Psalm 24.1-7, Isaiah 25.6-9, John 11.1-4, Revelation 21.1-4
Technically, the word ‘saint’ simply means ‘a member of God’s People’, and in particular a member of the church. In his letters, Paul often uses the word to refer to members of the churches he’s working alongside.
But in popular usage it’s come to be associated with martyrs. In the Catholic Church, to be martyred for your faith is the surest way of becoming a saint. Witness the example of Archbishop of Oscar Romero from El Salvador, who was martyred for speaking out against those who were oppressing the poor.
One Salvadoran woman, who attended his recent canonisation in Rome, said he had been a saint from the beginning. Esther Chavez first met him when she was working in a school. She was explaining to him what she did for a living when he said, ‘I think you have a different type of job to do.’ He asked her to go and work with poor women in her home town, providing childcare for them while they went out to work, and she has been a community activist ever since, for the past thirty years. That’s the kind of impact that he had on people.[1]
I guess we’re all familiar with the idea of martyrdom - dying for the sake of what we believe, or in the act of living out our beliefs. It’s something that’s always a theoretical possibility for any Christian.
There was a scene in a recent TV programme in which one of the characters talked about the kind of uncertainty which surrounds anyone, Christian or not. She stood on the pavement in a busy street and asked her companion, ‘How do we know that one of the cars going past us now isn’t suddenly going to veer off the road and knock us down?’
To take that idea a stage further, how do any of us know, when we step out of our front door, that today we won’t be called upon to push someone else out of harm’s way and suffer the fate that might otherwise have befallen them? Automatically we would become a martyr. But, of course, it’s a fate we always hope to avoid. ‘Let this cup pass from me,’ we might say, echoing Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he died.
Early Christians identified other kinds of martyrdom, too. They had in mind choices that were more humdrum than dying for our faith, simply adopting a way of living in which - because of their faith - people take a series of steps or decisions which radically alter the direction they might otherwise have taken. They take risks for God, or they deny themselves opportunities that might have led to wealth or influence in order - like Esther Chavez - to devote their lives to helping the poor and the oppressed.
Is this a kind of martyrdom which every Christian could embrace, without hesitation or any second thoughts? What if we could all become the kind of martyr who ‘makes a very serious commitment to following Christ’ in our everyday lives, but without anything desperately tragic or cataclysmic happening to us; just a series of little martyrdoms which together amount, over time, to an uncompromising witness to our faith?
I suspect we all know people who have lived like this. Shouldn’t we aspire, like them, to be the same kind of martyr? And isn’t that what it really means to be a saint? It involves letting go of things - hopes and ambitions, things that might have made life more enjoyable or easier somehow - in order to fulfil our destiny or do something which we believe God is calling us to. This is what the Celtic Christian bishop St David called, ‘Keeping the faith by doing the little things well.’[2]
And then there is a further type of martyrdom which is about ‘leaving all that is familiar to go on a journey without a particular destination in mind and without necessarily intending to come back, but waiting to see’ what God has in store for us. This understanding of martyrdom was embraced by countless Nineteenth Century missionaries.
Some were self-denying in more than one way. At Richmond College, which was a training school for Methodist missionaries, a memorial was put up to all the missionaries who had gone out to Africa. Many of them died within a year, and they weren’t speared to death by angry pagans, they all died of disease.
One missionary’s story is probably typical. She caught malaria and the doctors prescribed leeches to reduce her fever. She quickly seemed to recover, but the fever returned and the leeches were reapplied. This treatment continued for several months until she became so weak that she died. But other missionaries survived and worked on the mission field for their whole lives, never intending to return, at least until they retired. That too was a kind of martyrdom.
Because of the missionary journeys that Celtic monks undertook, this kind of martyrdom has been read back into the history of Christianity in these islands. The Celtic missionaries braved the sea in small boats or travelled long distances on foot over moor and mountain. Really they were just following the example of Jesus and the first disciples, who also embarked on this kind of journey, from Galilee to Jerusalem. And St Paul went on a series of similar journeys - eventually returning to Jerusalem, with a charity donation collected from his own churches for the relief of poverty there, before finally being sent from Jerusalem to Rome, to appeal his own case to the Roman Emperor after his arrest.
In both those cases their journeys ended in the classic kind of martyrdom - death for what they believed in. But for the Celtic missionary St Columba it did not. Legend has it that, after breaching copyright by making an unauthorised copy of an illustrated book of the psalms, he and a group of loyal followers were put into a small boat, without any oars or a sail, and cast adrift. If God still had a purpose for them they would find landfall and could establish a new monastic community. If not, they would drift slowly out into the wide ocean and perish.
In truth, Columba was probably sent on an authorised mission from Ireland to see what God might want him to do in Scotland, but it was still an heroic thing to do. His journey turned out to be a triumph, but it could just as easily have ended in martyrdom of the classic kind.
Ministers, of course, and their families, and many other people taking a new turn in their lives, follow this form of martyrdom - leaving all that is familiar behind them to go on a journey to somewhere new and unfamiliar, not knowing how that journey might end. And metaphorically, at least, we can all make that journey. Even churches can make that journey, leaving the familiar present behind, the way things have always been done, in order to journey into an unknown and unknowable future.
[2] Quoted by Heather Fenton in Guidelines, March 2018, The Bible Reading Fellowship
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