November 7, 2010

A Sermon For All Saints
By Scott R. Cooper

Given at St. Andrews Episcopal Church, Prineville, Oregon
November 7, 2010


Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our celebration of the Feast of All Saints, celebrated the first Sunday in November.  Because of the way the calendar falls this year, we are celebrating a bit later than usual, but this is the day appointed, and even if we did sang “For All The Saints” last Sunday, you should sing it even louder today because this is the day it is SUPPOSED to be sung! Let’s kick off with a simple question:  Who can name a saint?

(audience participation)

All good answers for sure.  What about Episcopal Saints?  Did you know that there are Episcopal Saints? Did you know that we still have a process in the Episcopal Church for creating new ones?  Many of the saints we officially commemorate are carryovers from Biblical tradition and the pre-Reformation days.  The more modern ones have to be acknowledged by the General Convention.  Interestingly, it is apparently not a requirement that you have to be an Episcopalian in order to be an Episcopalian saint.  Thus, among our saints, we include Martin Luther King Jr. who was a Baptist;  John and Charles Wesley who were Methodists; Archbishop Oscar Romero, a Roman Catholic tragically assassinated in 1980; , John Calvin, the father of Presbyterianism and Martin Luther who gave us Lutheranism.  As in all things, we Episcopalians are very forgiving in the latitude of belief we allow not only our parishioners but also our saints.

Our saints differ from the saints of the Roman Catholic Church.  Whereas that tradition attributes intercessory parents to the saints, the Episcopal Church simply believes that the saints have lived lives worthy of emulation. Saints are for us sources of inspiration, not  subject s of veneration.

A very good scriptural case can be made that all Christians qualify as saints.  In fact, in the New Testament epistles, Paul uses the word Sanctus regularly  in his greetings to the congregations.

Thus he addresses the Epistle to the Ephesians “to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.”  Similar greetings are extended to the Romans, the Corinthians, the Colossians, the Philippians and the Thessalonians.  For Paul, the bar for sainthood was set rather low.  You show up, you’re a saint.

So how did we get from that to the Saints that we more typically think of on All Saints Day.  How did we go from the idea of saints as ordinary people in the pew next door to the idea that saints are demi-gods possessed of moral qualities inaccessible to all but the most holy among us?

The answer lies in the waywardness that infected the church prior to the Reformation.  You have to remember that in the Dark Ages between the Fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance, the entire citizenry—peasants, nobles and kings alike—lost the ability to read and largely even the ability to travel.  The people didn’t know about Paul’s liberal definition of saints, because it wasn’t in the interests of the church and the priests to tell them that anyone can be a saint.  It wasn’t in the church’s interest, because the church found that ignorance was a pretty good way to make money and The Church wandered down a bad path  and  engaged in such practices as selling the relics of saints, selling intercessions by saints, and generally dreaming up any possible scheme it could monetize to fund the expansion of its secular power.

Thus, each and every citizen who was told that for the right fee he or she could buy a piece of protection in the form of a finger bone or scarf previously possessed by a saint was prone to fall for the salesman’s ruse.

Here’s just one example of how bad things got:  A favorite relic of the Middle Ages was the head of John the Baptist, untimely severed from his shoulders by Herod and the conniving Salome. At various times, that sacred head has been reported to be in the possession of churches in Jerusalem, Egypt, Britain, Turkey, Syria, France, Italy and Germany. Many of them claimed to have it at the same time, and some of them still claim to have it today. While I can’t tell you which one had might have head the actual head of John the Baptist, I can most certainly assure you that John the Baptist only had one head so somebody has been fooled!

To some degree all this got sorted out, kind of, during and after the Reformation when people gained access to literacy and the printed word and discovered to their dismay that a lot of charlatans, some of whom were wearing clerical robes, had been duping a lot of people.

Sadly, the reaction to all of this was predictable.  The pendulum having swung too far in one direction was promptly swung too far in the opposite direction.  Many church’s threw out the tradition of honoring saints altogether and we’ll probably never know how many art treasures were lost to posterity as images were smashed and banned and frescoes were defaced with lime or covered beneath gallons of whitewash.

Eventually, things evened themselves out.  The Protestant Churches laid down a rule that goes something like this: “No heavenly intermediaries are needed to intercede with God. Although the Virgin Mary, saints, and angels are all in heaven, they should not be the objects of prayer or veneration.”  Meanwhile, the Catholic Church recognized the error of its way and laid down a rule with slightly different wording which roughly says that “Although the saints and angels should not be worshipped, their intercession is valuable…Religious images should not be worshipped, but they help to inspire devotion.” 

Whether peasants and ordinary church people like us ever really bothered to understand the fine distinction is debatable but for the most part we all can now agree that God hears  our prayers whenever we utter them and that asking the intercession of saints, while perhaps comforting, isn’t a necessary prerequisite to getting God’s attention.

Now let me digress just a second and say that I started this whole section by saying that the Reformation sorted out the status of the saints “Kind of.”  There is a reason for that qualifier.  As I was researching this sermon, I was Googling on the internet as I often do, and amazingly one of the first things that popped up in my search was an offer on ebay to sell me various relics.  Amazingly, at this very moment, you too can bid on the hairs of six saints!  Or if you can’t wait, those very hairs are available at the buy-it-now price of $580.  Oh and one other thing, because the sale of relics is frowned and in fact forbidden by the Vatican, the seller has decided to take the entire proceeds of your purchase and apply it to a charitable contribution to an organization advocating to make Pope John Paul II a saint. 

I am seriously not making this up, and now would be an appropriate time to pull out your SmartPhones and log in to ebay because this offer conveniently expires TODAY, All Saints Sunday, and if you don’t act now you might not get the chance to purchase this rare and wonderful object.

OK, so the human tendency to make a quick buck is perhaps something we will never fully extinguish.  However, there are a few points of clarity surrounding saints and the way we are called as Christians to deal with this subject.

First, let’s agree that while all we may be saints, some among us have demonstrated more saintliness than others, and those who have reach the pinnacle of saintliness deserve a little extra recognition on days like today.

Second, let’s agree that while the Saints of Old are notable, the need to recognize extraordinary contributions to faith did not necessarily end with the Reformation.   There are still people today who inspire us to rise above ourselves, and All Saints Day is an appropriate time to recognize them as well.

Who are they?  Well, as we are going to see and sing in just a little bit, they are doctors and queens and shepherds and soldiers and priests. You will meet them in school or in lanes or at sea, at church or in trains or in shops or at tea. 

In other words, Saints are normal people, just like you and me.  Saints are distinguished not by moral perfection but rather by the gift of faith. And they don’t just have faith, they live their faith, and in doing so, they inspire the rest of us.

They inspire us to be better than we thought we could be.

They inspire us to put our faith into practice on days other than Sunday.

They inspire us to think that there might be something out there bigger than ourselves.

The inspire us to want to know more about that special man called Jesus Christ.

A saint or two might be right here in this sanctuary today, or maybe he or she is worshipping down the street or maybe he or she didn’t even go to church today. 

The saints with whom we are all familiar have names like St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Andrew, St. Joseph, St. Francis, St. Theresa of Avila, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Nicholas, St. Valentine and St. Patrick . . .

But I think it’s equally possible that there are other saints about whom we haven’t yet heard.  St. Anna, St. Larry, St. Jan, St. Cindy, St. Stan, St. Merry, St. Greg, St. Sally, St. Anne, St. Pat, St. Laura (continue naming members of the congregation--Warning:  failure to mention anyone is not an indication of a lack of confidence in their sanctity!)

The All Saints commemoration is not about yesterday and the saints that were.  It is about today and tomorrow and the saints we should all be striving to become.

As the old song says, “Oh Lord, I WANT TO BE IN THAT NUMBER, when the SAINTS, go marching in.”

With God’s help, we can be.

Amen

(Hymn to follow)