Year C
The Rev. Denise Vaughn
Who Is A Saint?
“What is a saint?” somebody once asked. “A saint is someone who lived a long time ago, who has never been adequately researched!” Presumably, the implication behind that reply was that, if you researched a saint long enough, sooner or later you would find that he or she had –as we like to say –“feet of clay.” We sometimes speak somewhat dangerously of the saints as being “the heroes of faith.” Yet, the communion of saints has nothing whatever to do with the cult of hero worship. We put heroes on pedestals and then after subsequent “adequate” research, we find that their human frailties and weaknesses are much the same as those of lesser mortals like ourselves. We have seen right through them, we say. It is not long before we then tear our heroes off their pedestals. Saints on the other hand are the very opposite of heroes. You are supposed to be able to see right through the saints.
They are intended to be gloriously transparent, which is why the church delights to put them in stained glass windows! We do that precisely because we are intended to see the light that shines through them from beyond. What we celebrate when we celebrate All Saints is not the superhuman faith and power of a select few but God’s ability to use flawed people to do divine things. We celebrate all on whom God has acted in baptism, sealing them, as Ephesians says, with the mark of the promised Holy Spirit. We celebrate the fact that God creates faith in God’s people, and those people through ordinary acts of love, bring the Kingdom of Heaven closer to Earth. We celebrate that we have in all who’ve gone before us, what St Paul calls “Such a great cloud of witnesses” and that the faithful departed are as much the body of Christ as we are.
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to attend my first three day silent retreat at a retreat house in Houston, TX run by the Roman Catholic Cenacle Sisters. As I was checking in, I discovered they had a book store and of course I had to go in. My weakness was rewarded when I came across a book of Women’s prayers titled ‘Soul Weavings: A Gathering of Women’s Prayers’. This book turned out to be filled with prayers reflecting the needs and experiences of women of all ages. Prayers that were gathered together not only from contemporary women of faith but also from women who have lived through the centuries, all over the world. One prayer that especially touched me was written by a woman named Ellie Hillesum she died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943.
In the preface of this book the author, Lyn Klug writes “As Christians, we are part of a vast community of believers, most of whom we will never meet. Yet, people of other times, places and cultures can become our companions, encouraging us to take risks, helping us to go on when the way is difficult, teaching us how to pray. Through these companions of the soul God “comes to meet us in the hardest hours, challenges us to change the world, and helps us to behold God in everything. Our souls are weaved together, a vast community of believers.”
It is quite a thing, really that we are connected to so many; connected to so much faith, so many stories, so much divine love. Especially in this day and age of alienation and trying to find community and belonging in smaller and smaller ways.
Many think that the basis of being connected to other people is in having the same theology or political beliefs, or denominational affiliation, or neighborhood, or Facebook, or Tweeter groups in common. But none of that is what connects us to the Body of Christ. What connects us to the body of Christ is not our piety or good works or theological beliefs. It is God; a God who gathers up all of God’s children into the church eternal and on this All Saints Sunday, one of the seven principal feasts of the church year, we celebrate that vast community of believers all weaved together, known and unknown. This is a celebration that includes all who have been baptized. It includes all who have been set apart through the ages by their faith in God, through God’s son Jesus, by the help of the Holy Spirit. It includes all of us blessed here this morning.
The gospel for All Saints Sunday lays out for us the characteristics of the blessed—the saints—along side the characteristics of the lost. And once again Jesus turns things upside down. In God’s rule the order of things will be reversed and Jesus drives home the topsy-turvy good news in today’s text, Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, or also called the Beatitudes. To be blessed is to have a relationship with God; it is to be rich with and toward God. In laying out the characteristics of the blessed and the accursed Jesus offers us a foundation for the kind of holy living that is celebrated today and it provides us encouragement to live out our faith as saints of God in the midst of difficult circumstances.
Several of us are reading and discussing the Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s book titled “Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus.” Each chapter grabs you and is filled with wisdom, humor and great stories as he invites us to join in the long line of those throughout history who have followed the rabbi of Nazareth. In his chapter titled ‘The Savior’s Not-So-Serene Call to Life on a Wild Restless Sea’, he tells of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian who witnessed to the gospel in the midst of the turmoil of Nazi Germany. He says, “It was there that he came to view the call of Jesus to a radical discipleship that follows in the way of suffering, the way of the cross. Bonhoeffer believed Jesus genuinely wants us to live the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, to live the gospel. For his beliefs, Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price; he was executed by the Nazis. Not long before he died he wrote, “The Church is the Church only when it exists for others.” “Jesus calls us to follow into the midst of the raging sea, to help bring about God’s plan and purpose for the world.”
So, “What is a saint?” was probably after all, the wrong way to frame the question. A better way to put the question might be “Who are the saints?” The saints are those whose lives demonstrate life on the margins, those who bear witness to suffering and struggling, who can be identified as prophets. They are “treasures in earthen vessels” because they are not what they seem to be. They all point away from themselves and are all caught up in something beyond themselves. They are all looking to the one Christ, and in him they have found their needs supplied and their yearnings fulfilled. So, we are not asked to worship the saints as though they were heroes, we are to copy their lives of faith, hope and courage. We are to celebrate them, and us, because God is glorified in and right through them and through us. We give thanks to God for all those yesterday and today that strive to keep the faith, those whose example show us how to be rich toward God.
I would like to close one of the prayers from Soul Weaving, written by Janet Morley from England:
For all the saints who went before us, who have spoken to our hearts and touched us with your fire. We praise you, O God.
For all the saints who live beside us, whose weakness and strengths are woven with our own. We praise you, O God.
For all the saints who live beyond us, who challenge us to change the world with them. We praise you, O God. Amen.
For in the Western church, it is required that a saint has been so hollowed out—generally through suffering—that God worked at least three miracles right through them! Such is the difference between heroes and saints.
Today is a day set aside in the church year to remember the saints. So, today let us remember all the deeply faithful and deeply flawed saints of God’s church through whom the glory of God has been revealed is being revealed and will be revealed. Let us remember Mary Magdalena and Peter the fisherman and the glorious disciples. Let us remember St Frances and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. Today let us thank God for gathering so many into the church eternal, some of whom still light our own paths.