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What
a strange question! Saints are really holy people, right? Only special people,
who meet strict criteria get to be called saints, right? We pray to Saints, we
name churches for them. Sometimes cities, or colleges or hospitals. Right now,
we are surrounded by idealized images of saints in the stained glass that adorn
this church.
You
know what? The word “saint” appears in the New Testament 62 times and that the
Apostle Paul used the term 44 times and not one of them refers to a hospital or
college? In the New Testament, every follower of Jesus is a Saint, or in Greek
"hagios", one of the holy
ones.
Yes,
that’s right. You are one of God's saints.
So
what makes a saint a saint? St. Paul says Baptism is the mark of sainthood. The
writer of the Revelation to John has a heavenly vision. He wrote, "I heard
a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among
mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself
will be with them;"
We
are called “saints” because of God's continuing incarnate presence among his
people through Jesus Christ and in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; it is God
who is intimately and fully holy, it is God who came in the flesh, who not only
lived and walked among us and still dwells in the midst of His people. That
presence permeates the entire community of faith.
As
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry once reminded us when he said,
God came among us in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth to change the world, to change it from the
nightmare it often can be into the dream that God intends. He came to change
the world, and we have been baptized into the Triune God and summoned to be
disciples and followers of this Jesus and to participate in God’s work, God’s
mission of changing and transforming this world. We are the Jesus Movement now….
…We are part of the Jesus
Movement, and he has summoned us to make disciples and followers of all nations
and transform this world by the power of the Good News, the gospel of Jesus.
What
makes God's people holy is His presence in and with us. It’s not our behavior,
which, we must admit, is often less than perfect, that makes us saints but it
is our living identity as Jesus’ people that makes us saints. There are many
examples of people transformed by the love of Jesus. One well known story is
about the Rev. John Newton who former slave ship captain who became an ardent
abolitionist and an Anglican priest. He wrote the famous hymn “Amazing Grace”
in 1764, that describes the truth that it is God's gracious presence in the
midst of His humanity that makes sainthood possible.
"Amazing grace! how sweet
the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found, was
blind but now I see."
With
God's loving grace we can grow to be the people God made us to be…to live into
the sainthood we have been adopted into!
In
the second half of today’s reading from Revelation, God's voice thunders from
heaven, "See, I am making all things new." God is making a promise to
us.
I
think I’ve told you before about how, when I was in high school and college, I
experienced two movements that was sweeping the churches: the Jesus Movement,
and in particular the movement that swept through the Episcopal Church (and
many other churches). People who were once part of a church known as “God’s
Frozen Chosen” were experiencing the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including but
not limited to speaking in tongues, and ecstatic prayer. Well, this was new to
me and I loved going to those churches and prayer meetings and I learned so
much from them. But the truth is that I made a rotten charismatic… and still
do! I am just too tightly wound, I guess! The truth is that the only time I’ll
ever pray with my hands up will probably be during a bank robbery.
I
used to feel guilty about this, thinking that I wasn’t holy enough or that
somehow I was closing out the Holy Spirit. But a wise woman reassured me that
it was okay…that God was not finished with me yet.
We
live in a world that often advertises promises of perfection, but the fact is
that saintliness is much less about perfection and much more about
transformation. We who are God's saints are saints both by grace and by choice.
We followers, friends, and apprentices of Jesus are constantly learning how to
follow Jesus as we do the work of God, as we allow the holy presence of God be
a transforming influence in our life.
One
of the things I have discovered over the years about how to learn and do the
work of Jesus is to let go of our outsized expectations of perfection. Sure
there are skills to learn: how to pray, how to read scripture, how to listen to
others, and how to form holy habits. At the same time, we are also called to
have an open and ready heart. And that comes from learning to improvise, punt, to
live with limitations. All these teach us that sainthood is not about
externals, piety, or looking good. Sainthood comes with baptism, and how we
live it by learning and doing the work of Jesu
I
remember a children’s sermon I heard as a kid, and I’ve repeated this image a
few times in this parish. In the sermon, the priest pointed to all the
wonderful stained glass windows that were in that church (here you have
wonderful etched windows but the image still holds….). What was said in that
children’s sermon is that we, you and me, are all like these windows: we are
people through whom the light shines.
When
I was in Seminary, I remember hearing Dr. James Fenhagen, the late Dean of
General Seminary, speak about the Church in American culture. He said that
modern Christians tended to have hard crusty exteriors but soft inner cores.
The problem is God call us to have a solid core, grounded in Scripture,
tradition, and reason, and a soft exterior, a heart for all God’s people. As
baptized said, we build that solid core by being disciplines who engage in prayer,
the study of Scripture, spiritual direction, and sacramental living, which shapes
into who and what we are, deep in our souls. All this helps us to have a
genuinely compassionate, welcoming, and embracing faith that expresses God’s
love and care to the people God gives us every day.
Remember
that famous old English hymn, "I Sing a Song of the Saints of God?"
The last verse brings home the point
"They
lived not only in ages past,
there
are hundreds of thousands still,
the
world is bright with the joyous saints
who
love to do Jesus' will.
You
can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
in
church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
for
the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I mean to be one
too."
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