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Sermon - November 2nd, 2008
Marks of a Saint
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Matthew 23:1-12
Once a year, this Sunday comes around, and we honor and celebrate the lives of those who have gone on before us. Not that all of them have lived the life of a Saint (with a capital “S”). They have lived as part of us in some way, touching our lives. They have been a gift to us from God, loaned to us for awhile to teach us something about living. We Protestants call them “saints” on this day and acknowledge that they have joined the communion of saints.
The communion of saints is a concept I have never really understood until I read Joan Chittister book, In Search of Belief, where she writes about the Apostles Creed. The Apostles Creed is one of those creeds that I memorized when I was a youth and recited in church many times, depending on what church I was going to. Now, I tend to think such a creed is irrelevant to the church today except as a part of our history. Joan Chittister has written a book about the creed that has helped me understand its importance.
When the church has been its best, it has offered much more than answers to resolve the unanswerable questions of life. It gives us a way to deal with questions and uncertainty. It gives us a way to ask faithful questions. Today we live in a time of too much information and too little understanding. Our world as we know seems to be falling apart, change is upon us, and no one seems to have the answer. It is such a time as this that the church is the place where faith can be rethought, reinterpreted, restated, remembered in the light of the present circumstances. The church is a place where we can remember that we are a people with a past, a history, a communion of saints who have gone on before us. Strangers who are now united as one. We have inherited a faith strong enough, versatile enough, deep enough to shape our lives and direct our decisions. The Apostles Creed says, “I believe in the communion of saints,” a community of holy people that calls us beyond our past. This community of holy people are calling us to live a transformed life.
Which is what Jesus spoke to the crowds about, saying, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” He was telling them that they look good, they say good things, they have the best seats, they exalt themselves, but they have really forgotten who they are and who they belong to. They have forgotten how to be a holy person and live a holy life. And Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be your servant.” He spoke in that upside-down language that the crowd loved, except the ones on the top of the food chain. Yet Jesus was calling everyone of them to a life of holy-making, a saintly life, which is an ordinary life whose extraordinary love of God has led them to live a life of extravagant generosity.
What this Sunday is about and what Jesus is saying is that our behavior in the human community, not just our affiliation with a church, what we do in the end, will measure the caliber of our lives. In the end we are bound to one another. Each generation is a link in the chain of life. Each generation is a standard for the one to come. We cry tears of loss for those whose lives have touched our own and have made our lives better. We cry for parents and grandparents and siblings, and friends and people we haven’t even known. We cry for those whose faith has formed our own. And we celebrate holy communion, the Eucharist, the great feast of thanksgiving, thanksgiving for all, and with all who have gone on before us, the communion of saints. We share the meal today, with all who have share this meal, remembering we are not alone, we are not alone.
We are reminded that we are not in church today just for ourselves, for our own personal piety. We are not even here for our own salvation, although if you are that’s a good start. We are here for the sake of the whole world. We are here to live out a faith that brings us open-armed to one another. We are here to reclaim what we have can never find in a materialistic world—a sense of spiritual substance and holy sacrifice, a sense of long-suffering endurance and eternal fidelity. People like ourselves have lived through the mundane and survived it, lived through tragedy and bettered it, lived through the immoral and righted it. We need these saints that surround us to remember the saint within us.
This Sunday is about the communion of saints who call us to keep an eye on the spiritual values of life so that we may live lives in which the physical and spiritual are integrated. The saints call us to nurture and nourish one another and to give hope. This Sunday reminds us to believe in God, yes, but also to believe in ourselves, to honor the past, and to model a better future. It is here around the table, in communion with Christ that we see the center of life raised on a cross, resurrected from the dead bones of past history, and alive in the spirit that makes us bold today. Whatever we are facing has been faced before. Whatever we do will effect what is to come.
The communion of saints is the heritage we received, the promise we make to others, and strength for the journey we are on. It is eucharist, it is the sacramental life, it is our life.
The communion of saints is the extravagant generosity of lives lived so we can also live a life of the extravagant generosity. It is making a solemn promise to be what eucharist is all about. Eucharist is thanksgiving, thanksgiving for everything that is, for all of creation, for the willingness to sacrifice ourselves for one another. Generosity comes from being thankful.
When we remember and celebrate the lives of those who have died, we tell of the Christ we saw in them. We remember how it looked in them. We know in them what it is like to be driven by the consuming power of God, to be totally oriented to God. The communion of saints stands before us and with us as stark witnesses to the holiness of God, reminding us always to leave behind us for those yet to come a searing memory of the same. It is about being generous with our lives—extravagantly generous. As the proverb teaches us, “Those who have lived well for their own time have lived well for all times.” What we think counts. What we do changes things. What we believe gives shape to the clay around us. I hope you believe in being extravagantly generous.
Amen.