York Minster

Celebrating the Saints - Simon and Jude

Date: 28th October 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Jeremy Fletcher

How do you read your newspaper? Do you always start at the back? Do you have to have it delivered by a certain time so that you can shout at the editorial over your toast? Or is it downloaded so you can catch up with the key bits on your pc at the desk? My newspaper rhythm changes at the weekends. On Saturdays I turn first to the page with the Court and Social and Personal Columns in the Telegraph. Not because I’m keen to see the latest news from Clarence House, but because that page has the Church Services for the next day. And I know that, if the York information is missing or wrong (as it has been for the last two weeks), at least three of you, and you know who you are, will come and tell me about it.

 It was with much relief that I saw yesterday that it was correct. My eyes could then stray to the Messages column. “Grateful thanks”, it said, to “St Jude”. Having done some research I now discover that there are many such messages. The custom has grown that if someone has asked for the prayers of St Jude, an acknowledgement of a favourable answer should be made public. One reason for thanking him in writing is that Jude is known as the patron of lost or desperate causes. This is partly because the letter of Jude in the New Testament encourages Christians to contend for the faith in the most difficult of circumstances, and is also because, when asking for the assistance of the saints in prayer, early Christians were unwilling to use the name Judas even though they were referring to the Jude we know as the brother or son of James, the one also called Thaddeus, the one who was not Judas Iscariot. So if you got to Jude when you were praying you must really be desperate. Now, as one whose collection of football teams includes Bradford City, Mansfield Town, Hartlepool United and Notts County I know a thing or two about lost causes, though why St Jude is also the patron saint of the Chicago Police Department is beyond me. Anyway, if your prayers are assisted by St Jude, it seems you have to let people know by means of the Daily Telegraph. Isn’t religion fun?

This is the season of the saints. Later this week the church celebrates All Saints and All Souls (or if you are being proper the ‘Commemoration of the Faithful Departed’). Today, commemorating Simon and Jude, is a good day to think about the saints, what we ask of them and what they might ask of us. As one who likes obituaries and biographies, the stories of the Christians of previous generations are always interesting to me. I value the round of the church’s year, where along with the great cycles of incarnation and passion at Christmas and Easter the saints and great believers pop up on their special days. Simon and Jude are commemorated on October 28 because their relics were moved to a church in Rome (and thence to St Peters) on this day in the seventh century.

We know a lot about some saints. Remember that the saints are all those who have died in faith, and indeed all those who believe through faith. That’s you and me, I hope. The best ones, for me, are those who are obviously flawed and difficult and human and messy, who have been used by God to do extraordinary things. I can’t do with the amazing and mythological stories about dragons and the like, and I’m not even sure about St Cuthbert having his feet warmed by otters after spending all night in the sea, but I am moved by the faithfulness of that same Cuthbert who brought the Gospel to a wayward and hostile land. Oddly, I’m also impressed by Paulinus, who did his bit in York for a few years, and then, when the situation got tough, popped back to the safety of Rochester, leaving James the Deacon to keep things going up here. Thank God for them both – they helped build the foundations of our life here today.

At All Saints we give thanks for the Christians who lit up their generations with faith, and passed that faith on to us. They are the saints we remember with joy and in celebration, for whom we rejoice. But there are saints whose lives have touched ours, to whom we owe much personally, and whom it is impossible to remember without pain. Though we want to wrap them up in our thanksgiving for all the saints, it is appropriate to remember them too by acknowledging our continuing sense of loss for them: it is with them that we feel most clearly a sense of the communion of saints. As a recent Anglican Roman Catholic statement puts it: “in Christ all the faithful, both living and departed, are bound together in a communion of prayer”. A friend put it to me like this after the sudden death of his wife: “I pray for and with her on the other side of God”.  And that is the special theme of All Souls on Nov 2nd.