we’re major or minor saints. What we can decide is whether we will try to be the particular piece of evidence that we can be, in our own place and with our own small abilities. And for that, what better than ThĂ©rèse’s plan, that we can try to love Jesus and share his love with those around us?[6] You and I trying to make God credible in that way will surely cause only tiny, tiny ripples amid the floodwaters of the entire world. But who can doubt what an immeasurably happier place the world would be if everyone tried it? Amen.
[1] 1 Cor. 6.2
[2] Acts 9.13, 32.
[3] 1 Peter 2.9.
[4] There’s a lot written about Thérèse, and some of it isn’t very good: as an excellent way of first approach, see Simon Tugwell, O.P. Ways of Imperfection (Springfield, Illinois: Templegate, 1985) 219-229.
[5] My friend Robert Macswain puts this by paraphrasing the words of a great, even though flawed, American president: “Ask not what theistic evidence can do for you, ask what you can do for theistic evidence!” (MacSwain, “Hagiological Argument,” 665).
[6] Micah 6.8