Tag: feast

“The Saints and the Rest of Us”

This sermon was originally preached at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Denton, Texas.

Something that some of you have probably noticed about me through listening to my sermons week after week– or just talking with me– is my love of the movies. Perhaps you’ve noticed. Last week at the coffee hour after the 11 a.m. service, I was talking with a parishioner about movies and about the work of the actor Ralph Fiennes.

And I realized that I knew not only that he played Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies, but also that he was the villain Ramses in the animated Prince of Egypt and that he was the villainous Amon Goethe in Schindler’s List. But that he had also played good guys, like M in the most recent Bond movies.

Now, mind you, it’s not that I really like Ralph Fiennes or have gone out of my way to find this out about him. I just happen to know these things. I can name every movie that Martin Scorsese has directed in order and tell you the year they came out. How does this benefit me in life? And yet I know all these things because I love the movies.

And that realization brought home for me again the truth that it’s very human to find other people interesting and to want to know more about their life and work. And I realized that, in a sense, celebrities are the saints of secular culture. Celebrities are the people who most Americans really know about. So today on All Saints Sunday, we as the church celebrate the saints— we might say, the celebrities of the church. The Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Elizabeth, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Barnabas, Saint Athanasius, those great heroes of the faith. They are, we might say, the celebrities of the Church, the most interesting people in the community.

Now there was a time in the West when the saints really were celebrities. You may or may not know a well-known actor in the theater or the opera or a novelist, but everyone knew the saints. On the eve of the Reformation, the late medieval era, there was a recognition that a lot of the common piety toward the saints had become problematic.

And this was not just a criticism of the Reformers. Even the Dutch humanist Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, pointed out some of the exaggerations of piety toward the saints. He wrote, “Each saint is assigned his own special powers and his own special cult. So that one saint gives relief from toothache. Another stands by women in childbirth. A third returns stolen objects and so on. It would take too long to go through the whole list. There are some whose influence extends to several things. Notably the virgin mother of God, for the common ignorant man comes near to attributing more to her than to her Son.” And this was a Catholic who wrote this.

So in the 16th century, the cult of the saints in the late medieval West had gotten a little out of hand. They were treated as sort of superhumans or demigods who had their own little sphere of influence. So during the Reformation, and in the English Reformation, from which we as Episcopalians claim our heritage, devotion to the saints was greatly minimized. But as is often the case in the Episcopal Church, there is a reaction against excess and then a streamlining of the faith. But then after the fires of controversy have died down a bit, a gradual return to fullness.

So in the Episcopal church today, we do remember the saints, not only on All Saints Day, but throughout the year in commemorations of the liturgical calendar. For those of you who come to the Wednesday noon Mass, if you come to that regularly, you’ll learn a lot of the different saints that we celebrate in the Episcopal Church. And so even though there was a reaction at the beginning, things have sort of returned.

And thankfully most Episcopalians nowadays are not allergic to anything that looks or sounds or feels Catholic— except maybe in moral theology. (Silence) That was a joke. (Laughter). Maybe a little too close to home. Ok! We’re in a place in the Episcopal Church where just saying, “Oh, well, we can’t do that, that’s like what the Catholics do!”– that’s not really a thing you hear anymore. That used to be a thing you would hear in the Church of England. Not so much anymore.

But there are other places in Christendom where that really is the case, where the saints really have gone away. The saints got pushed out at the Reformation and they never came back. And we hear this in the sentiment, “All we need is Jesus.” “Just give me Jesus.” “All I need is Jesus and the Bible.” It’s been said that nature abhors a vacuum. It could also be said that grace abhors a vacuum too, because this very human need to learn about interesting people and what they’ve done in their lives is not going away. It will be fulfilled in some way.

So there are Christians who have no devotion to the saints, maybe they’re even proud of that, but they’re very devoted to the lives of celebrities. They know who wore it better. They know when Tom Cruise was married and to whom, and why his marriage to Katie Holmes fell apart. And what Suri is up to now. They know lots about movie stars and musicians, both their work and their personal lives. But they don’t know much about or perhaps don’t even recognize saints who have been revered for centuries.

The fact is that the human need to look up to others and to learn about their lives will be fulfilled in one way or another. And so that’s why everything in the life of the Church is for our sanctification. God knows that we need ritual and repetition, that we need predictability in an unpredictable world, so he gives us the liturgy. God knows that we yearn to encounter Him, not only in our minds, but in the physical. And so he gives us the sacraments. And God knows that we naturally find other people interesting and that we want to learn more about them and imitate them… so he gives us the saints.

None of these are bad things. They’re good things. They’re part of what it means to be human. But these very natural desires need to be transfigured by God’s grace in the Church, because if they aren’t fulfilled here, we’ll seek to fulfill them using the resources of the world, and the results could be less than wholesome.

So devotion to the saints, remembering them and seeking to imitate their lives, is a way of broadening one’s spiritual vision. It’s like looking at a landscape and seeing not only the sun but also the moon and the stars and the mountains and rivers and valleys. Or if I may paraphrase Saint Paul’s admonition in Philippians 4:8: “Finally, beloved, whoever is true, whoever is honorable, whoever is just or pure or pleasing or commendable, if there is anyone of excellence, anyone worthy of praise, think about such persons.” It’s good to think about the saints, to know about their lives and their work. It’s a good thing to be mindful of the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us and to seek to imitate their virtue. Because if we don’t have room for the saints in our lives, we’ll surely find other saints to revere.

So that is my argument for devotion to the saints. Perhaps I didn’t really need to make that argument. Perhaps y’all are already on board with that. And you’re already on board with commemorating the saints. Maybe I’m quite literally preaching to the choir.

But there is in fact another danger associated with the saints, and it’s on the opposite end of the spectrum. If one danger is to ignore the saints and push them out of the church, the other is to idealize them, to view them as a spiritual caste, as a pinnacle of holiness that’s inaccessible to us. This is the idea that there’s the saints and there’s the rest of us, and never the twain shall meet.

I was watching a sitcom called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and there is a character who’s a Catholic priest. And he is probably the worst kind of pastor for giving counsel that I’ve ever seen in a television program. It is comedic how bad his pastoral counsel is. But this character, this Catholic priest, in one scene he’s wearing a black T-shirt with white lettering and it says, “I may be a priest, but I’m no saint.”

And that’s a common phrase that we’ve heard before, isn’t it? To say, Hey, I’m no saint. Well… why aren’t you? Or why aren’t you at least trying?

I really mean this. Why is it that to be a saint is a thing that we don’t take seriously? It’s very easy to sort of be ironic about sainthood to say, Well, hey, I’m no saint. And to be ironic with like a wink and a nudge and to accept that holiness is not really attainable for us.

It’s so easy in the modern world, not only to not try to be saintly, but maybe even to demonize people who do want to be saintly. To say, Oh, well, what, do they think they’re better than us or something? To think a person is “holier than thou” if they really try to be saintly.

But there are souls in the history of the church who really truly desired to be saints— to be holy. I think of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, whose whole life was about seeking holiness and union with God. He was very earnest about this. And so we see the truth that one cannot be a saint ironically. You can only be a saint earnestly and genuinely. And in fact, irony is really the easier posture to adopt because if we are sort of ironic and too cool for it, if we go down the road of pursuing holiness and fall down and fail, we can’t just get up and say, Oh, well, I wasn’t really trying anyway. If we go to God in prayer and say, “God, I want to be holier, I want my thoughts and my words and my actions to be more conformed to that of Christ. I want to be saintly.” That’s a very genuine prayer. And if we fall, there’s really no acting like, Well, we weren’t really trying. Because we were trying. So that moral genuineness, that spiritual earnestness has characterized all the saints, and not just the well-known ones.

That’s why we call it All Saints, both known and unknown: men and women who have earnestly, not ironically, not cynically, but actually and truly wanted to be holy. Because as we read in our reading from the Book of Revelation, when the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven, and there is a new heavens and a new earth, we are a part of that. We will be with the saints. There won’t be a divide between the people that we commemorate in the liturgical calendar me and you or your beloved grandmother or whoever it may be. We will all be there together, shoulder to shoulder. And so the saints are not separated from us, such that we’re not able to have any sort of hope in sharing their holiness. We are called to be saints.

And so that’s the question I leave with us today. A very non-ironic, very earnest question. Do you want to be holier? Do you want to be a saint?

Because if you do, God will help you. Because he always helps those who earnestly seek him. Amen.