Abstract
Earlier this year I watched a fascinating documentary called ‘Stand Up to Shyness’ by Rhod Gilbert. Rhod Gilbert is an apparently super-confident comedian who regularly stands up on stage in front of thousands of people, and also performs on television to a huge audience. Yet appearances are deceptive. In the documentary he reveals how he suffers from shyness at times so severe that it can make him anxious about doing apparently simple things like walking into a café and drinking a cup of coffee by himself. And that in turn leaves him feeling ridiculous—a far cry from his public image. By setting aside that public image in this documentary, and sharing his actual sense of vulnerability, he enabled others he met to journey through their anxiety into gifts they didn’t know they had.
Today on All Saints’ Day, we are invited to look again at appearances, and reflect afresh on the place of what might be regarded as weakness or folly in the eyes of the world. Speaking of those who have died in the faith, we have this description of the saints in the Wisdom of Solomon: ‘In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be an affliction, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.’ The willingness of individuals to embrace vulnerability, to experience and show pain, to give up their very lives, may seem ridiculous to a world that prizes material comfort, the appearance of strength, and self-preservation before all else. No doubt the saints looked and felt anything but strong as they suffered social humiliation and the physical pain of a broken body. But the reality is that those people have held onto the truth of their lives and the integrity of their love for God and others. In doing so, even though they appeared weak to the world, they have embraced the ultimate depth of wisdom, love and truth, and with it the prize of their eternal place with God. And they have enabled others to follow in their footsteps, walking through pain and vulnerability into hope and new life in God.
Biblically, there are so many wonderful examples of people who have done extraordinary things in faith, yet who have felt broken and even humiliated during the experience of that suffering. There’s Elijah, who having performed great feats of faith flees into the wilderness and feels such a sense of failure that he asks God to take away his life. Or Jonah, who having successfully warned the people of Ninevah of the danger they were in, and in doing so saved them from destruction, complains to God that he has been made to look an idiot because his prophecy hasn’t come true. There’s Mary—willing to endure social humiliation at becoming pregnant before she’s married when she says yes to becoming Jesus’s mother. There’s St Paul, who received his great call and conversion only once God had taken him into a place of profound vulnerability—experiencing blindness and dependency upon people he had once regarded as his enemies.
The flaws and vulnerabilities of these and so many others, with their complex characters and their convoluted histories, are important. Because if, on All Saints’ Day, we are to take sainthood seriously, we need to get past the sentimentalized idea that a saint is someone who’s got life and faith perfectly stitched up. Biblically, and in the real world, saints are anything but ‘saintly’ in the serene and sentimentalized way that we sometimes imagine. Living through the experiences that will form us into sainthood doesn’t seem to feel particularly saintly for anyone. And indeed, in these days when we are learning about the dangerous and damaging pasts of people the media and the church have in the past put on a pedestal, we do well not to be taken in by outward appearances of holiness.
But if the outward appearances of others, and our personal feelings about our own experiences can be unreliable as guides as to sainthood, how do we know a saint when we see one? And how do we move towards acquiring something of the quality of saintliness in our own lives? It seems to me that there’s a clue in our gospel reading. ‘Come out’ commands Jesus to Lazarus, summoning his friend who has been dead for days, wrapped in bandages and looking as unsaintly and unsavoury as a man could possibly appear. Lazarus must dare to step out of the tomb, and then be unbound from the bandages that restrict him in order for his life to be returned to him and in order for him to witness to God’s glory. Sainthood here is both an individual matter, requiring courage and conviction, and a team effort, requiring active participation of one kind or another on the part of the community.
Whether it is the cruelty of others that forces us to stand our ground as in today’s first reading, and so discover the depths of our faith in resistance and pain, or whether, as with Lazarus, the love of others enables us to discover sainthood in generosity and community, we do not grow into sainthood alone. Nor do we necessarily grow into sainthood in places and ways that we traditionally identify as holy.
Which brings me back to Rhod Gilbert’s documentary. Public and private responses to ‘Stand up to Shyness’ are revealing. People from some surprising walks of life (clergy included!) have taken courage from his honesty and felt freed to imagine new possibilities for themselves, discovering that what they thought was a weakness or an inability to do something is actually a potential source of insight, relationship and deep strength. It seems to me to be wholly biblical and right that it takes a comedian to summon that life and possibility from a place of such anxiety—God once again using a less than obvious person in the most awkward of places to summon others into hope and life.
So today, let’s notice and dare to be thankful to God for those situations in our lives that test and even frighten us—our insecurities and failures; our brokenness and our loss. Buried within them, as surely as within the tomb of Lazarus, is the possibility of our growth into sainthood as we stay faithful and dare to obey the command to come out into new life against all the odds.
Because God is as deeply with us today as he was with the biblical figures who have inspired generations of Christians, and the saints who followed their example. He is there in the toughest of places, in the least likely of people and the hardest of times, inspiring us, and commanding us out of the hurts and fears that bind us, to witness to his joyful, life-giving love. And who knows, improbable as it sounds, how often we ourselves play a part in that—through our example inspiring others to turn to God in faithfulness.
So in the quietness, let’s give thanks to God for the diverse, complex and improbable saints who have inspired and challenged us, and—with audacity and hope—let’s give to God for our own opportunity to witness to his saving love.