1 John 3:1-3Look at what sort of love the Father has given to us - that we should be called children of God and so we are. The world does not know us for this reason - it did not know him. Beloved, we are children of God now, and it is not yet revealed who we shall be, but we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him because we will see him just as he is. All who have this hope from him purify themselves just as he is pure.
November 1st is a forgotten day on most United Methodist calendars. All Saints Day is an ancient festival of the Church. It was John Wesley’s favorite feast of the Christian year. He lived in a time when Christmas celebrations were very small. Most people didn’t even take off work on Christmas in the 18th century. But All Saints Day was his favorite high holy day.
We’re only just beginning to reclaim this day as Methodists. We’re only just beginning to rediscover how important it is to remember and to celebrate the saints. All Saints Day is a time for us to remember that God has set us apart, has called us to a life more holy, has invited us to see ourselves as blessed by God and challenged to live differently because we know that we are children of God. When Paul writes to the churches in his letters, he writes to the saints gathered in those places. If we are to be called saints, a holy people, then we at least ought to spend one Sunday a year talking about what it means to be saintly.
Now the first thing I need to say is what saints are not. Saints are not human beings who live on a different plane of existence. Saints are not people who live lives so removed from the day-to-day dramas and tragedies and sin of the everyday world that they don’t seem human. Saints are not above it all, they are in it all. They are people like you and me and, bless us, when it comes to talking about the church the saints ARE you and me. Saints are made of very ordinary stuff.
It’s tempting on a day like today to talk only about those people who rose above it all. Like Rosa Parks or Mother Teresa…these are people who have become so legendary – so much like figures in stained-glass – that all the grit has been washed away from their stories. Rosa Parks will always be the woman who knew that she was a child of God and who would not relinquish that truth by giving up her seat. Rosa Parks is always on the bus in our minds and that’s a good thing, but we don’t see the struggle. Mother Teresa is always the smiling woman walking among the poor in India.
But I’ve known some saints who weren’t so loveable. Like Jack. Jack was one of the first people I met on my first Sunday at Memorial Church in Dallas. He was a retired worker from Braniff Airlines and I was a young seminary student and we ended up spending the better part of four years together sitting in the bass section of the choir.
Jack is a dead ringer for Richard Nixon, something he was not too proud of it but something that he couldn’t do much about. He could be a crotchety guy with a bad attitude. I’ll never forget when he stood up at a church board meeting in the middle of a discussion about how the church was going to reach out to the neighborhood around it. Memorial Church was a mostly Anglo church in a neighborhood that was very quickly becoming predominantly Latino. East Dallas was changing and the church was slowly dying. If they didn’t reach out they would surely go under. But Jack stood up and said, “Why are we talking about reaching out? Those people will not come to this church.” He could be crotchety and even a little racist.
But I liked sitting next to Jack in the choir. He had a corny sense of humor, which I’m prone to myself from time to time. Somehow Jack decided that he needed to take me under his wing and he did that by taking me fishing.
Fishing for Jack was a major affair. A major overnight affair. The first time we went fishing Jack said, “I’ll pick you up at 9 PM.”
I said, “Don’t you mean 9 AM?”
“No, that’s what time we’ll get back.”
And sure enough he rolled around with his boat to pick me up at 9 o’clock at night and we started out for Cedar Creek Lake, about 75 miles away. I realized quickly that this was a ritual for Jack. He stopped at the same store and got the same snacks and used the same bait in the same spots for the same length of time every time. The one concession he made to me being there was that he said he was going to let me pick the kind of fried chicken. “Do you want Popeye’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken?”
I said, “I don’t know. Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
He showed up with Popeye’s. He just couldn’t bring himself to change. And I appreciated that about him. I enjoyed fishing with him that night, even though we spent three hours of it holed up under a highway overpass bridge during a summer thunderstorm. He couldn’t even bring himself to get out of the water then. Jack and I didn’t agree on a lot of things, but even if he couldn’t bring himself to reach out to the community he lived in, he was reaching out to me.
Now Jack makes a pretty unlikely saint if we’re talking about stained-glass standards here, but let me tell you about another unlikely saint who makes his story more interesting. My third year of seminary in Dallas I left Memorial Church to start an internship with a community center and as the associate pastor of a Latino church in West Dallas. At the church I got to know Joel. I’ve known a lot of Joels in my life, and the one I love the best gets his name, in part from this Joel, another very unlikely saint.
Joel was my senior pastor at the Latino church. He was a feisty, combative pastor who was always getting himself in trouble. He was possessed by visions of where God was leading the church and when others questioned his vision he could launch into a fury. I spent most of my two years with him watching the fires that appeared in his wake as he roared ahead.
One Sunday I sat in the early morning Spanish service at the church and listened as Joel castigated the Church Council over some dispute they were having at the time. My Spanish was not very good then but I caught enough to know that he was calling people out by name in the sermon and telling them what he thought of their opposition. As the service ended I knew we had one more service to go – the English service – and I had to step in so I went up to him and said, “Joel, I think you’re in danger of losing your soul.” I think he did tone it down just a bit for that next service. Joel was impetuous and he was making a rough path toward sainthood, though martyrdom often seemed like a distinct possibility.
But let me tell you how Joel and Jack met. The vision that possessed Joel more than any other was that his congregation should merge with another congregation. The Latino church had a good-sized congregation with a lot of professionals in the Dallas community. But it was meeting in a building that should have been condemned. It was infested with rats and was falling apart. Joel had a vision that this vibrant congregation should join another congregation with a better facility and start a new ministry together with them. His vision led him to Memorial.
It seemed like a perfect plan in his mind. Memorial had a large, underused facility with an Anglo congregation that was finding it hard to reach out to their Latino neighbors. The Latino congregation could help them do that and could bring new life, vitality and resources. The fact that he might meet resistance on both sides never seemed to occur to Joel. This was what God was showing him and he could not understand why others couldn’t see it.
But his vision was from God. I realize now that it took someone with that ferocious determination and single-mindedness to get that merger to happen, and it did happen. That rough and tumble pastor who sometimes ruffled my feathers ended up inspiring me with what could happen. And even Jack was transformed.
One of the last things I did before leaving Dallas as a student was to go fishing one more time with Jack. The routine was the same. Peanut patties for snacks, Cedar Creek Lake, all night long, Popeye’s chicken. But this time there was a beautiful full moon shining over the lake and filling the sky. There was a nice breeze to cut the summer heat. And Jack talked about the new folks at his merged church who were becoming his friends. Sam, who now sat in the tenor section right in front of us. Richard, who sat with us in the bass section. I remembered how he had said that “those people” would never come. But they had and they had revived a dying church with a new vision of what they could be and they weren’t “those people” anymore. They were Sam and Richard and Conchita.
God did some absolutely amazing things with some pretty rough instruments in that place. God took people who not only lived on different sides of the city but on different planets culturally and made a family out of them. God took a brilliant, surly bulldog of a preacher named Joel and a crotchety, rigid man in need of transformation named Jack and put them in the same family. Those are the kind of saints I want you to hear about.
I want you to hear about Jack and Joel because I want you to know that it is not the best efforts of the best ones of us that makes a person a saint, it is Jesus Christ who makes a person a saint. It isn’t special breeding or special training that creates saints, it is Jesus Christ who creates saints. It isn’t vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that make a person a saint; it’s your baptism that makes you a saint.
1 John puts it very well. The writer is talking to a community that is at threat and under siege. There is darkness all around and they are in constant conflicts with powers they can only name as evil. It would be easy for them to forget who they were and why they were continuing in this life.
The writer of the letter tells them, “Look at the love that God has given us: We can be called children of God?! It’s amazing. It’s unbelievable. It’s fantastic. But it’s true. When we have been baptized into Christ, when we have put on Christ, when we have started to live through Jesus we ARE children of God now.
“But yet…but yet, it isn’t yet revealed who we shall be. It isn’t yet clear how God will take us, with all our foibles and frailties, with all of our doubts and dreams, with all of our wild hopes and great despair, with all of our sin and make of us saints…it isn’t clear who we shall be. But we know this: when Jesus is revealed in fullness at the end of time, we shall be like him because we shall see him just as he is.”
Saints are not holy because of what they have done…they are holy because they can see Jesus. They are holy because God has made them so. They are holy because God takes all of us who have passed through the waters of baptism and washed up on the shores of a new life and has set us on a new course, asking us to live out our calling as holy people. No, we don’t deserve that title. No, we didn’t earn that distinction. No, salvation is not ours by right. Salvation is ours by gift, by grace, by wholly uncalled-for mercy working in us before we could get ourselves together. We aren’t holy people, set apart people, saints for any good reason except God’s gracious love grabbing hold of us and refusing to let us go.
So when God takes hold of people like Jack and Joel, something miraculous can happen. These people seek Jesus in their own stumbling way and they meet in the unlikeliest of places – as brothers in a new church and with a new mission. Saints are people who know that they have been grafted onto a tree that was not their own. Saints are people who know that they are insufficient to the task at hand but who trust that God is sufficient. Saints are people who know their limits and fall at God’s feet.
I know you can think of some more saintly souls to remember today. There are people whose lives are so full of grace and wonder that we do set them apart in our minds and seek to model our lives after theirs. But there are other saints, perhaps more gritty and less attractive, who despite themselves show forth God’s love and God’s power to transform. I’ve been touched by quite a few of those saints along the way as well. I’ve met them in church meetings and in fishing boats. I’ve been exasperated by them and inspired by them. And if I am to be a saint it is for the same reason that I call them saints – God loves them so much that God calls them children of God. It’s not clear what we shall be, brothers and sisters, but this much is true – Jesus isn’t through with us yet.
May we be more holy and offer what we have and what we are to the God who meets us here, at this table, in the communion of the saints of every time and place. Thanks be to God.
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