Episcopal Church of the Messiah

Worship Service Sermons

November 4, 2007

 The Reverend Carolyn Estrada

Do you know what a "saint" is? I asked my older two grandchildren the other day.

"I think so…" Taylor, the seven year old, replied tentatively. "Is it someone like Mary, the mother of Jesus?"

"Yes," I replied. "Mary would be a saint. Can you think of any others? Do you think you could be a saint?"

"No way!" said Trey, who is five. "You’d have to be way too good!"

That’s the general concept – the result of my "straw poll" which included adults as well as children. I got responses like "someone who is holy" and "set apart" and "a really good person, as in ‘pure.’" Even our Collect for this morning speaks of the "blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living."

Personally, I prefer the definition I read in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary: A "saint" is "a dead sinner, revised and edited."

A dead sinner, revised and edited.

Some "Great Editor in the Sky" has red penciled all the faults and human foibles of their real-life history, and made them "larger than life" examples of Holiness, with a capital "H," people totally unlike us, unapproachable in their virtue…

The reality is, when you read the lives of the saints, you find that they were in fact very well-acquainted with sin – these were not ethereal, other-worldly people, paragons of all that is True and Pure and Beautiful.

Indeed, they were often people who struggled with their relationship with God and their fellow human beings.

Or, sometimes, at least initially, people who didn’t struggle at all: they were crabby or rowdy or indifferent or hostile characters for much of their lives, until touched by a grace that changed them. Before they were "saints," they were human beings, in all their complexity, whom God touched and used for God’s purposes A few of the more well-known examples are:

And there are many more – just try reading the lives of some of the saints!

It’s hard to think of saints as less-than-perfect people, not "all holy and set apart."

Even now, there is in the general populace some alarm and denial at the publication of Mother Teresa’s letters revealing her extended "dark night of the soul," and giving a very personal account of her doubt and her struggles with her faith – how could a saint feel that way? Perhaps she wasn’t a saint after all?!!

But I think Ambrose Bierce is right: A saint truly is a "dead sinner, revised and edited." Not because THEY have initiated the revising and editing – they don’t have a PR person out there putting spin on their lives – but because WE somehow have a need to see them as other-worldly, as someone very different from us. We can’t imagine "saint potential" in any one of our ordinary lives!

That’s a big responsibility – and one we may not want!

Huh?

Me, a saint?!!

I don’t think so…

And yet, as my conversation with my grandchildren continued, Trey suggested that maybe one could be a saint "if you loved God very much."

Yes, one could be a saint if you loved God very much… but I think there is another piece to that equation, for our loving God very much is love lived out in community, expressed in this world, with our neighbors. It seems to me that saints come out of community.

We often speak of "the community of saints" – those who have gone before us, present still in spirit; a community into which we will attain membership once we die. But I believe that this "community of saints" is in formation now, as we live here, in this life, a community which helps us to cultivate a way of life that bears witness to God’s love. It is a way of life lived in the midst of others, our ordinariness and theirs somehow bumping up against each other, like so many stones in a rock tumbler. Here we are:

So many pebbles dropped into the rock tumbler, rubbing against one another, bouncing and dropping and clattering together, a community, shaping one another even as we are being shaped.

It’s a much messier picture than Dante’s saints as individual rose petals all turned joyfully toward the heart of love.

But I think it is more real, for this is who we are, this is the community in which we live and love and are loved.

Wendell Berry has Jabyar Crow describe his vision of the community of saints "…the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members, and may be nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace."

This Sunday After All Saints, may we be reminded of the saint we each carry within us, and, as we bump up against one another in this messy thing we call "life," may our love for God be seen in our love for one another, for, in the words of the song, there is "not any reason, no not the least, why I shouldn’t be one too."

Amen.