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Sermon - November 5th, 2006
Saints: God's Handkerchiefs
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Revelation 21:1-6a
All Saints Sunday
Today is family reunion day for the church. It is the day for pulling out the family photo album and remembering where we came from. Open to one page and you may find St. Francis, standing barefoot in the snow, with birds on his shoulders and his pet wolf by his side. Or maybe you will turn to St. Joan of Arc, who led men twice her size into battle. She preferred armor to petticoats and puzzled everyone by dressing like a man, but the voices of her critics were nothing compared to the voice of God in her head. If you keep turning pages, you may come across St. Christopher, hiking through a swollen river with his tunic hitched up around his knees, his right hand on his staff and his left around the feet of a child he is carrying on his back.
These are some of our more famous ancestors, but if you keep looking you will find others, not as well known but no less intriguing. There is St. Maximilian, the first conscientious objector, who was drafted by the Roman army but refused to serve. His only loyalty, he said, was to the army of God. This was a great shame and sadness to his father, a veteran, who knew that his son’s decision meant death. At his execution, Maximilian noticed the shabby clothing of his executioner and, calling to his father in the crowd, asked that his own new clothes be taken off and given to his executioner.
A similar story is told about St. James, the Greater, brother of St. John, who was so full of grace on his way to his death that the guard assigned to him fell on his knees and confessed faith in his prisoner’s God. James raised him up by the hand, kissed him on the cheek, and said, “peace be with you.” Then both men were executed together, but their last sweet exchange lives on in the passing of the peace that many churches continue to this day.
When you start meeting these saints, one of the first things you notice is that they were not, well, saints. Legend has it that St. Francis rolled naked in the snow to defend himself against his lustful thoughts. St Christopher was on his way to work for the devil when a mysterious hermit recruited him for God’s work instead. St. Bernard was one of the organizers of the second crusade, which collapsed into pillage and looting. Generally speaking, the saints are not distinguished by their goodness. They are distinguished by their extravagant love of God.
Frederick Buechner wrote: ”In God’s holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.” This suggests that saint-making is more God’s business than our own, but either way the main thing is that they do exist. There really are ordinary men and women whose love of God led them to do extraordinary things, which means none of us can shrug our shoulders and say sainthood is beyond our reach.
Take Absalom Jones, for instance, born a house slave in Delaware in 1746. He taught himself to read from the New Testament and was eventually sold to a shopkeeper in Philadelphia. There he went to a night school run by Quakers and married another slave, whose freedom he bought with his savings. Eighteen years later he was able to do the same thing for himself and became a lay minister for the black membership at Saint George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
He did such a good job bringing in new people that the council became alarmed and voted to seat black members in the balcony. No one told Absalom Jones, and when an usher tried to pry him from his pew the following Sunday, he and the whole black membership of the church walked out the door. Seven years later his congregation was admitted to the diocese of Pennsylvania as Saint Thomas African Episcopal Church. It grew to more than five hundred members during its first year and in 1804 Absalom Jones was ordained a priest in Christ’s one, holy catholic, and apostolic church.
Or consider Constance and her companions, a group of nuns from New England who had not been in Memphis, Tennessee more than five years when yellow fever swept through that city for the third time in a decade. More than half the people who lived there packed up their bags and left when the sickness began, but Constance and her companions stayed put. Soothing the dying with their Yankee accents, they laid cold rags on hot foreheads and emptied bedpans. Maybe they though God would protect them from the virus or maybe they were not thinking about themselves at all. If you look really hard for it, you can find the round marker with all their names on it in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that you must be dead to be a saint. Unfortunately, that is one of the requirements for canonization in the Roman Catholic Church, but the truth is that there are living saints all over the place. Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela. But not just people who are in the news because of their work, there have been saints sitting in every church I have served. And then there was a friend of mine simply known to many as Nick. I met him when I was dating a guy from Dufur 35 years ago. One of our regular dates was to drive out to Nick and Adeline’s for dinner and watch “All in the Family.” Adeline, a widow, was the owner of the wheat ranch. Nick was the hired hand. When I decided to go to Australia, instead of marrying the guy from Dufur, I assumed that Nick and Adeline would not want to continue a relationship with me. When I finally got up the courage to write to them, they wrote back immediately with great understanding and enthusiasm. In fact, they understood why I ran off to Australia better than I understood it myself.
When Adeline’s health failed her, Nick, her hired hand and friend took care of her until the day she died. Nick and I continued writing letters. I would always stop and have lunch with him when ever I passed through The Dalles on the way to and from Heppner. Nick was a farmer through and through. He was also a Democrat. So when we got together he would pick my brains about current events and what my opinion was about who was doing what in politics. I always had to make sure I had read the paper before I saw him. He had this scruffy handle bar type mustache. He probably only owned one suit which he wore only when he attended a funeral or some important occasion like my ordination. He had many friends. He never married. He never missed sending a Christmas card, he never missed my birthday. He knew my children’s names. He was a kind, gentle soul. One day a few years back he died rather suddenly of a heart attacked. I didn’t know he was in his late 80’s until I attended his funeral.
Several months after his death, I opened up the Statesman Journal, Salem’s paper and saw his name, Gerry Nicholson. There was an article about him. Linfield College had received its second largest gift ever from Gerry Nicholson, I gasped when I read the amount--6.2 million dollars. I am sure that there was no one among his friends who knew that he had that much money. I wish that he was alive so I could ask him about his gift, except I think I know why. Education was extremely important to him. He had graduated from Linfield. If he were alive today he probably would tell me that he simply could not think of any other place that meant something to him and where he believed it would be put to good use.
Then just a few months ago, a friend of mine who is attending Linfield College loaned me a book and in that book was a bookmark from the library, the new library, “The Gerald R.Nicholson Library” at Linfield College. I exclaimed, “That’s my friend, Nick!” And told him the whole story. The only thing is, I don’t think that Nick would approve of the name of that library. But I do. Because in my book, Nick is one the saints.
So, whether you give yourself an A plus or an F minus in life and in being a child of God, no matter what, you will always be a child of God--you can’t take that back. You belong to God and all that remains is what you will do about that in your life. Just remember, you do not have to be famous, or perfect, or dead. You just have to be you--the one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated human being whom God created you to be--to love as you are loved, to throw your arms around the world, to shine like the sun.
You do not have to do it alone, either. You have all this company. All these saints sitting right here who you can see for yourself plus those you cannot--Francis, Joan, Christopher, Maximilian, Absalom, Nelson, Desmond, Nick--all of them egging you on, calling your name and shouting themselves hoarse with encouragement. Because you are part of them, and they are part of you, and all of us are knit together in the communion of saints--God’s handkerchiefs--dropped on the world for the love of Christ.
Amen.