An All Saints and All Souls Day sermon by the Venerable Colin Williams, general secretary of CEC

Chris has taken up rowing again. Back home in Canada it was his main leisure activity. But since he came to Geneva to work as an intern at an ecumenical agency there’ve simply been too many things going on. But these last couple of weeks he’s found his way into the Geneva rowing club. And so it was that last Saturday morning he found himself up early and rowing all by himself on the Rhone. Quite unexpectedly, he found himself caught up with the beauty around him. The intense autumn colours, the silence, the blue sky, the mist rising from the river – it was he said awesome. The beauty of his surroundings took him out of himself and beyond himself He was somehow caught up in something much bigger than himself.

It was the sort of experience captured two hundred years ago by the English poet William Wordsworth. In one of his best known poems he writes about the intense effect that his native surroundings in the English Lake District in the North West of England had upon him:
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light ,
The glory and the freshness of a dream

There are moments when particular places particular circumstances take us out of ourselves and point us beyond ourselves. In the Celtic spiritual tradition – the spiritual tradition which goes right back to the first arrival of Christianity in Britain in the decades after Christ’s death and resurrection – places that give us an opening into the wonder and glory of God revealed in his creation are called 'Thin Places’ . There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are always only three feet apart – but that in thin places that distance shrinks so that the two almost touch each other. The present day Irish poet Sharlande Sledge has written about thin places:-

‘Thin places’ the Celts call this space
Both seen and unseen,
Where the door between this world
And the next is cracked open for a moment
And the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy

Today is All Saints Day – the day when we give thanks for all the saints who from their labours rest.
And so it is a day when we celebrate the thinness of the divide between heaven and earth. We are reminded that Gods will is that the divide will become so thin that it will be broken down by the power of his love. Isaiah expresses that in our readings this morning:………..

In Revelation too the vision is of a new heaven and a new earth meeting and mingling as the home of God is set among mortals ‘and I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying ‘ See the home of God is among mortals. Visionary poetic language – expressing a profound reality – that in Jesus Christ the things of heaven touch the things of earth and transform them – water is transformed so that it has the power to reshape our lives, bread and wine are transformed so that in and through them we may feed on Christ.

And in the story of the raising of Lazarus, we see Jesus too demonstrating how in him the thinness between earth and heaven is dissolved. To his dead friend he calls ‘Lazarus come out’ And the barrier between earth and heaven breaks open And the dead man comes out and is set free

All Saints Day is all about remembering that there is no unbridgeable gulf between the things of earth and the things of heaven. In strict Catholic theology the doctrine of the saints itself declares that. The saints spend eternity making intercession for us to the Father so that through their prayers for us in heaven our earth-bound brokenness may be healed. Some if us will buy into that theology. Many of us will not. But whatever our theology there is a much wider agenda on this day. All Saints Day is all about proclaiming that we are called to play our part in revealing the glory of heaven in the humdrum existence of our everyday world – the glory of heaven which admits of no division, the glory of heaven which admits no foes nor friends but one equal communion and identity, the glory of heaven where there is no sound of warfare but the harmony which comes from profound fellowship. In and through the Christian Gospel the boundary between earth and heaven is so thin that that glory bleeds into our world – and our calling as servants of the Gospel is to play our part in making that thinness even thinner

The Christians of the city of Leipzig in the East of Germany knew that 20 years ago. 20 years ago Communist rule in the east of Germany was in its death throes. We know that now with the benefit of hindsight. The Christians of Leipzig don’t know that then. They had no reason to know that within a very few weeks the Berlin Wall would fall and oppression would be at an end. In those October days of 1989 Christian Fuehrer was the pastor of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig. His church had become the focus of hopes and yearnings of many citizens of his city for a new beginning. Every Monday evening since 1982 there were prayers for peace at 5.00 in St, Nicholas Church. They couldn’t be publicly advertised. But everyone knew about them. Sometimes the numbers of those attending became very low. But in 1989 the numbers began to grow. At the beginning of September, though the negligence of the authorities, western TV camera teams were able to get footage of what was happening. The following Monday people traveled from all over East Germany to join in.

But there were dangers attached to this. Already in September police had brutally attacked people emerging from St. Nicholas Church, And this was the year of the brutal repression of demonstrators by the Chinese authorities in Peking, an action expressly praised by the East German Leadership.

The crucial date was Monday, October 9 1989. It was known that extra army units had been drafted into Leipzig. 2 days before, demonstrations in Leipzifg had been violently put down. It became known that that weekend beds had been cleared in the Leipzig hospitals in advance of Monday. That Monday during the day many who were known to be participants in the peace prayers received threatening phone calls. Someone rang from one of the local barracks to say that the Communist party chief had given orders that St. Nicholas Church was to be cleared. Schools were closed early. Factories were closed and the workers told to come and occupy St. Nicholas church. The prayers went ahead . There was great anxiety about what would happen as the congregation emerged from the church. Whether they would be fired on. What they discovered as they emerged astonished them. Despite all the threats, 70,000 people had gathered outside the church to offer their support for those making prayer for peace and to protect them by their presence. What struck Christian Fuhrer was that they each held a candle. They were holding it with one hand and shielding the flame with the other. ‘For that he wrote ‘they needed both hands, so that the option to take hold of a candle became the option for powerlessness.’ Together the 70,000 walked the ring road of the city, past the St. Thomas Church where Bach had made his name, past the famous Gewandhaus from which the city orchestra took its name, right round the city. And the message was clear. On that night, the glory of heaven the glory of God’s Kingdom, was too bright to be extinguished by the shoddy power politics of a discredited regime. The boundary between the things of earth and the things of heaven seemed very thin indeed. Through the courage and determination of those people, Leipzig at that moment seemed a thin place .

Our calling is no less clear than it was for those followers of Jesus Christ twenty years ago in Leipzig. To make our community, our city, our world, the whole of the earth a thin place. A place in which not just through the beauty of his creation but also through our action, the things of heaven touch the things of earth and the glory of God’s Kingdom is revealed. Through our action, the poor cared for, racial injustice opposed, the hungry fed, the good ness of God’s creation preserved, the sick and the lonely comforted, through our action demonstrating that heaven is indeed no more than three feet away from earth - and need in fact be no distance at all.

Copyright (c) Colin Williams