For all the saints who are models for us in the beloved
community of God’s grace, we give thanks ☩ in the name of
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
In the letter of First John, we heard “what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him.” In other words, we are becoming something; we are growing in Christ. Through Creation, God is working to bring all things to their culmination and perfection in the love of God. Until that day when the swords are beaten into ploughshares, when the lion and lamb lie down together, when all has been made well, all of Creation is moving towards that end.
The saints of the Church are those in
whose lives we see what such growth looks like. Saints are holy men and women
whose lives are blessedly different. That is what John means by saying that the
world does not know us just as it did not know Christ. The lives of the saints
make no sense in a competitive and sinful world. Saints are often dismissed as
being crazy, just as Jesus was called “out of his mind,” because though the way
of love really is the grain of the universe, it it goes against the grain of
society. We need the saints because the world’s values and systems confuse us
about what matters most and who we look to as our examples. In their obedience,
courage, and compassion, they stand out as examples of what we are moving
towards – the fullness of the stature of Christ.
In the Eucharistic prayers of our
tradition, you might have noticed that, most of the time, the priest says words
that aren’t found on the same page as the rest of the prayer. These words come
between the “It is very, meet, right, and our bounden duty” and the “Therefore
with Angels and Archangels.” What is added is called the “Proper Preface,” which
is a sentence that connects our prayer to the season or occasion of the Church
Year. I mention this because, as Anglicans, when we want to know what we
believe, we turn to the Prayer Book. Praying shapes believing.
When it comes to the Proper Prefaces
for commemorating a saint, the Prayer Book gives us four different options. The
first three are listed as being used for saints and one is reserved for
apostles. To help us understand who the saints are, I’ll read these Prefaces. “For
the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all thy saints, who have been
chosen vessels of thy grace, and the lights of the world in their
generations.” That’s the first one. The second is, “Who in the obedience
of thy saints hast given us an example of righteousness, and in their
eternal joy a glorious pledge of the hope of our calling.” Third
is, “Because thou are greatly glorified in the assembly of thy saints. All
thy creatures praise thee, and thy faithful servants bless thee,
confessing before the rulers of this world the great Name of thine only
Son.” And, lastly, for Apostles, we have “Through the great shepherd of
thy flock, Jesus Christ our Lord; who after his resurrection sent forth
his apostles to preach the Gospel and to teach all nations; and promised
to be with them always, even unto the end of the ages.” Broadly
speaking, the Prayer Book gives us four shapes of sainthood: martyrs, mystics,
ministers, and missionaries. The four M’s. As we consider each, we’ll see something
about the shape of what it is that we are becoming.
First, we have what we might call
the mystics, and many of these saints are monastics as well. The Preface notes
that they show wonderful grace and virtue as the light of Christ shines in
their lives. Here, we might think of people like Howard Thurman who reminded us
that Jesus was one of the disinherited and showed us that the path of Godliness
is the path of lowliness. We might think of monastics like Aidan, Columba,
Cuthbert, Hilda, or Julian who gave their lives to prayer and drawing others more
deeply into encountering God. The mystic saints are those who help us to catch
glimpses of what we are becoming through meditation and prayer. Mystics also remind
us that God is bigger and lovelier than our ability to comprehend, and in their
lives, show us the virtue of humility. We need the mystic saints to model for
us living by a more sacred rhythm than the fast-paced and disposable nature of
modern society.
The next Preface mentions obedience
and righteousness, and we might call these saints the ministers. To be clear,
to be a minister does not mean you have to be ordained. All of us are called to
ministry – some as priests, some as teachers, some as attorneys, some as
bankers, some as nurses, some as artists, some as caregivers. The types of
ministry are as diverse as the whole Body of Christ is. And what is laudable about
these saints who do ministry in the name of Jesus is their obedience to following
his way, his truth, and his life above their own preferences and comforts,
revealing to us the paths of righteousness and justice. Here, I am thinking of
saints like Mary, the mother of our Lord, who said “Let it be with me according
to thy word.” I am thinking of Martin Luther King who awakened the conscience
of a nation around civil rights. I am thinking of the saints in some of our
icons such as Henry Beard Delany and Elizabeth Duncan Koontz.
On the one hand, these were all
fairly ordinary people. None of them were on the covers of magazines. Mary was
a young girl. Martin Luther King was a young pastor who was busy with a family
and finishing school. Delany was a black priest in church that would have never
considered electing him as a Diocesan bishop, but rather only as a bishop for
what was known as “colored ministry.” Koontz was a teacher who was fired for
standing up for those being neglected. These were ordinary people from whom the
Holy Spirit summoned an extraordinary response. We need the model of saintly
ministers to remind us that any moment might be the moment that God calls us
into action.
The third Preface reminds us of the
martyrs, those whose very lives become witnesses to the glory of God. The prayer
notes that these saints offer praise to God, confessing the glory of God in the
face of hostile and violent opposition. We ought not be surprised that one of
the paths of saintliness is martyrdom, after all, our symbol of faith is a
cross, an instrument of execution. And yet these are the saints that often
shine the brightness because they pay the full cost of discipleship. These are
saints like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who confessed the name of love against the
Nazis, Oscar Romero who confessed the liberating power of God to those who
abused their authority, and Alban who confessed not what would lead to his self-preservation
but gave his life for another.
As Bonhoeffer wrote, “When Christ
calls us, he bids us come and die.” We believe that when we are Baptized, we are
united to Christ in his death and are raised with him in his glorious,
gracious, and abundant Resurrection life. We die to self, sin, and death and
are reborn as children of God. The world can take away our dignity, it can take
away our freedom, it can even take away our lives. But no one and nothing can
take God’s belovedness from us because this love was given as a gift, not as
something we earned or were awarded. Love is forever ours. We are always the
children of God. And God’s love is all we need – it is the only thing that is
eternal. As St. Paul writes in First Corinthians, “Love bears all things,
believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
Love is what we are given in Jesus Christ and love is the greatest of all
things which shall never be taken away. The martyred saints remind us that some
things are worth living for, some things are worth dying for, and that love ultimately
wins
Lastly, we
have the missionary saints, often called the apostles. An apostle is someone
who is sent on a mission, often to preach and teach the liberating, loving, and
life-giving messages of God’s Good News. Some apostles, such as Constance, are
called to stay. When there was an outbreak of Yellow Fever in Memphis, she was given
the mission to stay and care for those who were suffering. Sometimes God will
send you “over there,” but a lot of the time, God will call you to remain where
you are, but to be there differently. To be there as an instrument of God’s
healing, reconciliation, compassion, or peace.
Other times, God will send you
somewhere, just as Patrick was sent to carry the message of Good News to those
who had enslaved him previously in Ireland or as Enmegabowh, the first indigenous
American to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, was sent to preach the reconciling
love of Christ to those tribes who had been estranged. We need the models of
missionary sainthood because we are a Spirit-blown people who are sent on
mission into a world that desperately needs to hear the Good News that God’s
love is working to make all things new.
Saints can
be mystics, ministers, martyrs, or missionaries, and we need them all. To be
clear, when we speak about the Communion of Saints, we are not engaging in
hero-worship. We do not praise the saints, but rather we praise the God who emboldened
and equipped them as saints. We lift up the saints precisely because we are a
part of their mystic sweet Communion, this fellowship divine. The saints show
us what growth in Christ looks like. The saints are examples of the difference
that Christ makes in a human life. The saints are models for how blessedness,
belonging, and belovedness transform an ordinary human life into the extraordinary
vocation of sainthood to which we are all called by virtue of our baptisms. To
be sure, we only know the names and stories of but a tiny fraction of the
saints of the Church. Tonight, we gather in thanksgiving for the witness of the
saints – for mystics, ministers, martyrs, and missions who show us the breadth
and width of God’s love. By the grace of God and through the Spirit, we mean to
be one, too.
