Thoughts going in, Sun Nov 7th

I’m having a hard time getting excited about any of the appointed readings for this Sunday. I think it’s because this Sunday is one of those days on the church calendar that has a heavy thematic emphasis. We, like many congregations, have transferred the celebration of All Saints Day (Nov 1st) to the next nearest Sunday, making it “All Saints Sunday.”

The gospel appointed for the occasion is from Luke 6, the Lukan version of the “beatitudes” (blessed are the poor,” etc.). The idea here, I think, is to describe what saintliness looks like at ground level.

The epistle reading, from Ephesians 1, continues St. Paul’s opening remarks to the largely Gentile congregation at Ephesus. One of his main points is that now that The Christ has come, a great mystery has been revealed—the mystery of God’s intent at the fullness of time, to fling the doors wide open and grant that Gentiles may have “covenant people status” along with the Jews, merely by faith alone. This week’s passage goes on to talk about the ‘saintly inheritance’ that is ours by faith.

As I say, I’m just having a hard time getting excited about either of these passages. As things now stand, I think I will either turn to Revelation 7 (“these are they who have come out of great tribulation” passage), or perhaps Hebrews 11—the great faith hall-of-fame chapter.

For me, All Saints day/Sunday is more of a time for thematic preaching than expository preaching. After all, we’ve come up with a special label for the day, so there are built-in questions. All Saints Day? Ok…..what’s a saint? And for that matter, why should we bother spending any time focusing our attention on the saints? These are questions that naturally develop whenever the day in question has us looking at a particular topic or theme.

For me, it’s a matter of “heroes.” We all like to have heroes, especially when we were kids. I certainly had my favorites. One of my favorites was Batman. He was impressive because he managed his status as ‘super hero’ without too much in the way of fantasy or science fiction. He wasn’t from another planet; he hadn’t had his basic physiology altered from the bite of a radioactive insect; he hadn’t discovered a powerful artifact left behind by an alien race. He was just a “normal” human who had the time and resources (to say nothing of his mental ‘drive’) to make himself a force to be reckoned with. Well, at least so it seems to me as I look back with grownup eyes at one of my earliest childhood ‘heroes.’ I had other heroes as well—less fantastic ones. As I think about it, it seems to me that the point of a hero is that we all would like to find an idealized version of OURSELVES. He or she is the one chosen precisely because they *can do, or *have done, what we wish we could do. They’ve succeeded at the thing that we’re still trying at—or perhaps the thing that we could never accomplish even in a million years.

With this in mind, Hebrews 11 is a fascinating chapter. It begins by giving us that wonderful definition of faith: “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”…..and then goes on to say, “THIS is what the ancients were commended for.” It then goes on to list these great saints by name…..Noah, and Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, etc. etc. etc. At midpoint in the chapter there’s something of a crescendo where, in vs 13, the author says: “ALL these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from afar.” Now here’s the point: if ALL we knew about these people was what we could read in Hebrews 11, it would be pretty easy to start to think of them as having extraordinary powers……coming from other planets……bitten by radioactive insects……or having powers deriving from alien artifacts or something. It would be easy to make them SUPERHUMAN—but they weren’t.

The actual biblical narratives that tell their stories portray people with immensely “human” tendencies. “Abraham trusted God and He credited that to him as righteousness,” St. Paul tells us, but that was ONCE. There were multiple times when Abraham’s trust in God was less than perfect, if not entirely absent. Jacob, at times, seemed to be something of a slimy crook. Moses murdered a man. Each of these saints had some whopper skeletons in their closet…

But here’s the point…I kinda like that. I like earthy, human, imperfect saints because I can relate to their imperfections. And that gives me hope. If God accepted them—warts and all—I can believe that God can accept me too.

Of course All Saints Sunday also has some theology with it. One of the great Lutheran terms coined to describe the life of the believer was “simul iustus et peccator.” It’s a Latin phrase that means the believer is simultaneously BOTH saint (just/justified), AND sinner. It’s a matter of perspective. Down here at ground level we see our weakness, our failings, our shortcomings, …and all of those times when we lacked faith. But the God’s-eye-view of the believer—which is always looking through the cross of Jesus—is to see our greatest, most idealized, potential—the Saint. That’s one of the neat things about Hebrews 11. It doesn’t present Abraham’s view of himself, or Moses’ view of himself; it presents God’s view of them.

It’s as though God has forgotten about all of the times they failed, and remembers only those times when they had a little faith. THAT’S SAINTLY. And that’s good news, for while I have my doubts that we can find the right radioactive insect to bite us….or the right powerful alien artifact left behind…the bible indicates that we can all have faith.

cheers,

TM