Who Are the Saints? (sermon for All Saints' Day, Nov. 7, 2010)

Luke 6:20-31
Ephesians 1:11-23

After all the Halloween festivities the past couple of weeks, not to mention the stores dedicated to Halloween merchandise that opened up all over town, I doubt any of us would be that surprised to hear that as a holiday, Halloween now ranks second in consumer spending, coming only after Christmas.

I read last week that some people think Halloween has become such a popular holiday because it is completely non-controversial and non-ideological. Lord knows, we could use a little of that in an election season! Think about it: people can celebrate Halloween without worrying that they are going to offend someone of a different race or religion. It’s a kind of “equal opportunity” holiday. My aunt, a kindergarten teacher, says that the week of Halloween is the most important week of the whole school year. “It’s the one holiday we’re still allowed to celebrate in a public school,” she said, and her school goes all-out with a whole week of events.

But is Halloween really a completely secular holiday? Originally, it began as an agricultural festival in ancient Celtic society called Samhain, which means “summer’s end.” This was the time of year when the sun’s ability to offer warmth and light and growth were decreasing, and the months of darkness and cold and frost were fast approaching. Samhain represented a time in-between -- between light and darkness, warmth and cold, life and death, this world and the next.

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that as Christianity spread across Europe and even, Samhain became tied to All Saints’ Day and was renamed All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween. All Saints’ Day is a time when we celebrate those who have died, a time when, in a sense, we the living, draw nearer to the dead. As All Saints’ Day approached, Halloween offered people an opportunity to come close to that which they often feared most: death and the powers of darkness.

In many ways, Halloween still allows people to do this. We live in a culture that is obsessed with security, that is terrified of death, and Halloween offers us the chance to face those fears head-on, if only for a night. But for Christians, there is the Sunday after Halloween, when we acknowledge that death will not have the final word, when we remember that ultimately, we have nothing to fear because we are God’s own. That is the day we celebrate today, All Saints’ Day. (1)

The challenge of this day, though, is that the very word “saint” is confusing. In the Catholic tradition, “saint” refers to someone who has been officially recognized by the Church because they were exceptionally virtuous in some way. This is not so different from the original idea of “saint” that inspired the early church celebration of All Saints’ Day. Back then there were still many who were martyrs for their faith, whose allegiance to Christ got them killed. But many of those martyred for the faith were unknown, their names were never recorded in the history books, and so All Saints’ Day was set aside to keep their memory, if not their names, alive.

In this tradition, sainthood was something that had to be earned through virtuous behavior.

There is an episode of the television show The Simpsons in which Homer Simpson dreams that he has died and gone to heaven. Just as he is about to pass through the pearly gates, Saint Peter stops him and says he hasn’t earned enough points to be admitted. But he has another chance: he can return to earth and do one good deed.

So Homer’s spirit goes back to his home, where he tells his wife Marge, “I have to do one good deed to get into heaven. Tell me what to do.” Marge says, “There’s plenty of chores that need doing -- wash the dishes, mow the lawn, feed the dog.” “Geez,” Homer fumes, “I just want to enter Heaven, I’m not running for Jesus!”

The original idea of sainthood -- and the Catholic Church’s understanding of saints -- seems to be that there is a sense in which we can all “run for Jesus” and some will get further than others. But this conception of sainthood was challenged during the Reformation, which gave birth to the Presbyterian Church as well as other denominations we refer to as “Reformed”. The leaders of the Reformation put a renewed emphasis on God’s action and God’s grace. Human beings could not earn salvation through righteous living; rather, salvation is a gracious gift from our loving God that then inspires us to live -- or at least try to live -- according to God’s ways. At this point in history, the concept of sainthood in the Reformed tradition was expanded to include all those who had been baptized into the family of God, all those who had received God’s grace. So All Saints’ Day became a day to celebrate the sainthood of all believers, and particularly those who have already died and entered God’s kingdom.

Today we heard a portion of Paul’s letters to the Ephesians. Here he has taken on the monumental task of explaining what Christians gain through their faith in Jesus Christ. First he reminds his readers of the big picture: when we heard the gospel and believed it we were “marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” This is what we celebrate in baptism, that our primary identity in life is that we are God’s beloved children. But even more than that, when we are grafted into the family of God it means that each one of us, no matter what our background or family identity -- has a share in what Paul calls “the riches of [Christ’s] glorious inheritance.” And Paul describes these riches in amazing terms: Christ, seated at God’s right hand in heaven, above all the other authorities and power, with all things under his feet...I don’t know about you, but in our current political climate what a relief it is to remember that Christ’s authority completely surpasses all human authority.

Still, I’m not sure that this passage gives a crystal clear answer to this question of who are the saints. One of my colleagues put it this way in an email to his church about All Saints’ Day: “the saints of my life are literally those I could not live without.” The writer Frederick Beuchner refers to lines in his prayer book that talk about “the Angels and Archangles and all the company of heaven” and says that “‘all the company of heaven’ means everybody we ever loved and lost, including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them or didn’t love at all. It means people we never heard of. It means everybody who ever did -- or at some unimaginable time in the future ever will -- come together at something like this table in search of something like what is offered at it.” (2) I think that explanation is exquisite, but I confess I still find it hard to wrap my head around.

Nicholas Kristoff is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and a veteran reporter who has traveled and lived all over the world. At the height of the terrible conflict in Darfur, he traveled to that region multiple times and wrote impassioned columns about what he saw there: mass violence, people driven from their homes, children massacred, women raped...but it seemed as though no matter what he wrote his columns didn’t seem to make an impact, they just disappeared without a ripple. At about that same time, there was a red-tailed hawk in New York City that was essentially evicted from its home atop an apartment building. It seemed the entire city was infuriated that this hawk had been forced from its home. Why, Kristoff wondered, why wasn’t there the same level of outrage for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Darfur as for this homeless bird?

That’s when Kristoff came across a series of studies by Paul Slovic. In these experiments, people were shown a picture of a starving girl named Rokia and given the opportunity to donate to her cause. Others were shown a picture of a starving boy named Moussa and had the opportunity to help him by donating money. Both groups responded generously and compassionately to the photographs of the individual children. But when a third group was shown one picture with the image of Rokia and Moussa together and asked to donate, their giving significantly decreased. (3)

For us to respond compassionately to those in need, we need to feel an emotional connection. And statistics, numbers, and other rational arguments just don’t do a good job of tugging at the heartstrings. Instead, they create something in us known as “compassion fatigue” -- we all know what that feels like, when the destruction and death and violence just overwhelms us and we can’t take it in. Well, it turns out that the number at which we begin to show compassion fatigue is when the number of victims goes from one to two. Show us one person in need and we will respond with compassion; but show us two and our compassion and generosity begins to wane.

So today, before we get overwhelmed with the concept of “all saints,” may we need to stop for a moment and think of that one person who defines “saint” for us. Maybe this person is a saint because we simply could not imagine our lives without them. Maybe it’s because through their actions they showed us what it means to live out the gospel, to share in that glorious inheritance that Paul writes about. As I wrote this sermon I kept thinking about the members of this community who died in the past year, Glenna Duncan, Estella Plaster, and Cristle Roney, and how their lives taught so many people the true meaning of love and sacrifice and service.

But maybe the person who defines a “saint” for you is entirely different. Maybe it’s someone that you struggle to love or even to like. Yet you know they are a saint because what matters is not whether they have earned your love and admiration, but that God loves them and extends the same glorious inheritance to them as God does to all God’s children. After all, in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus makes very clear that God blesses, not just those we like and can relate to, but the poor, the hungry, and the suffering. In a fractured and divided world, we need to remember these people as well, and remember that they too are the saints, whether we can see it or not.

No matter whom you think of today, no matter whom you remember as a saint, may you start with that one person, and may that memory spark the emotional connection that inspires you to respond compassionately to all people, for truly we are all the saints of God, moving forward on this journey that leads, not just to death, but to a place where someday, somehow, we will gather with all the saints around a table, guests of the One who lived and died and rose and reigns for us all. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. I am indebted to Tom Long’s article “Halloween: The Killing Frost and the Gospel” in Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, pp. 2-7 for these statistics and this interpretation of the relationship between Halloween and All Saints’ Day.
2. Both quotes in this paragraph are from an evotional by the Rev. Mark Ramsey at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC. Read it online here.
3. Kristoff told this story in an interview with Krista Tippett for her radio show “On Being.” Find the podcast here. Read a related article about Slovic’s research here.