Sermons

“Called To Be Saints”

I Corinthians 1:2-9; Ephesians 4:11-16 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – November 2, 2014

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might find comfort in the eternal promise of your love.  We pray it in the name of Jesus, Amen.

What do you think of when you hear the word “saints”?  An ancient icon, perhaps?  Or everyone’s favorite saint, Brother Francis?  Are there any Irish folks in the room who prefer St. Patrick?  Perhaps, even though it’s not language we Disciples use very often, you’re familiar with the phrase “the communion of saints,” which seems to imply there are a lot of them, right?  If you had to pick, would you say saints are living or dead?  Are they ancient or recent?  Are they normal or extraordinary?  In the process the Catholic Church is currently using, there must be three provable miracles attributed to someone before they can be canonized.  These folks don’t seem much like us, do they?

And yet, let us indulge in our Restorationist roots for a moment, and notice how Paul uses the word.  The example from First Corinthians is just one of many.  In almost all of the letters Paul wrote to churches, he addresses them as “saints.”  Now these were charter members of the church universal, which does make them kind of special.  And they’re ancient and dead from our perspective, but they certainly weren’t when Paul was writing to them!

As J. Paul Sampley puts it in his notes on First Corinthians in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, “Paul does not share the modern notion that saints are those who outperform other believers.”  The Greek word being translated here, and its Hebrew counterpart, literally mean “set apart for the gospel of God.”  In other words, baptized.  Everyone who is part of the Body of Christ is a saint!  All of us, whether we’ve performed miracles or not!

I wrote a little song to celebrate this, and I’m hoping you’ll sing it with me.  Some of you know the song “I Am the Church,” right?  Well, this is a variation.  You can follow along with the words up on the screen.  The one thing you need to know before we sing it is that you need to say “Au-gus-steen” rather than “Au-gus-stun” for it to meter right.  Will you sing this song with me?

“The saints are not just Francis, Patrick or Teresa; the saints are not just Augustine – the saints are the people!  I am a saint!  You are a saint!  We are the saints together!  All who follow Jesus, all around the world – Yes!  We’re the saints together!”  Amen!  Thank you for singing with me!  Most of the time, I say that we “commemorate” All Saints Day, but in this sense, it is truly a celebration.  We are the saints together!

So now that we’ve established that, what does it mean?  And on this day of sacred memory, how can it bring us comfort?  Well, first of all, it means no more excuses.  This is really a topic for a totally different sermon, but Paul makes it abundantly clear, in Corinthians and in Ephesians and many other places, that every person who is part of the Body of Christ has a gift to offer.  Just because you can’t niraculously heal cancer or catch a baby falling from a 7^th story balcony or give $5 million to build a cathedral, that doesn’t mean you can’t do something.  And that thing that you do – whatever it may be – the gift that you bring is just as worthy, just as holy, as any other.  You are a saint.  The gifts of the saints are precious.  Not being saintly enough isn’t an excuse not to offer yours.

More apropos to our service today is that being called to be a saint is an invitation into something much larger than ourselves.  And not just much larger, but also much longer.  Being a saint connects us to eternity.  When we sing, “We are the saints together!” the “we” we’re talking about is not just the people in this room right now.  It’s everyone who ever been in this room.  It’s Anita and Jim and Kay, and it’s all the other people we lit candles for this morning.  And not just them, but also  Mother Teresa, and Nelson Mandela, and countless wonderful and ordinary people whose names we’ll never know, throughout the earth and throughout history, all the way back to the Apostle Paul.  Being a saint is a way of achieving immortality.

Last year on All Saints Sunday, I took the opportunity to talk with you about how death is complicated.  Grief is messy and weird.  But grief is only one of the reasons we don’t like to talk about death.  Grief is what makes it hard to talk about other people’s deaths.  But there is something else looming in the shadowy corner, making us want to change the subject.  To discuss death is to remind ourselves of our own inevitable end – the universal experience we all face, even more certainly than taxes, though each one will be unique, even as each of us is unique.  While the death of a loved one may cause sorrow and heartbreak and any manner of other difficult emotions, our own death is a whole other thing.  It’s hard to imagine not existing any more, when, after all, we’ve existed our whole lives.  And for many of us, it’s incredibly frightening.

How does thinking of yourself as a saint shift your sense of what it means to die?  A saint, one in the communion of saints, one “in that number, when the saints go marching in.”  You will leave a legacy, whether it’s a grand building or a solar array or a tradition of planting tomatoes.  You will continue being a part of that reality you are already part of – the eternal body of Christ, the family of God.  Whatever that will mean – and there have been innumerable visions suggested – it hardly seems like it can be bad.  Being called as a saint brings us back to the basic message of the gospel:  we don’t have to be afraid anymore.  “Do Not Fear,” the angels are forever repeating.  “Do Not Fear.”

It may be that there is someone here who lit a candle today in memory of a person who seemed like the furthest thing from a saint.  And yet, you lit that candle, because that memory, too, is precious and worthy of redemption.  God’s eternal mercy is so much bigger than our capacity to channel it.  God’s transformative power is so much more miraculous than anything we can hope for.  God’s abiding love is so much more everlasting than our brains can even comprehend.  People talk of “saints” and how amazing and rare they are, and Jesus is sitting there, quoting “The Princess Bride”:  “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  “I have made you all saints, set apart for the gospel of God.  You do not have to feel unworthy or afraid.  You do not need to make excuses for who you are.  You do not need to worry that you will be forgotten.  You are the saints of God.”

On this day when we remember the saints who have gone on, let us hold fast to this truth:  that we, too, are the saints, just a few of countless thousands, the eternal body of Christ, made one through God’s love, never abandoned, never forgotten, never alone.  We are the saints together!  Alleluia and Amen!