[Propertalk] All Saints

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

First draft for Sunday 8 - )

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY  		            THE SUNDAY 
AFTER ALL SAINTS’ DAY
REVELATION 7:9-17			                    				 2nd NOVEMBER, 2014
1 JOHN 3:1-3				   			      PSALM 34:1-10, 22
MATTHEW 5:1-12

	Last week I came across a survey which showed the rankings of different 
religious and denominational groups in terms of their belief in God. 1 
I have to admit it took me a while to find where we, as Episcopalians, 
fell. If you’re curious, about seventy per cent say they believe in God. 
This compares with the “Nine out of ten Americans (who) say they believe 
in God. But push a little bit and you’ll find there is quite a range of 
belief across the major churches and religions in America.” The article 
accompanying the charts seeks to compare those who hold to a certainty 
that God exists and those who express an opinion on whether God is a 
person.

	I raise this as an issue because of what we celebrate this weekend. No, 
not the ECW and their Annual Bazaar – but that may come close to the 
mark, sometimes. I raise this as an issue primarily because yesterday 
and today we’re invited to spend time thinking about saints – who they 
were and are; how they lived; what made them special, if anything; why 
people are called “saints”.

	My first reaction to that chart and the thought of the Saints was, “Of 
course THEY believed in God. What a silly question to doubt that!”

	But then, almost right away, I found I had to qualify that. Think about 
it for a minute. I don’t mean that God’s name didn’t figure in their 
vocabulary any more, or did in their early life. But there’s one element 
in the life of everyone whom I’d name saint – the element of struggle.

	Look at practically any of them and we’ll discover that they were 
filled with questions. Some were brought up within the church, others 
came to the church through the action of the Spirit to encourage someone 
else to witness to God’s love. Practically all, though, were faced with 
such things as loneliness, uncertainty, isolation. So many of them also 
seemed to turn their lives around one hundred and eighty degrees, from a 
life of placing themselves first in self-indulgent to one in which the 
needs of others were served. Then there are others – saints who really 
test our patience and credulity, who seem to be so deliberate in their 
actions, behaving in ways we might think are diametrically opposed to 
the will of God – people who are, nevertheless, God’s saints.

	What we celebrate every year at this time is in my mind a contrast – 
the glorious patience, love and compassion of God which seems to take so 
long to rub off on some human beings; and the way in which people whose 
feet are cemented so solidly in clay that you might be tempted to wonder 
whether it would be best to stick them on a potter’s wheel and spin them 
till they turn into so much butter, like Shere Khan in Kipling’s story, 
if you’ll excuse the literary mish-mash.

Take St. Augustine, for instance. He was brought up in a wealthy and 
influential home. His mother was, by all accounts, a model Christian who 
wanted nothing better than for her son to embrace Jesus and to follow 
the guidance of the Beatitudes. But that wasn’t where the young man’s 
interests lay. He’d had the best possible education; he was a noted 
rhetorician; he was extremely clever and persuasive; he could be, and 
was, whatever he wanted to be anywhere within the Roman Empire. But he 
found the Christianity of which his mother spoke unconvincing, 
unsatisfying, illogical, impractical.

How often Monica, his mother, may have said, “Listen to your Mother!”, 
we don’t know, but you can bet she did say it, through her life, if not 
in words. There’s one thing of which I CAN be pretty sure, though. More 
than likely, she didn’t belabour the point. She would have gone about 
her daily tasks, not compromising what was important for her, not giving 
up what she held most dear. She waited and, eventually, what she’d said 
and, more importantly, what she’d done, convinced Augustine of the truth 
of Jesus life and ministry, AND of the rightness of his mother’s faith. 
August became, and continues to be, one of the pillars of the church. 
And for this, we call Monica a Saint. When it would have been so easy 
for her to have given in; when the culture of her time would have seemed 
to make it so difficult for her to profess and live her belief 
faithfully; Monica persevered, quietly, without a fuss, not drawing 
attention to herself, simply “Being” a Christian, with a capital “B”.

THIS is what makes the line from our last hymn today so powerful – “I 
mean to be one too” – to be a saint, by the grace of God. It’s not right 
to say, “God willing”. That we can take for granted. God will us all to 
be saints, but God doesn’t press us into it. God hopes, God gives grace 
so freely, then God waits for us to notice the sanctity all around us – 
in the craziest of places, in the most unexpected people.

This past week I met someone – I’ll call him José. I don’t know why we 
met – well, I do NOW, but it seemed so random. He grew up in L.A., in a 
neighbourhood in which gangs flourished. He was pretty sure of himself, 
feeling that he could deal with any situation by himself. He told me 
about wandering into places he was warned not to go, told by his mother, 
told by his friends, by his girlfriend. But he wouldn’t listen. One day, 
after some trouble, he decided to challenge those in another 
neighbourhood. He was young, he was tough, he felt invincible, and he 
had a gun in his pocket. Nothing happened, although he was seen by 
plenty of people. He got home to find his mother in tears, sitting on 
the front step, looking down the street. That’s the first time, he said, 
that what he was doing hit him. Then, and almost immediately after 
seeing his mother, when he reached into his pocket and discovered that 
his gun was not in his pocket.

	Many years later, José’s in Oregon, settled with a good job. He has 
three children. AND, he said, he feels a need to tell people about his 
faith, about the way that he used to live and the way in which things 
have been turned around for him.

	Is life easy for him? Not particularly, but he knows how to work on it. 
He knows that he can’t depend on himself. He’s experienced the love of 
God, he’s supported and encouraged by the presence of special people in 
his life, so much so that he tells others about this. He doesn’t force 
it on anyone. He treats each day as a time in which he can use God’s 
grace to be present to others, n a whole variety of ways, some of which 
he isn’t even aware or understands. Yet he does it. His mother’s words, 
his mother’s tears he carries with him. Now, so long after the fact, 
he’s listening to his mother.

	I’d call him a saint, someone whom God has touched, graced a change, 
and who furthers the Gospel. Blessed is he ….!

	But José isn’t the only one whom I’ve met, whom I know, whom YOU know, 
I’m sure, people whose hearts God has touched so that they can touch 
ours. By their nature, however, saints don’t around in fancy albs, or 
shining chasubles, with snazzy stoles. Saints don’t speak out in a “look 
at me; I’m great” way. Saints, contrary to ikonic depictions, don’t have 
haloes by which you can pick them out in Costco on a Saturday afternoon. 
On the contrary, saints merge in with the crowd. Occasionally you might 
notice someone stopping to talk or assist another person when everyone 
else is racing past. Now and again you may see someone reaching out to 
touch another on the arm, as if to say, “I care.”

	Usually, though, those whom Jesus called “Blessed” would never have 
been picked out in High School Yearbooks as being likely to be important 
by the world’s standards. They’d be the quiet ones who were faithful, 
who’d stand up to those whose dignity wasn’t respected. Like Eric.

	“When 14 year-old Eric started high school this fall, his parents were 
assured that the zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy in place at (his 
new school) would spare Eric from the relentless bullying he had faced 
since first grade. Instead, Eric was not just bullied but brutally 
beaten by a group of students at school while other classmates watched, 
leaving him with a broken wrist, a 9-day hospital stay, and a traumatic 
brain injury which will affect him for the rest of his life. …

	“Eric admits to lunging at the bullies as they threatened and yelled 
anti-gay slurs at him, but even though the other boys did not suffer any 
major injuries (…) and Eric was viciously beaten into unconsciousness, 
he is the one being punished.” He is being charged with assault.

	Who will speak for Eric? One woman in his community has come to his 
defence, and is working with his parents. Being a saint isn’t easy. It 
involves risk, it involves a lack of self-centredness. As Lindsay wrote, 
“As a person who endured a lifetime of bullying by a family member 
myself, I knew that I had to take a stand. What happened to Eric is 
horrible, and he deserves justice.”

	The Trappist monk and author, Thomas Merton, was walking towards 
Greenwich Village with his friend, Lax, one day. In his book “The Seven 
Story Mountain”, he wrote, “I forget what we were arguing about, but in 
the end Lax suddenly turned around and asked me the question:

   	“‘What do you want to be, anyway?’
    	“I could not say, ‘I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer 
of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,’ 
or ‘Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English at the 
New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,’ so I put the thing 
on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said:
    	“‘I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.’
    	“‘What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?’
    	“The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my 
confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all.
    	“Lax did not accept it.
    	“‘What you should say’ – he told me – ‘what you should say is that 
you want to be a saint.’
    	“‘A saint!  The thought struck me as a little weird.  I said:
    	“‘How do you expect me to become a saint?’
    	“‘By wanting to,’ said Lax simply.
    	“‘I can’t be a saint,’ I said, ‘I can’t be a saint.’  And my mind 
darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of 
my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot 
do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must 
reach: the cowardice that says: ‘I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep 
out of mortal sin,’ but which means, by those words: ‘I do not want to 
give up my sins and my attachments.’” 2

	Lax’s invitation, however, worked on Merton, not to make him famous, 
but to help him work through his insecurities, his restless questioning, 
to help him find in the resources of Mother Church, as well as 
elsewhere, the means to refine his questing. And through it all, God’s 
grace upheld him.

	That grace is always there, always ready to transform us, to make us 
saints, vessels of God’s love for all our sisters and brothers, wherever 
they are, whenever they need to be comforted.

	One of each week’s moments of special revelation, which seems to take 
me by surprise every time, comes at the epiclesis, the heart of the 
Prayer of Consecration over God’s gifts. We pray that God will send the 
Holy Spirit to make blessed the Bread and the Wine. Then, with boldness, 
with directness, with laughing certainty, the prayer continues, “Unite 
us to your Son in his sacrifice, that we may be acceptable through him, 
being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” 3

	We pray that God will make us saints, that God will “bring us to that 
heavenly country where with ALL your saints, we may enter the 
everlasting heritage of your sons and daughters.”

	We are called to be saints. We ARE God’s vessels of sainthood, for 
ourselves and the world.

	Think on this, then, when we hear the names of those this family 
remembers, those who new rest in that heavenly country, those with whom 
we WILL be reunited. And think about our belief in God.

NOTES:

1 	 
http://tobingrant.religionnews.com/2014/10/24/belief-god-atheists-graphs-churches-religions-faiths/

2	Thomas Merton  (1915-1968) “The Seven Story Mountain” quoted in “At 
the Edge of the Enclosure - Sunday After All Saints’ Day” by Suzanne 
Guthrie http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/allsaintsabc.html

3	“Eucharistic Prayer B, The Holy Eucharist”, in “The Book of Common 
Prayer”, Church Publishing Incorporated, New York. 1979. Page 369.


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)
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