(This sermon was delivered by my father, Barry Clarke, at St Matthias Denman, on St Matthias Day 2003)
Lord uphold me, that I may uplift you. Amen
If your brain started to wander during the reading about St Matthias you may have missed all there is to know about him. So forgive me if I read it again. ‘And the Lot fell on Matthias’. That’s all there is. There isn’t any more. It’s a bit like the English summer. If you are not awake you’ll miss it.
So the lot fell on Matthias. But that didn’t make him St Matthias. All it did was to include him in the band of the twelve Apostles, as a ‘replacement’ for the now missing Judas. It was yet quite some time before he would officially become known as St Matthias. For now, he was just an ordinary member of the infant church, who happened to be chosen, to be one of their leaders.
What then makes a SAINT?
The Oxford dictionary (among other things) says: ‘a holy person regarded as having a place in heaven’ , ‘a member of the company of heaven’.
The Dictionary of the Christian Church says ‘Saints are those now in heaven BECAUSE OF their exemplary lives.’
So much for definitions.
Saints go back a long way. They are not merely a creation of the New Testament times. I can not give you any examples of specific old Hebrew Saints, but they certainly believed in them. As far as I can tell, they (the Israelites) seemed to leave behind a monument to the person who had died, but as a place for the worship of God.
In Deut 32 we find ‘The Lord came from Sinai – and he came with ten thousand of saints’. Most definitely the idea of saints was alive and well in Old testament times.
In fact, before even then, the thought of saints is evident in older pagan cults, although in their case they tended to turn them into gods and to worship them as such.
Saints have been around for so long that they are not about to disappear. Nor do we want them to. (A bit more about that, later.)
These we have been talking about are what we might call small ‘s’ saints. Saints none the less, and as our definitions said, with a place in heaven, where are all the departed souls who belonged to the family of God.
The idea of big ‘S’ saints who became to be venerated as a specific person, began sometime after the death of Matthias. (Tradition says that he was martyred about 80AD.) By the time another 80 years had passed the cult of martyrs was well and truly entrenched in church customs.
Early church fathers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries were happy to accept a theological basis for the commemoration of certain Saints at the Eucharist and they made a distinction between these saints and the ordinary dead (or our small ‘s’ saints).
In these formative years of church structure, saints were created by a local congregation on the strength of that person’s known reputation. As devotion to saints grew, so idolatry arose and the worship of relics, some of spurious origin, began.
Bishops then became responsible for the declaration of saints in the area under their jurisdiction but the number of saints still continued to get out of hand.
Around about the year 1000AD we get the first formal canonization of a Saint. That is, this person was entitled under the canon law of the church to be honoured by the Church, by name, as a Saint. About this same time the important distinction between the WORSHIP of God and the HONOURING of Saints and angels was made and became the accepted norm.
It took a few centuries then to complete the great task of revising the list and the ‘lives’ of the accepted Saints. The sole authority for the declaration of Saints was now vested in the Papacy for the Catholic Church and the Synod for the Orthodox Church.
With all that done and Matthias’s name being on the list we can now say that he had become St Matthias, which is what we are doing today.
Now let me pose a question.
Here we have a man, an ordinary man, who just happened to be around at Jesus time and able to follow him around to hear what he had to say. He wasn’t one of the original Chosen Twelve. He was, as it were, just a replacement part – and with two available replacements it was a 50/50 chance that he would not get chosen. But he did. The lot fell on him. SO, what might have become of Matthias had the marbles fallen the other way??? Who knows? But I guess he would have continued with his ordinary life as a member of that infant church, as ‘part of the Body of Christ’ – a term in use very soon after Jesus death. He would almost certainly NOT have become known as Saint Matthias but yet he was still the same person.
Which brings us to a third type of saint. US here alive on earth now.
Pail, in one of his letters to the church at Corinth, wrote ‘we are called to be saints’ he is not saying that ‘we-are-called-to-be-saints-after-we-die’ saints but rather that we are CALLED upon to be saints NOW, in this life. Remember in Paul’s time there were no big ‘S’ saints, so what is he talking about? To the church at Ephesus he wrote of the Mystical Body of Christ, with all members as fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God. So dead or alive we are to be numbered with the saints.
One of the clauses of the Apostles’ creed states ‘I believe in the communion of saints’. In fellowship with them. Passed loved ones can become closer to us because of this belief that we are all called to be saints. A very comfortable thought.
Further on in our service during the Thanksgiving, Father Glen will say to us, ‘therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven…’ (i.e. saints passed and saints present, and particularly today our Patron Saint Matthias) – what wonderful company to be in – and then he will ask us to worship God with our response ‘Holy, holy holy Lord, etc’ .Let’s put our heart and soul into that response as we honour the memory of those near and dear to us individually, and of Saint Matthias.
Matthias, an ordinary type of person, upon whom the lot fell, to be something extraordinary. Who knows, one day the lot may fall upon us to do something, that to us may appear to be extraordinary. May we take up the challenge like Matthias and run with it.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.