First of all thank you for inviting me back to All Saints to preach. It’s so good to be back in the old pulpit surrounded by you all, old friends and new faces, lots memories of wonderful experiences and wild show piece extravaganzas and of course some sad memories too of people we knew and loved and who are not here any more. So many of you and them did so much to shape who I am, my own ministry and faith and I have a lot be thankful for, and I know it, and I am. I’m particularly grateful of course to Chris and to Peggy for extending the kind invitation to be with you tonight and allowing me what is a rare pleasure of breathing deeply and filling my lungs with a goodly dose of incense, the odour of sanctity and smell of heaven! And just before I start with the sermon I am delighted to be able to pass on a special and genuinely unsolicited thanks from the two confirmation candidates from St. Mary’s who were confirmed here a couple of weeks ago, Olivia and Phillip, and from their families. They all said how very welcome they felt, not at all like outsiders and interlopers but like real members of the family - and they particularly said what a wonderful service it was and how friendly you all are - I of course beamed proudly and said that I would only ever be the vicar of wonderful churches with wonderful people in them!! Thus being able to praise two churches with only one compliment!

Anyway enough praise, and back to the All Saints sermon for tonight.
May I speak in the name of the Father and of the Son.......

About once every three or four months a complimentary copy of the Alpha News falls onto my lap from my Church Times. It is well produced, well written, well photographed and above all it is free. My first reaction as I look at the beautiful young smiling faces is a mixture of prejudice, jealousy and inadequacy. Prejudice because it stands to reason to any moderately sane person that my version of Christianity is better than theirs. Jealousy because in spite of that their version of Christianity seems to work better than mine, and inadequacy because if that’s the case then it must be me doing something wrong! 

And so I flick through the pages of Sandy Millar and Nicky Gumbel posing first with The Bishop of London, then with the Archbishop of Canterbury, then with the Cardinal of Westminster - and no doubt one day with the Pope himself, - and I read through the articles about another half a million Christians drawn to Christ, and another dwindling congregation of 30 become a staggering 300 after only 12 weeks, all those feelings of prejudice, jealousy and inadequacy are strengthened and confirmed. So what’s going wrong I ask myself? 

But the point of my sermon isn’t to advertise Alpha - they hardly need my help there anyway - but nor is it to criticise it either, - there’s a great deal of faith, prayer, holiness and commitment at Holy Trinity Brompton where the Alpha Course came from and we could do with a bit more of that in all our churches! 
Rather the point of my sermon is about saints - how do we make saints of ourselves and of others? 
How do we deepen faith and prayer, find a real desire to study the Bible and serve God in everyday life - how do we make and become committed followers of Jesus giving our whole life and not just a part of it to him. 

The evidence - from Alpha News and elsewhere - seems to be that the simple clear cut message of sin and damnation converts people to faith - and possibly even to sainthood - more readily that our more liberal Gospel of universal salvation. And that is a problem for me and for churches like ours which, on the whole, preach a questioning and welcoming, inclusive and universal kind of Christianity - loving people just as they are with as little or as much faith as they have when they come to us, doubts, warts and all. Preaching a God who loves us, rather than a God who loves to be loved.


Basic protestant theology is simple, clear and above all it is personal - it is about ‘Me’. It takes as its starting point that we are all damned. When Adam and Eve sinned the whole world went completely wrong, and the key word here is completely. St. Augustine of Hippo, then Martin Luther and finally and supremely Jean Calvin taught not just that Sin entered into the world - as St. Paul gave us, but that Sin totally infected the world - the Total Depravity of Humankind. Crudely put, we have blown it and there is absolutely nothing we can do to rescue either ourselves or the world around us - we are all on a helter skelter to Hell and there’s only one way and that’s downwards - bad news!

Thankfully, however, there is good news - God is merciful and good as well as being just and holy - and so God works out the only plan whereby he can still be just and fair and sin can still be punished, and at the same time creation can be rescued. He will take the necessary punishment and destruction onto himself - so he is born, crucified and banished to Hell but because he is God - he overcomes it. The price has been paid, the sentence has been born and anyone who wants to can latch on to Jesus’s coat tails and can be saved through him. Calvin makes it all a bit more complicated with the theology of predestination - but that has to be another sermon by someone else I fear.

Now at one level that simple protestant theology is very attractive. We are all sinners and we all know too well that we are, and if we turn to Jesus, God will save us from the inevitable consequences of our sin. People are given a clear and rather stark choice between life and death, heaven and hell, salvation and damnation - and put like that the response is that many people really do give their life fully to Jesus. They are filled with genuine joy and thanksgiving to God for having been saved, - and I’m not knocking it - they become deeply committed in their whole life - not just their Sunday life, to prayer and to a living relationship with God who has saved them. This message - stark though it is - converts people.

But the theology of this stark message is a bad theology (sorry Calvin!) - and that’s the problem. It’s the personal ‘God saved me’ bit which changes lives, but it’s also the personal ‘God saved me’ bit which is too narrow, too egocentric and which limits God’s saving work in a way that better theology will just not allow. 

Better theology goes back beyond Adam and Eve, and tells of the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Free Will and te right to choose which God has given us mean that Good and Evil are constantly competing at every point for control - they compete in our world which struggles between life and death, health and disease, growth or destruction, they compete in our society between chaos and order, and they compete in our own selves between good and evil, generosity and selfishness, love and hate. The struggle is hard and continuous and each one of us - like it or not - is caught up in it day by day with every choice we make. It is, according to the book of Revelation an almighty battle in the sky with Michael and his angels on one side and the forces of evil on the other - poetry, story, and very powerful imagery. Who will save us? Cries St. Paul in his letter to the Romans. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. And Christ rescues not just me, but the whole universe - a far grander scheme - the victory of Good over evil. The resurrection of Jesus is the sign that God - who is out of time - has won that victory, eternally and categorically. We however who are still living in time have the strange situation of having to live day by day through the heat of the battle whilst yet knowing the outcome and victory is ours. Something about E = MC squared I think.

Now at one level this is exciting and wonderful stuff - God is interested not only in little old me going to heaven but in all creation going to heaven, trees and animals, stars and planets, the whole thing - Ephesians 1:10 : a plan for the fulness of time to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. Universal theology - salvation for all people - in the most extreme of forms.

But - sadly - this exciting and wonderful message doesn’t seem to change people’s lives, people who are more concerned about ‘me’ than about ‘all of the rest.’ . If it’s all happening out there, up there, somewhere else - indeed if it’s all happened and God has won the victory then why should I bother to get out of bed and go to church, read my bible or be nice to my neighbour. Where’s the incentive? Where indeed you might ask.

And so here are three possible answers - one from each of tonight’s readings. 

First - the Book of Revelation - You might write the Book of Revelation off as a rather strange psychedelic book at the end of the Bible about horsemen, glass seas and golden crowns. But one thing the Book of Revelation always tells us that there is a struggle going on and that we are still very much part of it. “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal” - and so what if, just what if it actually matters whether or not we say our prayers, read our bible, are nice to our neighbour, get out of bed and go to church. What if God’s plan for the fulness of time is us taking our part in that plan - and if we fail to do it then, God help us, we somehow work against that plan. What if when we pray “thy kingdom come” that is actually part of God’s plan in making the kingdom come and if we fail to pray it - even for one day, then the fulness of time is affected. If you want a simpler version, what if when we pray “I wish Lord that there wasn’t a hole in the ozone layer, and I wish there weren’t Nuclear Weapons and nations who would use them, and I wish people could live in peace” God says back to us “And so do I and that’s why I put you there! You are my plan” The phrase we use is the Body of Christ - and that puts us with Christ on the cross doing the work of salvation with him - and don’t cry ‘Pelagianism’ to me - it’s not, it is the doctrine of the Incarnation, the co-operation of the Blessed Virgin Mary with the Holy Spirit. It is what the rather difficult line from the Epistle to the Colossians means when it writes that St. Paul is making up that which is lacking in the sufferings of Christ - The victory is won in eternity, but somehow it still matters in time that we win it - day by day. 

Secondly - the epistle of St. John - it matters in all this what kind of a person we are and what kind of a person we shall become. Part of the transformation of the whole creation is our own personal transformation - the call to purify ourselves just as he is pure. We have to start our work of redemption of the whole world not out there with grand projects - but in here, in our own selves, and we do this by prayer, by repentance, by the grace of the sacraments of baptism, the Eucharist and confession and in the daily struggle each one of us leads, living as children of God - the doctrine of sanctifying grace. 
And thirdly we are called to be blessed. Jesus - who not surprisingly is always a couple of steps ahead of us here - doesn’t offer us salvation, heaven or hell - but blessedness. The promise of living the beatitudes is a promise to find blessedness of life, which is after all what we’re looking for, and what we have to offer, isn’t it? Except I guess we don’t quite believe it enough, do we. We don’t quite believe that a life of prayer, faith, discipleship - the Christian Life - will bring us not only salvation, but blessedness, true interior peace no in this life and in the life to come. 

It’s hard to see blessedness in the Beatitudes, I’ll grant you that. Most of us don’t want to be poor, or even poor in Spirit. We don’t want to weep or mourn or be persecuted, but perhaps it is only when we let go of our insatiable desire for wealth and security, for pleasure and eternal youth, and even for the constant praise of those around us, perhaps it is only when we let go of these things that we find blessedness - the true peace we are all longing for - sainthood.

Would that convert people? Well I think it would, if only we believed it enough for ourselves. 

The Rev’d Paul Kennington