Celebrating the Saints

The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary
Setauket Presbyterian Church

The Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Hebrews 11:29 - 12:2 James 1:17-27 & 2:14-17
October 13, 2002

On Wednesday morning I got a call at home from Sandy Bond who had just finished reading the prayers I had given her for this morning. She was concerned that I confused and reminded me that this was not All Saints Sunday. But every year at about this time, as the youth group begins to prepare for the Halloween/All Saints Party, I begin to think about the community of witnesses who have gone before us. In the office we remember and share stories about the members and friends of this congregation who have passed away in the previous year. And for several years I have thought that it would be great to invite the memory and meditation of the entire congregation in advance, in preparation for All Saints Day so that the great cloud of witnesses may speak to us.

Let me begin with a story:

When Dorothy Day was a young child, at a time when many people couldn't find work, her father brought donuts home every Saturday morning. As she sat in her apartment in New York City eating donuts, she could see ragged, hungry people walking the streets below. One day she suggested to her father that since he always brought a dozen donuts even though there were only three people in the family, perhaps she and her parents could eat just one each and share the other nine with the people in the streets. Her father told her this wasn't a good idea, but every Saturday morning for several weeks she brought it up again. Then one Saturday her father grew stern: "There's nothing we can do," he said. "Don't ever bring this up again." Dorothy refused to accepts her father's analysis of things. She kept her compassion alive, spending time among poor people and finally opening the first Catholic Worker house of hospitality in 1933. Ever since that day, people influenced by Dorothy have been welcoming the homeless poor, offering a listening ear, a bowl of soup, and a bed to sleep in at night.

Last Sunday when Elder Martha Porter spoke to us from this pulpit, she used an image which has stuck with me and which coincided with one of my hopes for this morning's message. She was telling us about a national church gathering in which she had not expected to be called on to speak, but during which she heard things spoken by others which she knew not to be true. "How could I be silent, while surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. My hair stood on end and the Holy Spirit lifted me by that hair and carried me to a microphone."

What struck me was the power of that great cloud of witnesses. The communion of saints, living and dead, do speak to us, to inspire us, and to open us to the movement of God's spirit which just might literally lift us out of our comfortable seats into public proclamation to bear witness to the faith we share and the message we have from Christ for the world.

Some of you, and certainly most of our youth, know that I have an enduring fascination with the great saints of the church, and specifically with the saints of our Presbyterian tradition. I make the confirmation class each year write a small research paper on a saint of their choice and the lessons they have to teach us. Our senior high dinner dialogue the first Sunday of each November is a discussion of the mentors, models and saints who inspire us. But my interest in saints is not a simple interest in church history or a fascination with do-gooders. I am interested in saints because I am interested in how the church bears witness to its faith in generation after generation. But I am also troubled by the little stated but very obvious truth of how rarely a person's moral beliefs translate into moral or ethical action. In fact, most ethical theory, as I read it, seems to be an attempt to bridge the gap between belief and action.

The problem is not new. It is not a problem particular to our age, though the diversity of moral systems and faith systems, brought into clearer focus in the post-Sept. 11 interfaith awareness, may lead us to think we have unique problems. James wrote about this trouble within his own congregation 2000 years ago, "Be not just hearers but doers of the word." is the way he put it. "Right God-talk without right God-action is simply outrageous!" An assertion consistent with 1000 years witness of the Hebrew prophets who came before him.

The church has long understood that the "gap" between moral belief and moral action is often filled with the lives of saints, models and examples who not only inspire faith in the God who inspired them, but who empower us to get up and to do similar things ourselves by the simple act of going before us. "How could I remain silent, inactive, self-secure, when so many others risk so much more with fewer promises?" we might ask ourselves.

Saints model Christian practice for us, the attention to God's presence in the everyday normal acts of living, eating, playing, working and resting, and among the everyday, ordinary people with whom we share these acts. They demonstrate an everyday spirituality which is not about dogma or doctrine, but about a way to live lives which are pleasing to God in the daily settings of life: family, friendship, work obligations, the rearing of children and political questions. Saints teach us a trust in the larger workings of God, and inspire us to action with and on behalf of those who are oppressed. They challenge us to live and work for peace amid violence. How deeply we still need such a way to live!

In the early church the designation "saint" referred to the baptized church members and to the faithful departed, a designation revived by the Protestant reformers. Thus we are all saints, and part of the community of saints, potentially and actually reflecting the sacred which is God. During times of persecution, the designation "saint" clung to those who died for their faith, often violently, at the hands of Roman rule. Thus Saint Paul, according to tradition beheaded in Rome, and St. Peter, crucified upside down, both during Nero's persecutions. Still later, sainthood was recognized in those who separated themselves from the world to lead lives of purity in the desert, like Saint Anthony, who ironically became one of the most powerful advisors to worldly power as a result of his dedication to a reality larger than the world of power. Still later, sainthood recognized moral leaders and model Christians in monastic and religious orders, during which time women such as Julian of Norwich and Hildigard of Bingen were increasingly considered saints.

But to use the word in the way both the early church and John Calvin used it, as the community of the faithful, I would like to share with you some of my own communion of saints, in the hope that you will remember some of your own. I think in a time when many of us in our world, and even within our own churches, cannot agree on theoretical rules for our behavior, it is helpful to name those whose actions have inspired and formed us in our faith, and whose voices keep us open to the movement of God's spirit. As the church of the middle ages believed, "to read aloud a saints life is a form of prayer."

I started writing this sermon on Monday, which was the Feast Day of St. Francis, an official saint whose life has always attracted me. His prayer of peace was one of the early prayers which I learned to love, and his Canticle of Creation, a hymn to Bother Sun and Sister Moon, and even Sister Death, inspired my favorite hymn, "All Creatures Of Our God and King," which we sang this morning, and which was sung on my wedding day. Francis was a privileged youth prone to partying and pleasure, who found his life changed one day when, while he was riding through the countryside, he encountered a leper. Dismounting from his horse he shared his cloak with the leper, and then, inexplicably, or by divine influence, he kissed the leper's diseased face. From this simple encounter, Francis began to shape his life around a whole new set of values, completely at odds with his family, his privilege and his world. When, after a lifetime of simple living, voluntary poverty, service to the sick and care for the beauty of creation, Francis lay dying, he said to his disciples, "I have done my part. Now you do yours."

This is the message of all the saints lives. Their calling helps us understand our own calling to meet those around us and respond to the needs of our day. Saints make our faith relevant as they translate the meaning of our ancient gospel in fresh and transforming ways that change us and the world we live in.

There are other older saints, like St. Augustine who said "Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O God." Or Meister Eckhart who said "If the only prayer you ever learn to say is thank you, it would be enough." And more recently there are saints like Thomas Merton, who said "The Christian life - and especially the contemplative life - is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places." And the Brazilian Bishop Dom Helder Camara who said "We who are charged with announcing the message of Christ need to learn the incomparable lesson that he taught us by his own example. He taught first of all with his life, and only then did he preach."

At the October meeting of the Long Island Presbytery, one elder rose before the gathering and suggested to our stated clerk, "We need to remember the Presbyterian Saints," by which she meant not only the giants of Calvin, Knox, Witherspoon and Edwards, but the saints who have inspired each of us and who sit in the pews beside us.

I remember one of the first encounters that filled me with conviction and around which my life was forever changed. In 1986 I was attending a gathering of 5000 Presbyterian youth from around the country, and we filled our days with play, prayer, workshops, and worship - the rhythm of a balanced spiritual life. We entered the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's largest "Lap Sit," and I had the sense that I was among a many of the Presbyterians who would be my peers in the church for the rest of my life. I was in exactly the place God wanted me to be at that moment.

One evening our worship was led by Benjamin Weir. Some of you may remember that Ben Weir was one of the (**) persons held hostage, some for 16 months, some for longer, by a group a terrorists in 1984-85. He was a Presbyterian missionary in Lebanon when he was captured, and when I met him in 1986, he was the newly elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly. He spoke to the gathering of youth about his experience in great detail, helping us to imagine the terror of his experience and the desperation of his captors. He explained how he placed his life in God's hands throughout the experience, and how he was comforted by words of scripture he could remember and by the knowledge that his family, his congregation and the Presbyterian Church (USA) were praying for him. And he prayed too.

And then he told us how he had been changed. He believed in peace more firmly than ever before. He explained that to respond to terrorism with violence was, yes, to speak a language the terrorist could understand, but that it was a language that failed to speak to the human being who was resorting to violence, to their own hopes and dreams which, he said, were little different than our own, and that to speak in violence was to speak in a language foreign to Christ. Back home, Ben continued to urge to church to work for justice on behalf of the Palestinians and the strengthening of the international community, rather than vengeance. And in that most difficult climate, he prayed for forgiveness for his captors and love for his enemies. He urged us, and urges us still, to practice forgiveness at all times and to commit ourselves to the Presbyterian Church's Commitment to Peacemaking, a commitment this congregation made in 1983. The next day, after much prayer, I did just that, recording my words on a note card I carry to this day in my bible.

Another Presbyterian saint is surely Robert McAfee Brown. When I was in high school, I read one of Bob Brown's books in a church book group with my mom, which profoundly shaped my understanding of the church and suggested for the first time that God might be calling me into the ministry. The book, Saying Yes and Saying No: On Rendering to God and Caesar, was about the political context of the church's witness during the middle 1980's. In the midst of a theological controversy within the Presbyterian Church (in which Bob was a pastor, teacher and political activist), the illegal actions of the U.S. government in Nicaragua, and the promotion of what was then known as the "Star Wars" Missile Shield, Bob spoke to me clearly about theological integrity in ministry and about a gospel with implications not just for individuals but for the whole world. Using the "Theological Declaration of Barmen" as his model, Bob wrote about what the church must say "yes" and "no" to, not only within the world around us, but within the church itself.

As a professor at Union Theological Seminary, Stanford, and the Pacific School of Religion, and through his many books, Robert McAfee Brown shaped a generation of pastors in the Presbyterian Church (USA). As a leading figure in the ecumenical movement, he was the Protestant observer at Vatican II and produced not only a commentary of the proceedings but a popular book, The Spirit of Protestantism, articulating the distinctive contributions of the Protestant tradition. Always a champion of the Hebrew prophets, Bob helped introduce Latin American Liberation Theology to North American churches, not only asa movement to imitated, but as a challenge for us to develop a truly North American liberation movement of our own. Many of his books fill the shelves of our church library.

But a complete list of Presbyterian saints would also include folks like Audra Weiser and Ed Dexter, Pam Edgar and many others with whom we have worshiped and from whom we have learned. Perhaps by now, each of you has evoked the memory of those who have inspired you. I would invite you in the next few moments, in which I will be quiet, to name them to yourself, or to call their names out loud, thanking God for them and the way they have helped you find a way to live.

[silence]

I think of Mrs Peterson, who would one day be my church school teacher and who had been my father's church school teacher, whose knowledge of the bible and adept and persistent theological arguments convinced the Baptist pastor of my parent's church to baptize me as an infant, despite the fact that the congregation they were attending at that time practiced adult believer's baptism. I think of Mrs. Forbes who taught me Old Testament in church school. For some reason I always call to mind a student in the class showing us a magic trick. Mrs. Forbes talked about Jacob who tricked his father and brother, about Laban who tricked Jacob, and about God who was trickiest of all. She opened me to a more complex understanding of God and God's sovereignty.

Once you start naming saints, they start multiplying. What about Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Rosa Parks? Cezar Chavez? And on this Columbus Day Weekend, we must remember Bartolomé de las Casas, who sailed with Columbus but who declared, "Christ did not come into the world for Gold."

Once we start naming saints we begin to see them everywhere. And that, of course, is the point.

For we are surrounding by so great a cloud of witnesses. Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.