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Everyday Saints
A sermon preached by the Reverend Dr. Stephanie J. Nagley at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland, November 7, 2004, All Saints Sunday.
What a week we have all had. The elections are behind us. Many people celebrate the outcome. Many people are down in the dumps. And there are some who don’t know what they feel. As I said in last week’s sermon no matter the outcome, no matter who is elected, you and I will still have the task of being the people of God. We still have the task of figuring out our way to justice, understanding how to find peace, learning how to be merciful and seeking the unity of all people.
So, the celebration of All Saints’ Day is well timed. This is the perfect time to stroll down memory lane and talk about the saints and our saintly heritage. Who are these saints that show us the way?[1]
There are some 150 people, give or take, on the Episcopal list of saints. There are the familiar ones, Luke and Matthew, Mark and John. There are eight missionaries and two islanders who died during World War II. There is Constance and her Companions that waged war against Yellow Fever in Memphis, Tennessee in 1878, giving their lives to take care of others. There is Catherine of Sienna who pulled up to her full height of five feet and in her twenties set off on a cross country journey to reconcile two popes battling over who was the true leader of the church and whose battle deeply divided the faithful.
We often think of saints as somehow different from us, as somehow more religious or more of believers than us. We may see them as serious folk who are somehow more serious than we. We keep them in the bookcase next to the dusty volume of fairy tales because we can’t quite relate to people that seem so good. But the truth is, the saints are just like you and me.
What makes a saint is more than good works, or piety. Those qualities are essential, of course. But there’s something more to saints than just saying one’s prayers or knowing doctrines backward and forward, there’s more to saints than that.
Saints are people deeply in love with life, so in love that they forget themselves and approach life full out. To become a saint there has to be a miracle here or there but those miracles don’t happen because the saint prayed or worked harder than others. The miracles came about because the saints fell in love with God and as a result with all of humankind.
Fred Buechner said that in God’s holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.These flirtations of love and the embrace of all creation are the saints. [2]
For the most part our saints do that loving and embracing with prayers and works and full throttle belly laughs. They are people too serious about life to always be serious. They are wonderfully crazy to the point that they see the world like a child standing on her head or swinging by the knees from the jungle gym.
St. Teresa of Avila wrote a serious and moving account of the spiritual journey. But she also stood on her head, looked at the world up side down and giggled. “God deliver me from sullen saints,” she said. She was a sixteenth century reformer of the Carmelite order of nuns. She made her sisters take off their high heels and leave the world outside. But on special days she had them dancing in the cloisters and gave them castanets.
Teresa savored life. One day a visitor found Teresa eating a partridge, not just eating it but eating it with glee. A visitor seeing her was shocked and said, “What will people think?” With juice running down her chin, Teresa said, “Let them think what they want. There is a time for partridge and a time for penance.”
The saints took themselves seriously and not so seriously. They understood well the dangers of thinking too much of themselves. There is a Reformation saint whose two most treasured books were the New Testament and a book of jokes and riddles. They got to know the depth of humility that leads to laughter and looking at the world upside down, for they dared to tangle with God and have an argument or two about the nature of faith. The saints didn’t settle for the status quo and seemed to march to a different drummer. When the someday saint Pope Pius X heard that people were counting on a few miracles to assure his entry into the list of saints he said, “So now it’s miracles they want from me — as if I didn’t have enough to do already!”
Who were these saints? The saints were and are people who fall deeply, passionately in love, crazy, sometimes uncontrollable love with God and by extension all of creation. These are people who can’t seem to hold back the horses. These are people who open their hearts and those hearts are ever spilling out with affection. Our finger-licking partridge-loving friend Teresa said, “I have no defense against affection. I could have been bribed with a sardine.”
What makes a saint? Uncontrolled affection, unwieldy acceptance, unreasoned mercy, unending charity, an insane faith of unbounded love. People who didn’t need or want attention or kudos or trophies. People who only could live as they had been loved by a God, a God whose love is wildly extravagant.
There is a story about Francis that may be helpful for our time in a country that does appear to be deeply divided. The story is about seeing the world in that swinging from the tree, upside down way. The story is about seeing with eyes crazy in love. [3]
The story is set in the world of Gubbio, a small town just outside of Assisi. The people were paralyzed with fear because there was a ravenous wolf roaming in the region. The wolf had not only killed livestock. The wolf had killed human beings. In stomach-churning fear, the town had barricaded itself within the city walls. Francis heard about this and went to the people and offered to subdue the wolf. Armed with nothing more than his faith, Francis approached the wolf and gently talked to the animal. He talked to the wolf and explained the seriousness of the wolf’s crime, and then he offered forgiveness. He proposed that he would be a peacemaker between the wolf and the people if the wolf promised to stop harassing them. Francis promised the wolf the people who do no harm and that he, Francis, would take care of the wolf’s hunger by feeding him. The wolf extended his paw and sealed the deal.
Francis then went to the town’s people and asked them to treat the wolf with respect and not to harm him. For two years, the story goes, until the wolf died a natural death, the people and the wolf observed the terms of peace set forth by Francis.
The tale is more than just a quaint but easily cast aside story. The tale tells us something important about how saintly perspective works. There’s a willingness in Francis to see things a little differently than the people or the wolf. He didn’t look at the people from the wolf’s perspective who was dominated by the instinctual necessity to kill in order to stay alive. Nor did he look at the wolf from the people’s perspective. His vision wasn’t clouded by fear and the consequent drive to make sure they survived at any cost. Francis saw that both the wolf and the people were in the same predicament. The people and the wolf were adversaries willing to battle to the death for survival. Francis saw the dilemma of the wolf and the people of Gubbio, and he saw that dilemma with the eyes of love. He stirred mutual compassion. He showed them that their shared life on earth could be lived for their mutual well being.
But before we stick those saints back up on the shelf it’s good to be reminded that saints are not perfect, nor is their love always so virtuous. Saints are real people, passionate people whose love is sometimes a bit on the shady side. There was a notable saint who said to a pretty young woman who came and sat next to him, “Sit on the other side of the table, please, madam, for I am not yet an old man.”
Who are the saints and what makes then so? People who dare to live full-out lives, whose eyes see the world a little differently, who are giddy and over the heels in love with God and creation.
The saints are here, all around us. People like you and me. Loving people, sometimes pure, sometimes off track, but always passionate for the one thing, the love and willingness to see and hear one another in wholeness.
On All Saints’ Day we celebrate that truth. On All Saints’ Day we remember in our lives the people who have given us a godly heritage, a way of being that is the way of our happiness...the blessed way of living that is of God. They are here every day, those saints, Luke and Thomas, Mark and Matthew. They are here with those we’ve loved and lost in our lifetimes. They are ours and we are theirs.
Look out that window to the Memorial Garden. There they are, our beloved saints. The ones who cried and laughed with us. The ones we argued with and joined with in a thousand gatherings. There they are, those who flicked the ashes from their cigarettes and drank too much gin. They opened up our lives to what it means to be with one another, in good times and bad. They opened us up to what it means to love, to truly love and be loved without conditions.
Look around next to you. You’re sitting next to a saint. We are all saints by our birthright in God. The saints we remember in our prayer book may have walked the way of holiness, may have loved in the way that God loves us, more consistently. They may have seen the way of Christ more completely. But we see the way of love and the way of Christ, too.
Our work as the people of God continues and because of those who have gone before and because of God’s ever present hope in us we can do more together than any of us thought we could do alone. Our work continues. We are the saints in light here and now, the hope of all to come. We are the saints in light, the people of the risen One, who dared to dream and give everything so that we could make the dream come true. We are the saints in light. So, let’s get on with it. We need to get on and laugh and love and dance and play as if there is no tomorrow and with the sure and certain knowledge that we, too, make a difference.
[1] The stories of the saints are taken from Barbara Brown Taylor, “A Great Cloud of Witnesses”, Weavings, vol. III, 1988. Taylor credits Phyllis McGinley, Saint Watching, as her source. (Back to article)
[2] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. (Back to article)
[3] Wendy M. Wright, “For all the Saints”, Weavings, vol. III, 1988. (Back to article)
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