Sunday, November 1, 2015

All Saints Day


I remember learning the word “saint” from my Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Rocky.
Mrs. Rocky taught Sunday school for the younger elementary kids
at Park Forest Baptist Church in State College, Pennsylvania.
She loved Jesus and she loved children.
And I remember the day she taught us the word, “saint.”
She asked us what the word meant, and we were first and second graders,
So we said: “a football team!”
And to our surprise, she said, “my book here says that you would say that!”
And we were amazed that her book could predict we would give that answer.
I’ve come to learn since then that Mrs. Rocky was a saint.
And today is a day for celebrating Mrs. Rocky and for Sunday school teachers through all generations that loved children and loved Jesus.

Saint is a word that we trip on.
Not because of the football team.
It’s because the word saint has always meant two different things.
The word saint became a technical word
applied to people who displayed extraordinary virtue in their lives.
Saints were heroes of faith, hope, and love.
Many saints showed their heroic faith by standing up to powerful people who hated them,
and many lost their lives.
And they became known as martyrs –
which is a word that means witness,
someone who bears witness to the love of God at all cost.
So the church began a process called canonization to recognize heroes of the faith.

So we have Saint Teresa
and we have Saint Francis
and last year Pope John Paul II was canonized by Pope Francis
and there’s a movement in the works to canonize Dorothy Day,
the American woman who began and lead the Catholic Worker movement,
that provided food and housing with dignity to homeless and poor in major cities all over the world
while working for the rights of working people.

These are people who showed extraordinary character.
But they were also people. 
Like us.
And they were called Saints in the technical sense,
But even before that, they were, like us,
Saints.
Like Mrs. Rocky.
Like Mickey Randall and Frannie Sousa.
Like me and you.
Lovers of God and of others.
It’s this first and primary sense of the word “saint”
that people like John Calvin and Martin Luther wanted to reclaim –
because the church had so emphasized the heroes
that the rest thought that the term did not apply to them.

The word translated saint in the New Testament is the word that means holy one.
But how many of us think of ourselves as “holy”?

Isn’t God alone holy?
What does holy mean?

Holy – the word indicates those who are set apart for a purpose.
Set apart by God – set apart, consecrated,
like when we set apart a time each week for worship,
Or a space in our house for prayer
We make that time and that space a holy time, a holy space.
And we ourselves are holy because we have been changed by the love of God,
We have been captivated by the beauty of the holiness of God’s love –
the holiness we see in the life of Jesus Christ
Who loved God and loved his sisters and brothers wherever he found them.

It is in Jesus we find ourselves set apart for a holy calling – to love and serve.

And when we are set apart by love and for love,
we join a vast community of saints across space and time.

We can even imagine that as we gather for worship, as we sing the doxology,
that we join in the song of praise of the host of heaven
and those who Christ has called from all generations.

We join in the company of faithful who have found themselves united to Christ
and to one another in an eternal love –
A love that destroys the shroud of death and wipes away tears.
An eternal love whose final word is resurrection and a banquet.
A heavenly potluck, perhaps!

In Song of Songs, we read “Love is stronger than death.”
And this is the Christian hope.

We are like Lazarus bound and entombed in the fear of dying
before Christ comes toward us
and in a loud voice
Says, “take away the stone.”
And then “Lazarus, come out.”
And within the community of faith,
we find ourselves unbound and freed from our tombs of fear
and for the first time able to realize the power of the resurrection,
of new life transforming us.

We are given a new hope,
the hope that we need not live in light of the economy of death,
But can freely give ourselves to God and one another
because we are captivated by a love that is stronger than death.
A love that unites us with God and one another now
even as it will unite us with God and one another into eternity.

The picture of the Christian hope is the triumph of a new creation born of God’s love
and of the gathering of all peoples from all times and places,
bound by the unbreakable tie of self-giving love,
the love that from all eternity is the life of the Three-in-one God.

And this is not a far off reality, but a reality so very near to us.
We have been and can be freed from the tombs of the shadow of death,
We can be brought to the freedom of knowing the love that is stronger than death,
We can be given the love of God in our hearts and live a life defined by the gifts of God
and the hope of new creation,
and the triumph of the God who is love.

We are even now in the company of those who have gone before us,
worshiping God as they did, and loving one another as they did.
We have a great cloud of witnesses urging us out of our tombs and into the life of faith, hope, and love.

Not to heroic glory, but to the beauty of the ordinary,
the love that transforms the ordinary.
These saints, our witnesses, urge us forward to walk in the hope of the love that is stronger than death,
The love that will unite us with our sisters and brothers in the company of God in the resurrection.

We are all, in Christ, saints of God.
Saints like Mrs. Rocky, teaching and loving 1st and second graders,
saints in the sense of Jean Vanier when he wrote:
We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.

Love is what makes a saint.
In either sense.
We are saints because of love.
And not even primarily because of the love we have,
Really we are saints because we have been loved by God

and being so loved – death loses all its power.

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