Looking for Heroes and Heroines

How are you with heroes and heroines? I used to take them for granted, finding them in every good story I encountered. Today I am not so sure. Looking about me at history in the making, I notice instead the raw search for power and all the posturing that goes with it. Even a classical tale like the ‘Odyssey’, told in a recent film with all the enthusiasm of modern technical wizardry, turns out to be mostly about death and deception.

It is just as well that we can turn elsewhere for our heroes and heroines, our role models. This October we have celebrated 800 years since the death of St Francis. He didn’t seek fame. He simply fell in love with God and with God’s creation and shared his vibrant insights with all who came in contact with him. He has inspired every generation since. In our current age of ecological impoverishment, he teaches us valuable lessons about how to live in lose touch with our neighbour and our neighbourhood. Likewise, William Tyndale, also in our memory at present, devoted his life to a cause. He sought to translate our Bible into English, rescuing it from the hands of a clerical minority and placing it in our homes, ultimately into our hands. For this ambition he suffered a martyr’s death and incidentally passing on his rich use of language to Shakespeare’s generation.

These are two of the great number of rewarding stories within our faith which we will honour on Sunday 1 November when we mark All Saints’ Day. All these amazing people have one thing in common. They put God first; devoting their energies to expressing and channelling the love which is always seeking us out, always trying to make us think and live better.

Perhaps our saints can also encourage us to look elsewhere for our heroes. Because we bump into them all the time. Anyone who chooses to follow Christ, often at great cost to themselves, can teach us who we might be, how we might live. This is how we flourish as a community. Let’s look for, and recognise, the famous ‘unsung heroes’ who make all our lives more precious.

Lord, we thank you

for those who followed you

And those who follow you now,

so richly blessing our world. Amen.