Church of the Incarnation, New York, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Sunday after All Saints - November 2, 2008
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Yesterday, November first, was All Saints Day, which we are celebrating today. In the Church’s calendar today’s date, November second, is All Souls, the celebration of all the faithful departed. The beginning of November is the time when Christians place before ourselves all the good examples of faith, when we surround ourselves with reminders that others have gone before us, have made our lives in the faith possible. And today is Commitment Sunday here at The Church of the Incarnation. I pray that you will be generous with both your treasure and your talent, because the gift of yourself, your time and your energy, is as precious as your money.
This morning I want us to think about saints – the saints of the past, and the saints we might become. There is so much holiness. All the saints of the Church, famous and not so famous. All the saints of our particular communities. All the saints of our individual lives, all the people whose holiness has drawn us closer to God. Who are your saints?
I’ll tell you some of mine and you can think of yours. In the wider Church, my favorite saint of the Church is the Venerable Bede, the eighth century English Northumbrian monk and scholar whose holy life and writing at the northern edge of the known world still shines after all these centuries.
At St. Michael’s Church, Anaheim, California, where I was Rector in the 1990's, Chuck Henderson was Treasurer for ever and ever. Perhaps you know someone like him. His financial reports to the Vestry also seemed to go on for ever and ever. But one day he listened to the Gospel, Matthew 25, and was seized by the command of Our Lord to feed the hungry, and so he started and ran a feeding program for the poor. It ran every Monday night at St. Michael’s for twenty years. His vision and dedication opened a way for dozens of church members who wanted to walk the Gospel path. It changed that church. It made St. Michael’s a light to the poor.
In the Order of the Holy Cross, I think of Br. Paul Hayes, an old African American man who came to us after years of day jobs and life on the road and destitution. Those hardships took a real and lasting toll. When he found the monastery, he first went to work in the kitchen. Eventually he joined the Order. He would sit and listen to you and God was in his face and in his words and when you left your heart was healed. I know, because I watched it happen time and time again when we were stationed together at our monastery in Berkeley. I saw spirits lifted and lives changed and vocations saved and marriages healed. I know because it happened to me.
And in my personal life I think of my maternal grandmother, Della Rebecca Mohney Marshall, a solid, daily Bible-reading Christian lady of severe old-time Protestant tendencies whose love flowed out of the kitchen she almost never left. She was full of a righteous goodness that was almost frightening in its simplicity and so profoundly attractive that you wanted to be with her all the time, and not just to eat her sugar cookies.
Who are your saints? Circles upon circles of saints around us, smaller circles opening into wider circles, until finally, in the words of the seer in Revelation which we have just heard, it becomes a great multitude that no one can count, standing before the throne of God, praising the One whose life is their life and whose love is so strong.
Holiness is a category of embarrassment to people of our time. Holiness is something that others are supposed to discern in you, preferably after you are dead and gone, not something you actively pursue. But to be holy in the here and now? To work at being holy? How presumptuous. How priggish. How boring. Saints are other people, in other times, under other circumstances. Certainly not now. Certainly not us.
And yet Jesus calls us to be holy. From the end of the fifth chapter of Matthew, which begins with the Beatitudes we just heard, Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” What a preposterous thing to say. Who can be perfect? How can we do it? Impossible.
These two texts, the Beatitudes and the “Be perfect” passage, contain two words that give us a clue to a better understanding of holiness, and our call to be holy, two Greek words that are keys to the true Christian understanding of holiness. It may not be what you expect.
The first word is “blessed”. In Greek it is “makarios”, which has a wider range than our rather anemic “blessed”. If you are “makarios”, you’re happy because you’re fortunate, because you are one of those people who always seems to land on your feet, because you’re a winner. You are plugged into whatever it is that’s running the right way. You have the right rhythm and go with the flow. Your nature is in tune with the great reality and your life is in harmony with the best energies of the universe.
So, Jesus is saying, the people who are really plugged in, who are really surfing the crest of the great wave of the universe, are the people who follow God’s values, and not the values that seem to apparent to us on our first glance. They are the people who are trodden down inside as well as out; they are the people who have lost someone dear and feel it deeply; they are the people who are humble through and through; they are the people who want what is right so much they can taste it; they are the people who are always letting others off the hook; they are the people who aren’t fooled when we want things to be complicated and do some fancy dancing around tough issues, when the issues really aren’t that complex at all; they are the people who will take a risk to stop a quarrel or a fight or even a war; they are the people who get into trouble because they would rather follow God than adopt the fad of the moment. Jesus says these are the people who are the lucky ones, the people who will win the ultimate game of life.
The second word is “perfect”. The Greek for this is “teleios”. Again, our translation is a little weak. The Greek means perfect, but not in the sense of “without a flaw”. Rather, it means something that has achieved its goal. “Telos”, from which it comes, means the goal or end or purpose of something. So a person who is “teleios” has become the person who has become one with what was purposed at his or her beginning. Clearly we can never be flawless, though perhaps there are moments when we might glimpse that happy state. Thank God for moments of bliss! But to fulfill our purpose, that we can do.
What are the purposes, the goals of our lives? Have we chosen well, or have we settled for something second or even third or fourth rate? Perhaps we might consider an upgrade. Have we worked conscientiously to achieve our goals? Have we become the person we had the potential to be?
This understanding of “perfection” is very different from the idea of flawlessness. For one thing, it is dynamic. It is a process. You are not finished until you are finished, and yet if we are engaged seriously and completely in moving toward our goals, we are in a very real sense accomplishing them already. To be practicing them is to have achieved them, though with progress still to make. That is why so many professions say that the people following the profession are “practicing” – law and medicine, to name just two. To be a practicing lawyer or doctor means that you are a lawyer or a doctor, but that you are also on the way toward greater wisdom, greater skill. So to set out seriously on the path to reach a worthy goal is already to be on the way.
I would suggest that a saint is a person who has found the true and worthy goals of his or her life and is pursuing them. If those goals are God’s goals, that person will be plugged in to God’s energy. Now I admit that this may sound a little like New Age thinking. Those who know me well would be surprised to hear me called a New Ager. But truth is truth. We were created with God’s goals, God’s purposes in mind, and we have been shown God’s agenda for his creation. These are available to us all. We can adopt them and live them. We can get with the program.
My hope for myself and for you is that we all may be saints. My hope is that we may look at our goals, revise them if we need to, and begin living as the blessed of God – that we may begin to be poor in spirit, mournful in solidarity with each others’ losses, humble in the face of reality, eager to do what is right, generous and kind and forgiving to each other, undivided in our loves, willing to calm and stop destructive conflict, and ready to suffer if need be when we do the right thing.
My hope is that we will be people whom others will look to in love and gratitude when our day is done, that among us there may be holy scholars and teachers, that among us there may be visionaries willing to work inside the Church and outside its walls to bring about good, that among us there may be holy men and women willing to be patient channels for God’s grace and love, that among us there may be adults whose love for God is a rock and a refuge for the young.
My hope is that we will be those saints.
No comments:
Post a Comment