| Tracy Smith desperately wanted to be normal. So she got married and set up a normal home with a normal husband.Copyright St Elisabeths.
Now, Tracy’s husband had an unusual name: He was called Sylvanus Timothy Ditchwater. To his friends, this gob-full was abbreviated to “STD”.
Tracy didn’t like this one bit. “I am not having a husband whose nickname sounds like a shady clinic, she said.” So as soon as they were married, Tracy had Sylvanus Timothy Ditchwater changed by deed-poll to plain “John Smith,” because John Smith was normal.
Tracy and John went to live in a normal house, painted in normal colours. Tracy wore normal clothes, and her body was pierced with a couple of quite normal piercings because Tracy was 26 and normal 26-year olds are pierced, but only twice.
Tracy wanted so much to have the normal amount of children. The trouble was that the normal amount is 2 and a half, and Tracy couldn’t manage the half, so she settled on having just two, and it worried her.
Tracy didn’t smoke, because most people didn’t, but she drank because most people did.
Of course, Tracy only drank a normal amount of 10 units of alcohol a week.
As a child, Tracy went to Church. Now she didn’t. It was, after all, normal nowadays for adults not to go to Church. Copyright St Elisabeths.
And in any case, Tracy had begun to find some Christian ideas quite challenging.
Yes, Tracy had suspected for sometime that Christianity was definitely not normal. In fact, she had decided, it was quite subversive.
A lot of it seemed to be about risk.
Tracy’s sister Sharon, though, had carried on going to Church. But Sharon had no children……… and Sharon had piercings in exotic places: so she wasn’t normal………. and she had very short hair.
One day, Tracy was going on about Asylum Seekers - whom, she said, should all be sent back - and dossers and big-issue-sellers, who, she said, should all be thrown in Clink - and hungry people in Africa, who, she said, should pull their finger out and do some work instead of messing about and catching AIDS and dying.
Sharon listened over the normal cup of Nescafe, and tried to tell Tracy that she was wrong.
Sharon quoted the bible, the bit called the “The Beatitudes”, that list of people who God was going to bless and make very special, including the poor and the hungry and those who weep and those who are hated.
It all sounded very trendy and politically-correct to Tracy. This was the sort of stuff trendy liberals in Fallowfield believed in, Tracy thought. But Tracy was Reddish, born and bred, and she wanted to be normal, not trendy.
Yes, Tracy wanted to do well with her life, buy a hairdressers, make money. She pushed John with his football; he was only 22 and there was still a chance he could make United. Then there would be a mansion in Wilmslow, shopping at Harvey Nicks and lots of big dinner parties where Tracy would give normal food like lasagne and salad to the rich and famous.
Christianity, Sharon said, was about much more than this. She went on about swimming against the tide, alternative values, the world in God’s promised reign being turned upside-down.
“Listen, love” said Tracy. If you want a better world, sort out the illegal immigrants who sponge on the social, and bring back hanging.”
Sharon muttered something about learning to love one’s enemies.
Today is the Feast of All Saints. Today we celebrate all those little names who don’t have a day of their own: the saints you knew and I knew, the holy people who radiated God’s love in our world, the ones who were often elderly and single and lived alone and were sometimes vulgar and eccentric, ……..but whose lives shone with brilliant light of holiness.Copyright St Elisabeths.
Today reminds us of that line we say week-by-week in the Creed when we declare that we believe “in the communion of saints.”
And what does it mean, this “communion of saints”?
It means that we are claiming a link, a connection, a relationship with people down the ages who have reflected the light of God in our world. It means that we are claiming to be part of a body with them, the Body of Christ, the Church whose boundaries are beyond time and space and outside normal things and in the realms of heaven.
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about narrowing the boundaries of our own Anglican Church to exclude those who do subversive things.
I wonder how big the communion of saints would be if we excluded those figures from history who were subversive, abnormal, and challenging?
And I wonder how true to the gospel the Church would be if it cast out those Christians who preach a gospel which is so true to the bible that it is subversive and provocative?
A few days ago, a guy said to me “I don’t know how you do your job, all that having to be nice to people and all those funerals. And it’s not as if the Church is a very tolerant or progressive institution, is it? And everyone knows that it doesn’t pay well. So what keeps you going?”, he asked.
I told him that I failed miserably at being nice to people, and only two things kept me going.
The first is this. What we are doing today. This mass, this eucharist, this meeting of Christ’s body round his table. This keeps me going: being part of the company, co-panis, a Latin word which mean “the sharers of bread,” the feasting on Christ, his body and blood, a place at this altar, this sacrifice, this mountain top where God is met and given and feasted on; this keeps me going.
And the second thing is the wonderful, enormous privilege of meeting ordinary people in this parish at extraordinary times in their lives and in their deaths, and seeing God at work in them.
Yes, this second thing that keeps me going is about a ‘phone call from the Co-op, and a knock on a door on Marbury Road, and a meeting of a family or a partner who has never come to Church, and a sharing of their grief, and a glimpsing of their faith. It’s about seeing God shine out of their lives with so much power and light that even Marbury Road becomes a little paradise.
What keeps me going is seeing God not just in those who come here week by week, but seeing God also in those who don’t come at all and often don’t realise that God is at work in their lives.
This is the most amazing privilege of ministry in the Church of England, and it’s linked to the fact that we are the Church for all who chose to come, that this building is legally open for the Christenings and Weddings and Funerals of every single person who lives in this parish.
The Church, this Church, is not just here for the normal, the respectable, the average. These are, statistically, a small minority anyway. The majority in this land today are perhaps like you, single, or widowed, or growing old or “living over the brush”, or transgressing the usual standards in many other ways.
The Church is here for all. Young old, male, female, married and not married, transgressive or typical. The Church is here to be inclusive, open, welcoming; ready to celebrate the presence of God in the lives of all we meet.
Today’s gospel ends with words which have been called “The Golden Rule”: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
Wouldn’t you rather be included rather than cast out, accepted rather than rejected, welcomed rather than ignored?
Wouldn’t you rather be understood rather than condemned, be loved rather than be hated?
At the heart of the gospel is a God who welcomes us while we are yet sinners. This is not a God who wants us right and perfect before we are welcomed and accepted by him. This is a God who welcomes us as we are, prodigal children, vulgar, obsessed, lost, uncertain, abnormal, but loved, loved by God at a depth beyond human imagining.
Wouldn’t you rather be understood rather than condemned, be loved rather than be hated?
Of course you would.
And the gospel’s Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you”, means that each one of us must include and welcome and understand and love others as we long to be included and welcomed and understood and loved.
Yes, today’s gospel challenges our notions of what the world should be like. It offers us a vision of God’s kingdom where human ideas of power and status and normality are turned upside down.
It’s a vision of a world which we sometimes find perplexing and a wee bit frightening.
But those who work to build that new world, who seek to put its values to work in their lives today are called “Blessed”, saints indeed.
May we learn to rejoice that God chooses to bless us with his presence in the lives of every human being.Copyright St Elisabeths.
May each one of us work to stretch the boundaries of the Church to be so wide that no one is excluded; for all, each and every human being is truly a temple of the living God, and God is in every human life waiting to be worshipped and served and loved and adored. Amen.Copyright St Elisabeths.
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