This morning we celebrate the festival of All Saints Day, the day in the church year we set aside to remember all those who have died in the faith, especially those who have died in the last year. This year we remember Jean, Alvina, Ed, and Dorcas, all of whom are fitting examples of what a life of faith looks like in practice. Though certainly they lived their faith in different ways, and some of those ways were gentler than others, all of them were people who showed their faith through action. Jean was a passionate and strong-willed voice for community activism through her work with Creating Change, Alvina loved to feed people through her family garden, Ed was a handyman, always fixing what needed fixing, and Dorcas demonstrated hospitality through a table that was open to anyone in need of a hot meal. Were they perfect? No, but they were saints. People who lived lives of faithful witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
What is a saint, anyway? As Protestants, we have a complicated relationship with the word “saints.” It seems very Catholic, and tends to conjure up images of strange, holier than thou, long-dead figures who perform miracles and reveal themselves through fuzzy images on burnt toast. Or maybe we think of more modern saints, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., maybe even Mahatma Gandhi, people who lived holy, sacred, set-apart lives, people who accomplished tasks we could never see ourselves possibly living up to. There is a temptation to place our saints on pedestals, as figures to revere rather than models to follow. It is easy to do this with saints, especially after they are gone, to remember only the good things and forget the times they drove us crazy. Mother Theresa was strong-willed and difficult, Martin Luther King, Jr. made some questionable decisions, and certainly we can all think of a time when we did not see eye to eye with someone represented by one of these candles. And it’s important we remember those truths of our saints as well. Because placing our saints on pedestals really does them and us a disservice. To see them as greater than they are, as holier than us, is to diminish their humanity and release us from the expectation that we ourselves could be capable of doing great deeds. If they are saints and we are not, then they can go on doing great work for the world and we can go on being grateful for their sainthood and content with our lack thereof.
But if we see our saints for what they are, people just like us, sinners in need of redeeming, just like us, brothers and sisters in Christ who strove and failed, fought and struggled, tried their best, came up short, asked for forgiveness and tried again, just like us, then they become for us real models to follow, and we are set free to live into the glorious sainthood that God sees in us, the beautiful company of the kingdom of God.
Our problem with saints, this temptation to ascribe to them unreachable goodness, comes from our very human fascination with trying to earn our own salvation. And this isn’t a new human trait, something we modern-era folk came up with, this is like the central experience of humanity. Think about the Bible, one way to read it, and many people read it this way, is as a law book, if you follow every single thing written in here perfectly and exactly, then you will be a saint and God will love you. The problem with this? Since the Bible is in fact, not a law book, this is impossible. Some of the things blatantly contradict each other; others are too vague to be clear. Even the most simple like, “do not murder,” can have complicated implications. Premeditated murder is obviously wrong, but what about in cases of self-defense? What if you don’t kill someone yourself, but you neglect to intervene on someone’s behalf? Or if killing not their body, but their hopes and dreams? Is our greed which leaves so much of the world in abject poverty a form of murder? Where do we draw the line?
But this has not stopped us from trying. In fact, trying to figure out exactly how to follow every single law in the Bible perfectly was basically the full-time occupation of the scribes and the Pharisees that Jesus is so regularly struggling with in the Gospels. Questions of how to apply the law is what the scribes were disputing in our Gospel text for this morning. In the passage before this, they were discussing with Jesus tax codes and marriage laws, creating stranger and stranger situations to trick Jesus into saying something that they could hold against him.
Until one of the scribes, in a very un-scribelike move in the Gospels, instead of asking Jesus to define the situation, asked him to frame it. Which commandment is the first, Jesus? If nothing else, which commandment should I follow above all others. When the commandments disagree with one another, and I cannot figure out which way I should go, what do I follow first and foremost, above all others. Make it simpler for me, Jesus.
And Jesus said this: “the first is, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And… you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love God; love your neighbor. Neither of those, if you flip back to the lists of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testaments, is listed as one of the ten. They are instead summaries of the commandments; they are the heart of what God wanted for us when he ascribed these lists to Moses so many years ago. Love God, love neighbor, and if you do those things, everything else will fall into place. If you do those things, everything else becomes guidance.
Love God; love your neighbor. It is that simple. It is that impossibly hard. It is simple enough that we can give up all our attempts to create rules and find paths and make checklists and spreadsheets and guidelines and just live into the beautiful reality of love. It is hard enough that we can never live up to it; we will always fall short. We will always struggle with setting God above the other gods in our life, gods of comfort, of pride, of technology or success or self-righteousness. We will always struggle to love our neighbor, in no small part because we will always struggle to love ourselves, and when we forget that we ourselves are saints, then it is impossible to see the sainthood in those around us.
But that struggle, brothers and sisters, is the beautiful freedom of sainthood. By God’s grace we are made saints, and not by our actions. We are free to live, to love, to fall short, and to try again. Sainthood is a journey, not a destination. It is living every day, even when we can’t see it, even when we don’t believe it, as beloved children of God because God has said that it is so.
So this morning we give thanks for Jean, Alvina, Ed, and Dorcas, great saints of the church, who stayed the course and finished the race and now rest securely in the arms of God. We give thanks for Chase and Leah, the two newest saints to join our community this year through the sacrament of baptism. We pray on this all saints day that they might find among us and these our departed saints, models of life to strive for. And we give thanks for us all, great saints of God, that we, in our struggles and failures, our cracks and our doubts, that we too are saints, set free by the promise of God’s great love for us to live lives of hope and power and grace and freedom. Do not sell yourselves short, dear brothers and sisters, you, we, are all great saints of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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