Saints are, for the most part, quite ordinary people.

You can't often pick them out in a crowd.
They only have haloes in stained glass windows.
They are people who almost all the time go quietly about their business.
They do not often think of themselves as saints.
They don't love the limelight or the headlines.
But saints are people who go to school with Christ.
They try to shape their behaviour and their attitudes according to the gospel.
Just occasionally, usually without premeditation, they are compelled to take a public and courageous stand.

Just occasionally an ordinary person gets up and says, like Thomas More's great opponent, Martin Luther "Here I stand. I can do none other. So help me God". And people recognise that there is among them a saint impelled by the love and majesty of God.

Just occasionally an ordinary person stands up in a world of lies and speaks the truth. And people, if they dare, recognise that there is a saint among them. Sanctity shines through the ordinary.

Just occasionally an ordinary person shows immense courage in witnessing to the love of God in a world that is full of pain and oppression. And people recognise that there is a saint among them.

Most of the time the saints are hidden; only a crisis or certain kinds of crisis, can propel them into the public gaze, letting holiness shine, through.

That means that the vast majority of saints work quietly, anonymously, as the yeast in the dough, the salt of the earth.

It is good for us to think of the saints who are renowned, and the saints who are unknown because 'they without us, shall not be made perfect". Humbling words!

Late one evening in the winter of 1940-41 Madam Magda Trocme answered a knock on the door of the parsonage in the High Cevennes. The Jewish woman outside asks, "Can I come in ?" "of course", she replies, without a moment's hesitation.

And that knock on the door was a start of a process by which several hundred Jews were fed, hidden, and spirited across the border into Switzerland. Magda and her husband had nurtured her people on a simple and direct Gospel, teaching them to love God and neighbour as oneself. Aiding, Jews was a natural outworking of their simple commitment to Jesus, the Jew.

Daniel Trocme and some others perished along with Jews in the extermination camps - martyrs , witnesses to the truth, saints. Now trees have been planted in their memory in Yad Vashem, the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, in Jerusalem.

The knock on the door late that winter night brought into the open that there were saints in the High Cevennes.

Fifty years ago an almost unknown Scots woman was transported by cattle truck from a holding camp east of Budapest to Auschwitz where she died some time in July or August. She had been born in Dumfriesshire, of farming stock and served as the matron of the Church of Scotland school for Jewish girls. She was in Scotland on leave when the war broke out, but immediately undertook the hazardous journey back to Budapest. Although Hungary was officially neutral, Nazi expansionism soon began to threaten that neutrality.

The missionaries were ordered back to Scotland. Jane Haining disobeyed and stayed with her girls. "If these children need me in the days of sunshine", she said, "how much more do they need me in the days of darkness?" She was denounced to the authorities and deported along with some of her Jewish girls to Auschwitz. In three months 1,300,000 were liquidated in Auschwitz, among them No. 79467, Jane Haining, who stayed faithful to her task and her Lord, and showed herself to be a saint.

In the early 1930s a young Austrian, Franz Jaggerstatter, was a local tearaway in the village of St. Radegund. He got into fights and roared around the village on his motorbike. In 1943 he was called to serve in Hitler's army. In a crisis of conscience he went to his bishop to ask whether a Christian could possibly fight for a Nazi victory. The bishop told him it was his duty. Jaggerstatter still refused to fight. On 9th August 1943 he was beheaded in Brandenburg prison.

The night before his execution he wrote to his wife, with his hands in chains: "These few words are being set down here as they come from my mind and heart. And if I must write them with my hands in chains, I find it much better than if my will were in chains, no sentence of death can rob a man of the faith and his freewill". The tearaway of St. Radegund showed himself to be a saint of God.

Helmuth James, Count von Moltke was no village tearaway. He came from one of the most aristocratic military families in Prussia. But he was himself committed to non-violence. Accordingly, he refused to take part with many of his friends in the plots to assassinate Hitler, although he was at least as resolutely opposed to Nazism as they.

When he came under suspicion, von Moltke, like Thomas More centuries before, used the weapon of silence. He insisted on his own non-participation. He had only thought. After a show trial, which condemned him to be hanged with piano wire, the judge wrote across the paper: "He did more than think". Thinking truthfully in evil days can be a sign of sanctity. Because thinking can itself threaten the edifice of tyranny and falsehood.

"He did more than think" - these words could also have been said of Thomas More. What a strange, complex figure More was - not just that hero of Robert Bolt, The Man for all Seasons. On the one hand he was the epitome of the Renaissance man, of learning, charity and tolerance, whose home in Chelsea, immortalised in Holbein's famous portrait and drawings, was the centre of culture, piety and family virtues. On the other hand, he was a savage polemicist against the Reformation and in support of the King: revolutionary, intolerant, authoritarian, relentless. He was too, a public servant of great integrity who became deeply and enthusiastically involved in "the King's games' to which he refers in his Richard III: "These matters be king's games, as it were stage plays, and for the most part played upon scaffolds, In which poor men be but the lookers-on. And they that be wise will meddle no further".

The historians art still disputing their assessments of More. Yet for our purposes but one thing is important: this distinguished public servant, the skilful player in King's games, whose character was as ambiguous and contradictory as ours or as any , and yet who strove to school himself in the ways of Christ at the end of the day showed himself to be a saint by following conscience as the voice of God rather than the command of the King.

"In my conscience", he said, "this was one of the cases in which I was bounden that I should not obey my Prince ….. in my conscience neither suddenly nor lightly but by long leisure and diligent search of the matter." The conscience and the courage of this man "who did more than think" showed him to be a saint.

"They, without us shall not be made perfect". These are humbling words and challenging words as well. For the passage goes on: "With this great cloud of witnesses all around us … we too must throw off every encumbrance and the sin which all too readily restricts us, and run with resolution the race which lies ahead of us, our eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith." (Hebrews 12: 1-2)

Thomas More and all the saints who have gone before, are there around us to encourage us as we too run the race of faith, God's saints in this generation.

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