The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs by Fra Angelico
Readings for today.
Coffee hour last Sunday was a glorious celebration of Trinity’s generous gifts of hospitality. I arrived a bit late and admired the delicious offerings, including a tree themed dessert table. The chocolate trunk of the tree was heavenly!
Beyond the bounty of food and coffee, a warm parish hall and the hum of conversation, I saw several unhoused neighbors being welcomed in. I learned that one of those neighbors is a young woman I had seen in church. It was really cold last weekend, and before the service, one of our congregants invited her to come in. The same person sat near her and helped her find her way through the service. She was invited to coffee hour, where people learned her story and that she needed a place to sleep safely. One person went down to the WHEEL shelter to find out about shelter resources. Upon learning that there were beds available at a nearby location, a second person walked her to that shelter.
A cold and frightened young woman found compassion, kindness, and hope because this community together shared their gifts for welcome, and connecting resources with urgent needs, and gentle companionship. What a beautiful, lived statement of our faith!
This past week much of the Northern Hemisphere celebrated Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and/or All Souls Day. These three days take us on a journey.
We start with Halloween. With changing seasons and harvest time, our thoughts turn to seasons of life and our own mortality. Pre-Christian festivals at this time of year claimed a thin or permeable space between this life and the next. On this one night, spirits could cross back into the land of the living. We face our fear of death and the unknown through humor, pranks, and silly costumes.
The reality of death and a spiritual life after this one brings us to All Saints’ Day on November 1. All Saints’ commemorates all saints known and unknown.
All Saints’ is followed by All Souls’ on November 2. All Souls’ was added to the church calendar in the 1970s to distinguish between saints of the church and the saints we have known in our lives.
All Saints’ and All Souls’ are celebrations of hope manifest in the lives of people living the best lives of faith they can.
The word ‘saint’ gets used in several ways.
‘Saint’ can mean one who has been canonized or recognized as a saint by church authority. We think about these people as the heroes of the Church. People whose lives were exemplary because of self-sacrifice, witness, virtue, martyrdom, or their accomplishments.
People like Jesus’ first apostles, who spread the gospel to the nations, telling of their experiences with Jesus, healing people, sharing hope and inviting everyone they met to join their growing community. Or like Martin Luther King, Jr, or Florence Li Tim Oi, Patrick, or Macrina, Desmond Tutu. The list goes on. The Episcopal Church continues adding new saints, new commemorations of people who give us examples of how to live our faith.
While we remember them for how they lived their faith, how they taught, healed, modeled grace and love and hope, every one of these people was a human being. Every one of them sinned, faltered, and failed at some point. They may not have been a great parent or partner. They got angry, defied authority, disappointed people they loved. In other words, they were human beings - fallible and flawed like the rest of us. And yet, we remember them for the ways they lived their faith.
When the apostle Paul refers to all the saints, he means all Christians, all who are redeemed and sanctified by their baptism into the Body of Christ.
On this day, we celebrate all the saints. All the ones on the church calendar, and all who have ever been or will be baptized with water in the name of the triune God (including Josh who will be baptized today). And we celebrate and remember all the faithful and holy people we have known who have gone before us to join the heavenly host.
When we think about the saints, even knowing they were human, we often come back around to the idea of perfection. The Beatitudes in today’s gospel lay out an ideal of perfection or blessedness in the eyes of God. And later in Matthew chapter 5, Jesus says we are to be perfect as God is perfect.
Let’s pause with perfection for a moment. God is perfectly God: unbound by time or space or tiny human brains, creative spirit of all things that ever were or are or are to come, ultimate love, etc etc etc. God is perfectly God.
We are not created or asked to be perfectly God. We are created perfectly human, perfectly unique (every one of us different and amazing!), perfectly imperfect.
God being fully God is holy perfection.
Us being fully us, fully human, flawed, sinful, repentant, trying - that’s our perfection.
Which is why, in our baptismal covenant, we say, “I will, with God’s help.” Because we are imperfect, short on time, lacking desire and ability to live perfectly in our faith, destined to falter and need forgiveness. Fully and perfectly human, learning and trying our best to live with grace, compassion, justice, and love, for ourselves and all people and creation.
Today we welcome Josh into the family of God, as it is known and lived here at Trinity. In baptism, Josh joins the cloud of faithful imperfect saints who have lived and died and are yet to come. As we all renew our baptismal promises, we refresh our commitment to be imperfectly perfect, to come together in worship and love, to work for peace in the world and justice for all people, to honor the dignity of all human beings and to preserve God’s beautiful creation.
Saints are people who live their faith, to the best of their ability. We bear witness to Christ as people of compassion, kindness, grace, and hope - for ourselves and for every person we meet.
Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation in the church and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment