single persons, people
of all races and families
of every kind.
Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 7
Nov 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
The Church of
Our Saviour
in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey
Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons
Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links
I Mean to be
One Too
Reflections on the
lessons for the Feast of All Saints
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
With some luck and even more help I mean, God helping, to be one of the saints of God. It's not really out of the question. It has happened to lots and lots of people. "You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea."
That hymn (one of my lifelong favorites) doesn't mention that you also find saints headless in some king's dining room like John the Baptist. Or burning at the stake for acting too much like a man à lá Joan of Arc. Or gunned down by a sniper at a Memphis motel like Martin Luther King.
But not all songs and stories have to be so dramatic. The church has always enjoyed domesticating the saints. Before the Reformation the saints were always closer to everybody than were God the Father and God the Son, whom patriarchal and judgmental religion had made remote and unapproachable. So in the Middle Ages an elaborate cult of the saints became the only face of popular Christianity that generations of people -- for centuries -- ever knew.
The church's obsession with and affection for saints has a long history. It was a Christian version of the native polytheism that the people of Europe had embraced long before Christianity ever showed up. The saints replaced the local gods and goddesses and fairies and spirits and took over their roles assisting with everything personal, domestic, and agricultural.
Lists of saints are indeed still consulted for the patrons and matrons of every trade, vocation, or lifestyle. Joseph of Nazareth is patron of those engaged to be married. Joseph of Arimathea looks after funeral directors. The Vatican only last month announced that Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, is now the official patron saint of politicians.
My Roman Catholic sister-in-law in Austin, Texas, drives around with her SUV full of car seats and preschoolers chanting
Hail Mary, full of grace, Help us find a parking space.
I suppose I believe, sort of, in the invocation of saints. More likely, I believe in the convocation of saints -- the power that still resonates in the world because of God's people and the lives they have lived over millennia. It's nice to think that the ones who've gone before us leave a legacy to help us along still. In other times, saints' relics were available all over the place for veneration. They provided a people with physical reminders, connections, a kind of continuing incarnation of divine power. A bit of bone or a hank of hair or a drop of some saint's blood was a First Class Relic, which could work miracles. A bit of a dress, or scarf, or a shoelace was a Second Class Relic, and not quite so holy, but still venerable. To each his own, I think, but connection and memory are indisputably spiritually good things.
Our first reading from Ecclesiasticus -- in English, "The Church's Book" -- is a hymn in honor of the most illustrious of our former human neighbors. Mentioned are rulers, strong men, sages, prophets, counselors, teachers, musicians, rich people -- people honored by their contemporaries; celebrities, you might say: people who are "famous for being famous." And then the poem also holds up briefly the thought of "those who have left no memory, and who disappeared as though they had not been." What about those others -- those saints that don't register on our radar anymore that this feast day honors nevertheless? Who are they? Where are they now? What are they up to?
St. John the Divine -- in his Revelation -- caught a vision of the nameless ones in his old age, in exile on the island of Patmos. He saw a number impossible to count, people from every nation, race, tribe, and language. They were wearing white robes -- that this one I have on is supposed to recall -- and holding palms in their hands, and they were all singing and shouting about victory. And there were angels and messengers among them, and the angels bowed down like Muslims do at Mecca, and worshipped the Lamb who was there in the midst of them. And John's tour guide told John that these people will never have to be hungry again, nor suffer from the sun or the wind, nor from plagues, and they will have fresh spring water to drink, and God will wipe away all tears from their eyes.
These folks are so glad to be where they are because they've been through some trouble. The old fellow tells John that these folks have been through the great persecution, through the Great Ordeal. They died with their boots on. The palms -- symbols of martyrdom -- tell us that they did not die in bed. Their tribulations were not cash flow problems or workplace tensions or family feuds. These are they who have come through the Great Tribulation.
What might that be? John's Revelation is an underground tract about imperial power and its temporary victories, and its slaughter of the resistance, and its ultimate everlasting defeat by the God who is the final authority over history. So now we get -- through John -- something of God's take on how things will finally turn out for the kind of folks who don't knuckle under to the Empire, and its dragons of military and industrial might which John excoriates elsewhere in the same tract.
The Great Ordeal is the struggle of the saints, the ongoing wrestling for life in the midst of death, resistance to the arrogance of Caesar, hoping against hope for a New World where God's ways will be sovereign. Before the Russian Revolution, the Tsars would not let this book be read in church -- it was a threat. It does not show respect for authority. It calls government by the name of "Beast" and prays for a catastrophic end to it. It says that saints are the people who have fallen in the struggle against an unjust Empire. It says that even those who seem to be defeated in the eyes of the world will rise in the eyes of God and God's people forever.
Now comes Matthew with what he says is Jesus' own list of saints, of Blessed Ones: The ones who don't necessarily base every decision on how much money it will make them. The ones who try to be gentle and look out for those who can't very well look out for themselves. The ones who have enough feelings to grieve and mourn when that's called for. The ones who are hungry and thirsty for justice. The big-hearted ones. The pure-hearted ones, too. Peacemakers. And people who have to pay a price for standing up for what they believe. To them belong the rewards God has to offer.
What about us?
Matthew adds a footnote to include us: "You, too, when you are abused and persecuted, when you are 'rebuked and scorned' and lied about on account of the name of Jesus. Take everything as a compliment, and know that you are in good company. "
In the 1980s, in Chile, a liberation theologian named Segundo Galilea (wonderful name! "Second Galilee") wrote a book about the beatitudes called To Evangelize as Jesus Did. The idea of the book is that the Sermon on the Mount -- where Jesus lists these Beatitudes -- never actually happened, per se.
Scholars have known for generations that it's an editorial compilation. But a compilation of what? It's a collected list of things that people still remembered about Jesus many years after the crucifixion.
Galilea's point is that Jesus didn't talk about the beatitudes. He lived them. People, after all, remember what others DO much more vividly than what others SAY. And it's the way Jesus lived his life that made him rise from the grave and keep right on living in people's hearts -- in saints' hearts -- right down to the present day. Not what he said, but how he lived: That is Jesus' gospel.
So Jesus is the first of all the saints -- known and unknown -- who followed him in life. The definition of a saint is one who is baptized and tries to do the will of God. That's Jesus -- and that's the model for our own sainthood. He was baptized into that project, and so are we. And so, very soon, will be Amber and Alex. They'll be taking their chances in this life against all odds along with the grand-sounding cast of characters in the Revelation reading and the folksy types in the hymn we'll sing right after we finish with the baptism . . . and along with you and me. And there's not any reason, no not the least, why they shouldn't be saints, too.
-- Mark Lewis
With acknowledgement to the work of Grant M. Gallup.
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
© 2000 -Church of Our Saviour Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons
Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links
http://www.secaucus.org/oursaviourWebmaster - DRoberts@Secaucus.org