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Hymn: Who are these like stars appearing?

Introduction (Fr Owen)
Welcome to St Gabriel’s Pimlico for our worship of God in this service of Morning Prayer. I’m Father Owen Higgs.

Christians have always gathered at regular hours during the day and the night to say the Psalms and hear the Scriptures. In our Morning and Evening Prayer we respond to God with praise on behalf of all creation and with prayer for the salvation of the world. These daily prayers are the hinges of our life here at St Gabriel’s. Along with the Eucharist they provide not only a structure that shapes our life as a Christian community, but they are a way by which the Holy Spirit nourishes and forms us as the Body of Christ in the world.

We welcome especially listeners to Radio 4 to pray with us today. And, of course, our worship is not just with God’s people on earth. Our worship on earth is always part of the greater worship of God in heaven. Today this is the more in our hearts and minds as we celebrate all God’s saints, our brothers and sisters who have gone before us signed with the sign of the cross.

Today, we continue to pray for all innocent people, Israeli and Palestinian, who are caught up in the terrible violence in the Holy Land, and for all those suffering from conflict across the world.

Sung opening responses (Dan Soper)

Fr Owen
The night has passed, and the day lies open before us;
let us pray with one heart and mind.

Brief Silence is kept.

As we rejoice in the gift of this new day,
so may the light of your presence, O God,
set our hearts on fire with love for you;
now and for ever.ÌýAmen.

The choral parts of today’s worship are sung by our friends from Inner Voices, a chamber choir made of singers from a group of inner London state schools. They continue our worship with Psalm 84, a psalm of trust and hope and joy in the Lord.

Choir: Psalm 84

Reading: ÌýIsaiah 25.6-9

°ä³ó´Ç¾±°ù:ÌýThe Lord is my light (Pascoe)

Responsory (Fr Owen)

Choir: Blessed be the Lord (Barnby)

Fr Owen
In a few moments time we hear from our preacher, the Bishop of Fulham (the Rt Revd) Jonathan Baker. But first, a reading from the New Testament.

Reading: Revelation 7.9-17Ìý

Sermon: The Bishop of Fulham
It’s one of those markers which help us to notice the cycle of the seasons. For those of us here in the United Kingdom, the clocks have gone back today, and with that a sense that we have moved more deeply into the evening and night-time of the year: the nights are drawing in, we spend more of our waking hours in darkness, and even the ubiquity of electric light generated at the flick of a switch cannot entirely rob us of an instinctive sense that, at this time of the year, the world is turning. Meanwhile, a different kind of darkness – the darkness of terror, violence and war -Ìý seems to have so much of the world in its grip. Our prayers this morning are with all suffering in the Holy Land.

It is into this arena of struggle between darkness and light that the Church gives us the feast of All Saints, kept on November the First, which we are celebrating this morning. The feast is a great gift to us, because the saints are, put simply, those in whom the light has prevailed, and whose lives bear witness to that Light: not simply the light of day, the assurance that however short the days now, spring will come again, but the One who is the very Light of the World, Jesus Christ our Lord. More specifically still, the saints are those who show us, in the reality of human living and human dying, that the Christ is Risen: they are witnesses to the resurrection of the one whose birth we celebrate in the very dead of winter. All Saints Day is about as far away in the Christian calendar as it is possible to be from Easter. But as we keep this feast the light of Easter, the light of the resurrection, floods in, as we give thanks to God for all who have let the light of the risen Jesus shine in their lives, such that we may see in them something of the holiness of God.

Holiness. The Hebrew scriptures are clear that God alone is holy. The remarkable thing is that, because of Jesus Christ, God shares his holiness with us. By faith and baptism, and then through the sacraments and the habits of Christian living, we can become like Christ, like the one whose life – whose fully and uncompromisingly human life – is alive with the life of God. Every human being, astonishingly, has within themselves the capacity and capability for holiness: that is the great hope of All Saints Day.Ìý

In the New Testament, the ‘saints’ are all those who are disciples of the Lord Jesus, who have chosen to seek to follow Him and who belong to one of the local churches, where those same followers of Jesus gathered to pray and to worship; hence St Paul writes to the saints in Rome, in Philippi, in Ephesus, wherever it may be. That usage persists in some texts in Christian worship, for example when the invitation to receive Holy Communion at the Eucharist is given with the words, ‘God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people,’ or something similar. But when we think about the saints today, we do so more naturally according to the Church’s evolving use of the term. The Saints (capital ‘S’) are specifically those women and men – and children – whose lives have been so marked by holiness, have been so transparent to the light and love of God in Jesus Christ, that we can be confident that, having died to this world, they live eternally in the near presence of God. There, they remain our sisters and brothers in Christ, and we may confidently call upon them in our prayers, and ask them to pray for us; and we may trustfully follow their example.

The Saints are an extraordinarily diverse company. First in the procession of God’s holy ones are the martyrs, those who have suffered death because of their witness to Christ. The word ‘martyr’ simply means ‘witness,’ and every saint is in this sense a martyr because every saint witnesses to the truth of Jesus Christ. There have been Christian martyrs in every century, and there continue to be Christian martyrs in this, the twenty first century AD. We might think of the 21 Coptic Orthodox martyrs killed in Libya in 2015. Venerated in the Coptic Church they were recognised formally too as Saints in the Roman Catholic Church just this May by the Pope during a visit to the Vatican by the Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II: and Christians of all traditions, Anglicans included, honour them as such, powerful testimony to the fact that in the face of persecution, differences between denominations become irrelevant. Martyrdom inspires us to a deep and profound ecumenism.

After the martyrs, the Church traditionally groups her saints together according to the manner of their holiness of life: the apostles and evangelists, for example, or teachers of the faith; those who have served God through a particular calling or way of life in the Church, or who have been outstanding in the service of the poor. Among them are some of the powerful, in worldly terms – kings, emperors, not a few popes and bishops – perhaps too many. But among them too are the weak and the powerless, those whos very weakness has been used by God to demonstrate the power of the Gospel, the power of Jesus Christ who accepted death on a Cross for our sake. St Martin de Porres, born into urban poverty in Lima in Peru in 1579, illegitimate and of mixed race, and who devoted himself unstintingly to the care of the sick and the poor in that city, is just one such example.

But even the roll call of those acclaimed as Saints by the Church in every place and every age cannot exhaust the number of the holy ones of God, the ‘great cloud of witnesses,’ as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews puts it. This brings us back to All Saints Day, when we gives thanks for all those, known andÌý - by far the greater number – unknown, whose lives have brought light into the darkness and who, in this darkening world, surround us now, each one a light in the communion of the saints, the communion of all baptised into Christ and so made sharers in the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Hymn:ÌýGive us the wings of faith

Prayers (Fr Owen)
Rejoicing in God's love for each one of us, we turn to him with our prayers and petitions:

For the Church, that all her members will, in their words and actions, proclaim the holiness of God.

Lord in your mercy.ÌýHear our prayer.

For all elected and appointed leaders, that they may always strive to work for peace, with justice, among all people.

Lord in your mercy.ÌýHear our prayer.

For all who face hardship in body, mind or spirit, that they will be inspired by the lives of the saints.

Lord in your mercy.ÌýHear our prayer.

For those who suffer on account of their faith that they may receive blessings in this world and an eternal reward with all the saints of heaven in the next.

Lord in your mercy.ÌýHear our prayer.

Ever-living God, we are gathered as your family to praise your name and honour your holy ones. In your kindness, answer our prayers and the prayers which the saints offer on our behalf. We ask this through Christ our Lord.ÌýAmen.Ìý

Let us pray

Almighty God,
you have knit together your elect
in one communion and fellowship
in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord:
grant us grace so to follow your blessed saints
in all virtuous and godly living
that we may come to those inexpressible joys
that you have prepared for those who truly love you;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

Jesus taught us to pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom in peace and justice, so lifting to God especially those places where there is warfare and violence, and in particular the Holy Land, we say,

The Lord's Prayer

Blessing (Bishop of Fulham)

The Lord be with you
AllÌýÌýÌýÌý And also with you

May God who kindled the fire of his love in the hearts of his saints,Ìýpour upon you the riches of his grace.ÌýAmen

May he give you joy in their fellowship
and a share in their praises.
Amen

May he strengthen you to follow them in the way of holiness
and to come to the full radiance of his glory.
Amen

May almighty God bless you,
the Father, and the Son, + and the Holy Spirit.
Amen

Hymn: Praise, my soul, the King of heaven

Organ Voluntary: Marche, No 4 fromÌýMeditaciones religiosas op. 122 by Louis James Alfred Lefébure-WélyÌý