Today we are celebrating the feast of All Saints. That means all the saints who have ever lived, whether they are on the calendar or not, and, as time does not work the same way in the kingdom of God, those who have not yet been born. It is a feast of the life of the whole Church and a natural progression from Pentecost.

In the very early days, it was a feast of the martyrs. The Troparion for the day is all about the martyrs.

Adorned in the blood of Your Martyrs throughout all the world, as if clothed in purple and linen, through them Your Church cries out to You, O Christ God: Bestow Your bounties upon Your people, grant peace to Your habitation, and great mercy to our souls.

There is now a great variety of saints in the Church, but the martyrs remain our root - like a rock on which the Communion of Saints is founded. As Tertullian said: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”. And lest we forget our roots, relics of the martyrs are embedded in Holy Table, on which the Liturgy is celebrated, and in the Antimins, the cloth which is spread out on the Holy Table during the Liturgy. This is a direct continuation of the practice of celebrating the Liturgy on the graves of the martyrs, forming the nucleus for every parish church.

It's interesting to contrast the hero and the martyr. Both are brave. Both live through trials that are way beyond ordinary. But the hero faces death by going into battle. The martyr faces death by not going into battle. Which doesn’t mean he or she avoids suffering or endurance, but that they don’t embrace violence or the pursuit of power. She or he chooses humble love as the way to speak about truth.

The word martyr means witness. A witness establishes that something is true. Our martyrs have given evidence – they have made God knowable by how they have lived and how they have died. They didn’t try to prove the existence of God by arguments. God does not make himself known by argument, but by the lives of those who follow him.

Who breathes life into these lives? Where does their fire come from? Again, All Saints is a natural continuation of Pentecost – the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the Comforter - Paráklētos, in Greek.

Fr Anthony Coniaris says that Paráklētos means more than Comforter: it means someone who is called in to help when a situation is beyond the power of the person to help themselves. Hence the various translations of Advocate, Counsellor, Comforter. This is the Spirit that breathes through the Church, and characterises what we call “The Communion of Saints”.

On the Day of Pentecost - the flames of living fire came down on each of the Apostles individually. And is it still so. St Peter tells us : “But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do”

It’s tempting to have something of a caricature of holiness and to dismiss the idea of our own call to holiness because we know we’ll never be St Basil the Great. But we are each called to holiness. Each of us has received a unique calling to share the ministry of humble love in the Church.

And it is completely unique. In the Book of Revelation each of the saints is given a white stone on which is written their personal name – known only to themselves and God. Metropolitan Kallistos liked to tell a story from Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim. “Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’
But this is not talking about isolated self-actualisation in the secular sense.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

No one becomes holy alone. In the Church the grace and comfort we receive from God is mediated to us through each other. And, any darkness in my own Christian life is never my problem exclusively. It is shared.

The feast of All Saints is a great and glorious calling for each and every one to share in the humble love of the saints.

Given by Mother Sarah