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| "Last Judgment Mosaic: Saints in heaven." Torcello Cathedral (Venice) |
No matter how many times I
hear it, I'm always a bit surprised when I’m reminded that before the earliest
Christians were gathering to worship and reflect upon certain life events of
Jesus they were commemorating the lives—and deaths!—of the holy men and women
they knew. From what we can tell, the church in its earliest days did not
celebrate things like Easter or Maundy Thursday or the visit of the magi and
certainly not Christmas. Those commemorations turned up, in various forms, later
on. In its earliest days, however, we do know that the church was marking on
the calendar the dates when certain noteworthy and distinguished men and women
died.
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| Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. Martyred in A.D. 155 |
There are several reasons why
the church was doing this right at the start. One reason is because everyone
thought Jesus was going to return within their lifetime. There was no reason to
draw major attention to things like the date of his birth or the date of his
crucifixion on a yearly basis because much of that was fresh on people’s minds (although
maybe not in as much detail as we have now) and also because they were in this
state of anticipation, focused more on Jesus’ future than on his past.
Another reason why the early
Christians were remembering these ordinary women and men of faith was because
they saw in their lives significant, tangible hope—hope that their faith had
not been lived in vain, hope that the things they did and the message they
preached mattered to God and God’s kingdom. There was a little anxiety about
the fact these people had died before Christ’s return. Would they be lost from
God’s plan? And yet, the gospel of Jesus had taught them that their lives—and,
just as powerfully, their deaths—were not meaningless in the ultimate scheme of
the universe. The lives of these people had offered living laboratories of
God’s grace for them, stained glass windows, if you will, through which the
light of Christ could shine, and when they died—or, as was more common the case
early on, were killed—the church wanted to remember them.
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| Perpetua and Felicity. Martyred March, 203 |
The calendar pretty quickly
got filled up with these commemorations: Stephen, Polycarp, and Perpetua, just
to name three. Once the Twelve apostles died, of course, they were placed on
the calendar, too, and as each of those days rolled around each year, the
faithful gave thanks for those people’s lives and the way they demonstrated
God’s love. They’d say, “Let’s look today at the life of so-and-so. He wasn’t
perfect, but he knew God loved him anyway, and we saw signs of God’s coming
kingdom in the way he lived his life.”
It didn’t take long for the
calendar to get filled up. Every day people were celebrating the lives of multiple
people. By the sixth century, and maybe even earlier, the church finally chose
a date and called it all saints day. It was one day to reflect on the lives of
all those men and women who had gone before us, especially those we had lost
most recently.
I think that the closest
thing to a calendar of saints we have now in our culture is the Google Doodles.
Those of you who use Google’s search engine or visit the Google homepage on a
regular basis know what I’m talking about. On many days when you access their
main site, you’ll notice they’ve taken their logo and created some cool form of
interactive artwork that seeks to recognize the work of some person who was
born on that day years ago. Typically it’s someone I’ve never heard of. Maybe
some nineteenth century Frenchman who revolutionized hat-making or something
like that.
Now, I have nothing against
Google or their clever doodles, but it’s interesting to note that a
multi-billion Internet giant who gathers and sells information about all of us now
has such a strong hand in determining who in our culture is worth
commemorating. If only the church could come up with doodles! When I see a
doodle, it’s a reminder to me that the people of God still need to be diligent
about remembering its faithful departed. It’s a reminder that these people are
still a part of us, that we are a communion of saints. Like the theologian G.K.
Chesterton once quipped, if someone asks you how large your church is, be sure
to count the tombstones, too. At Epiphany we could add the columbarium niches. The
church needs to take the time to realized how we’ve been blessed by our
heritage of holy men and women—all of them, the dead as well as the living—because
their lives have something to teach about the hope of God’s kingdom. Their
lives have something to say about the great reversal that God is bringing
about.
It is precisely that great
reversal, that turnaround of the world’s way of doing things, that Jesus begins
talking and teaching about at the beginning of his gospels. Nowhere are the
elements of this turnaround more starkly laid out than in the gospel of Luke. As
it turns out the things that the world typically values and lifts up as
blessings are not what will be blessed and valued in God’s coming kingdom. At
one point, Jesus looks up at his disciples and says, ‘Blessed are you who are
poor, for your is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for
you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed
are you when people hate you and exclude you...for that is what your ancestors
did to the prophets.’
This kind of talk was
earthshattering, and quite honestly didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Everyone
was used to thinking that things like poverty and hunger and sorrow were
occasions of God’s curses, not God’s blessings. But now Jesus is declaring that
they are blessings now because in the coming kingdom those things will be
exchanged for eternal abundance and happiness.
And, as if that wasn’t clear
enough, Jesus adds four statements of woe. The things that we typically strive
for now, things that we habitually cling to for hope—wealth, satisfaction of
health and appetite, and giddy cheerfulness, fame and acclaim—these things will
not last. They never do, and Jesus wants to make sure we understand that
present security does not guarantee future comfort. The kingdom of God will not
be based, for example, on earthly forms of wealth. Those who get too used to it
now will have a great shock when it’s not there in eternity.
In fact, these three
categories of things that Jesus attaches woe to are things that delude us into an
evil individualism. When we have a lot of money and possessions, when we have
wonderful health and a full belly, when we are just happy and satisfied all the
time it is far easier to feel and become cut off from the needs of others.
Just look at the vision of
discipleship that Jesus offers as he continues this sermon! There is a whole lot
of sharing and interdependence and mutual love going on. If you have a
possession, like a coat, and it is taken by another, you let go of it…and then toss
in something extra to go with it. You pay attention to others who have needs, even
giving to those who beg. You love enemies and do not be given to revenge. If
these are descriptions of following Jesus now, then imagine what God’s eternal
kingdom, when it arrives in full, will involve. It’s going to be an eternity which
will involve a lot of dwelling together in true communion.
I read an article this week
that suggested modern-day Christianity, especially in the United States, is
marked by a pervasive sense of individualism, as if faith can be lived out
between God and me, as if the local congregation is largely just a filling
station where we tank up on spirituality for the week, and we just happen to be
doing it at the same time with a bunch of other people. If contented
individualism is our version of the faith, then Jesus might pronounce a “woe”
on us, too. The saints remind us of our interconnectedness, that God, in the
end, wants us together, and that that life may begin now. I certainly witnessed
that spirit in this congregation recently as we suffered five deaths in the
past four weeks. People came together consistently to help the families in
their grieving and contributed resources for food. These were our saints.
A sense of togetherness and
mutual support is not, however, the primary place to which that the poor and
the hungry and the mourning point us. Ultimately Jesus knows these people are
blessed because they are most prone to understand the blessing of the cross. Those
who are down and out now, those who are painfully aware of their worldly
shortcomings are far more apt to comprehend that God is their only hope. They
are the ones who will run to the hope of the cross, that will see in it God’s
vindication of the hungry, the beaten, the despised.
In the long run, then, the
power of God’s kingdom will not be up to us and our ability to “pull it off.” The
saints of God surely play a part in it, for sure. Aware of our sinfulness, you
and I are transformed by God’s grace and begin to grow into that future, but,
bottom line, it is not we who bring about this utter reversal of things. That
is God’s doing, and even in the darkest, bleakest, most forlorn corners of this
world God can bring blessing.
Come to think of it, these
people of the church don’t really need Google doodles, because they’ve already
managed to doodle all over our lives. They believed in that place of the great
reversal and they saw it, and so they
doodled all kinds of kindness and charity and love. And often those doodles became
masterpieces as the Lord grabbed their hand and began to move the pen along
with them. They doodled this beauty right on into eternity.
And so, from the beginning,
the followership of Jesus has wanted to remember these important works scrawled
across the millennia as they have waited for the full picture to appear. That’s
what this day is called: all saints. All the doodlers. And that includes not
just the dead, but the living.
So, then…pick up your pen!
Look to your neighbor. Look to the world. And, for all you’re your worth, keep
doodling. God will make it beautiful.
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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