The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Our second reading recalled some of the heroes of the Old Testament. The writer has already celebrated the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, the great leader of the exodus, Rahab the prostitute who helped Joshua to conquer Jericho.  Now he lists Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jephthah, David and Samuel and a whole host of others, too many to name. 
What a rollcall it is, but as he conjures with all these names from Israel’s past, even his first readers might have supposed that the age of the heroes, saints and martyrs, was over, a glorious but distant memory.  Two thousand years later their exploits seem even more distant, as do the early martyrs of the Christian Church, from Peter and Paul to our own Alban and Columba.  Perhaps it was this elusive sense of distance that inspired the restorers of Westminster Abbey in 1998 to fill the ten vacant niches above the Great West Door with a whole row of modern saints and martyrs, all from the twentieth century.  Following the example set by the epistle, I propose to say a few words about each of these ten figures, before exploring what they might tell us about the life that we are called to lead as Christians in the 21st century.
In the chronological order of their martyrdom, first up is Saint Elizabeth of Russia.  Born Elizabeth of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1864, she was brought up in England under the protection of her grandmother Queen Victoria.  At the age of 20 she married into the Russian royal family, later adopting the Orthodox faith.   In 1909 she abandoned her privileged position at court to enter the convent of the Sisters of Love and Mercy, which she had founded four years earlier following the assassination of her husband, but in 1918 she was taken away by the Bolsheviks and gruesomely murdered by being shoved down a mine-shaft.
Next, Manche Masemola.  In 1927 Manche enrolled in a class to prepare for baptism.  Her parents, who thought she was bewitched, had recourse to the traditional remedies of the Pedi people.  When these failed to shake her determination, they took her to a lonely place in the bush and killed her.  No more than 14 or 15 years old, she had predicted that she would be baptized in her own blood. 
Maximilian Maria Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered in 1941 to take the place of a stranger chosen at random to be killed in revenge for some escapes from Auschwitz.  When he was the last member of the group to survive two weeks of starvation and dehydration, he was given a lethal injection, to which he submitted calmly.
Lucian Tapiedi was one of a group of eight missionaries in Papua New Guinea in 1942, who were axed to death by frenzied tribesmen following the Japanese invasion. 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in 1906, was convinced that it was the duty of a Christian to be fully engaged in the secular world.  He founded a breakaway ‘Confessing Church,’ which was firmly opposed to Hitler’s racist policies, but he insisted on returning to Germany on the outbreak of war. Imprisoned from 1943 he was executed in Flossenburg concentration camp on 9 April 1945 for his part in the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. 
Qamar Zia, born in British India in 1929, moved with her family to Pakistan on partition.  Having encountered Christianity at school, she studied the Bible secretly for seven years, running away from home to avoid an arranged marriage. Changing her name to Esther John she found employment in a mission hospital before her work as teacher and evangelist led to her murder in 1960.
Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister whose tireless non-violent campaign for the rights of African Americans inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  He survived a first assassination attempt in 1958, but was shot dead in Memphis Tennessee in 1968.
Wang Zhiming lived in Wuding, China, where he was born in 1907.  In 1950 he signed the Three-Self Manifesto, which sought accommodation with the new Communist regime, but after 1966 he spoke out against the violence of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  He was arrested in 1969 and executed on 29 December 1973 before more than 10,000 people.
Janani Luwum was born in Uganda in 1922.  After a short teaching career, he converted to Christianity in 1948, rising to become Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.  He criticised the excesses of Idi Amin, who came to power in 1971.  After delivering a formal note of protest against the regime’s use of arbitrary killings and disappearances, he was charged with treason and assassinated at an army barracks on 17 February 1977.
Finally Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, canonised by Pope Francis just three weeks ago. A powerful advocate of liberation theology who spoke up for the poor, he used his weekly broadcast sermons to give the widest possible public exposure to lists of those tortured, murdered or caused to disappear by a lawless government.  He was shot at the altar on 24 March 1980 by an unknown drive-by assassin.
Ten modern saints and martyrs.  What might we learn from them?   Several were leaders within their respective churches.  As such, it was their public duty to speak out against institutionalised injustice or the evil behaviour of tyrannical governments. Whilst the prominence of their position might offer them some protection, they knew there was always the risk that they might be next on the hit list.  Others, like Manche Masemola, Maximilian Kolbe or Esther John, remained stubbornly true to their faith even in obscurity.  Whether living in obscurity or in the public eye, they all felt called to stand firm, acting and speaking with steady determination in accordance with their faith and regardless of the consequences.  In many cases God seems to have used their gift of martyrdom to bring about greater changes than they could possibly have accomplished if they had lived. In several cases their murderers were converted, and the church experienced surging growth. 
Our modern martyrs would have recognised the appeal which concluded our second reading ‘to run with perseverance the race that is set before us’ – they all did that, following the example of Jesus himself, who ‘set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ They knew what they had to do, they knew the risks, and the probable outcome.  Like the first readers of our epistle, they would have recognised the invitation to ‘look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith’ – how else could they have held such a steady course?   Whether they endured their cross or their shame for the sake of the joy that was set before them, we do not know. I doubt whether they were looking so far ahead.  But perhaps that deep seated joy is the gift which our loving heavenly Father bestows on those who by faith follow Jesus into the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death.  We cannot know, but in one of his last speeches Martin Luther King assured his followers that victory would be theirs even if he was no longer around to share it with them.  Like anyone else he wanted a long and happy life, he said.  But if that was not to be, he was still full of hope, because as he said ‘mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’ 
At our baptism each one of us was given a candle and invited to ‘shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father’.  We are not very good at it, but isn’t that what the saints and martyrs learned to do, even in the most testing of circumstances?  Perhaps they drew their inspiration from St Paul who was told by the Lord Jesus, presumably in a dream or vision: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ (2 Cor 12.9).    
We do not know how or when we may be called to stand firm in witnessing to the faith that we profess, but on this festival of all the saints, we can resolve to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, as they did, looking unto Jesus.  God alone knows where that will lead us.