Dead, Deified, Or Different?
Sermon
Uplifting Christ Through Autumn
Sermons for the Fall Season
Blest are the lowly; they shall inherit the land. Blest are they who hunger and thirst for holiness; blest are they who show mercy; blest are the peacemakers.
As you are all aware, today is All Saints' Sunday. In the year 835 A.D., Pope Gregory IV established for the Western church November 1 as All Saints' Day.... The Sunday following became All Saints' Sunday.
The day was intended to be a day of celebration and commemoration of all the saints of God, known and unknown -- a victory party for those who shared in the mystery, yet continuity, of resurrection eternity.
Unfortunately it is hard for many of us today to get into the party mood because saints seem so distant -- so removed from the action of our daily living. The whole theme of "All Saints' Day" seems to take on a rather musty air like something experienced when peering into a dusty corner in the attic of history.
Saints are from a different time of self-perception; a fascinating topic in the realm of church history, but are they really relevant to the bottom line of our daily interaction?
I asked a study group of students once to define "saint" and then to name some saints. Their definitions and candidates all seemed to fall into one or more of three categories: "A saint is someone who is either deified, dead, or different."
First there were those saints who are practically deified. From the ancient stories about them, they seem pretty godlike in total personality. We envision them with halos. They are the superstars of past ecclesiastical piety. You can easily tell who they are because "saint" seems to be a part of their name. Saint John, Saint Mark, Saint Augustine, Saint Francis -- yet also all are apparently removed from us by a large slab of time.
And all the saints that were listed by the students in my study group, except for one, were dead. They were people in the past who had died in the faith, and in most cases died for the faith due to intense persecution. This was important for canonization by my study group -- Saint Stephen and Saint Peter -- and listed here were more modern names -- like Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a young pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis toward the end of World War II -- saints as people who had put their bodies on the line for their faith and were killed.
Then there was the third category. The students agreed that saints were willing to go against the people that are faithfully different. Saints were willing to go against the flow of the ordinary, to risk and sacrifice their lives for their faith. In our initial discussion, it was in this category that the students placed the one, contemporary saint that was a part of their list: Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa was a little, fragile woman living out her life as a part of a religious order serving in the city slums of India and other parts of our world where human need and desperation seem to peak.
In the eyes of our society, she was a very different kind of person -- a woman who, it appeared to the world, had sacrificed what most people seem to define as pleasure and comfort and success so that she could minister to those who are most obviously in physical need. Her ministry was in the very style of Jesus Christ. She was a woman who had forsaken a biological family and personal safety and any kind of possessions. She was a woman who fasted, wore a habit, spent hours in prayer -- a person who was very different -- like Saint Francis caring for the birds and talking to the birds.
Respected, revered -- Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize. A contemporary at that time, but it appears to us she was someone who was very different from us.
Well the odds are good, of course, that all the people, represented by the names that I mentioned, were or are saints of God.
But deified? These people were lifted up in our memory, in most cases, because some of their actions were godlike, or more specific in human interrelational terms, Christlike. But if we study the record closely, we quickly discover that they are also human creatures of limitation and separation -- just like us.
Many are certainly dead, but let's also look around -- in our very midst. Yes, saints are always different, in the sense of living a faith that results in actions and philosophies that often fly in the face of societal expectations that are based on ego or self-interest. When the will of God acts through a person, that person, now a saint, becomes in that very moment a divine corrective to loveless action and momentum.
Let me describe to you some "different" people that were encountered during a chapel field trip to Chicago some time ago. It was different in the sense of being saintlike.
The first person I'll describe is Dan Jorenko who works for the Northwest Community Organization -- a neighborhood action-justice organization in a low-income neighborhood of active shops and stores. All the signage there was in Spanish. Most of the people on the street seemed to be Mexican or Central American.
It was about noon when we arrived in this neighborhood. I went into the storefront office to find Dan. The front office had the feel of a Dickensian sweatshop for accountants. There were five or six ancient wooden desks buried under a sea of papers. I found Dan in the back room, his hands covered with ink, cranking out flyers on an old mimeograph machine. The flyers were about a neighborhood meeting at St. Mark's parish hall -- a meeting to help convince city officials of the need for low-income apartments in the neighborhood, places to live that are rehabilitated and sanitary. There were many families desperately seeking a place to live. One side of the flyer was in Spanish, the other side in English. At the bottom it said, "For a ride ... call Dan at NCO."
We went to lunch at Arandas Cafe at the corner of the block to talk. Over Mexican sausage sandwiches and enchiladas (ask Jeff about beef brain burritos) we tried to talk. That was somewhat of a mistake because this was an authentic Mexican cafe and the music was blasting away -- so maybe only six or so of us could actually hear Dan.
Dan told of political wars that were trying to bring about justice in his little area of the city. They were getting very poor people to see that they, too, have rights; trying to build a sense of dignity in people who for the most part felt that they had been forgotten by the normal process of goods and services. Dan was a graduate of Michigan State and then a Methodist seminary. He decided not to seek a call as a pastor of a church because he was afraid that he would not be placed in a poor section of the inner city.
Almost three years prior to our meeting, he took this poor paying job with NCO, living in an old apartment two blocks from the office. He works days and most nights. Wearing a torn shirt and ripped jacket, holding a burrito in ink-stained hands, he talked about how he cared for people. He had a certain smile and a sparkle in his eyes, and could see only the positive things that were happening around him, even when his stories seemed to all be about uphill battles against forces of prejudice and apathy, which were affecting families in desperate need. Dan kept a spark of hope and joy in the midst of all this. It was a part of his faith. Is this a saint, perhaps?
Blest are they who show mercy; blest are the single-hearted for they shall see God. Blest are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you because of me.
During the same trip, we talked to Gary Mills at St. Mary's Lutheran Church. It's a mission church in the basement of a low-rent apartment house now owned by the American Lutheran Church. The pastor's parsonage is across the street -- that street and the few blocks around it have the highest homicide rate in the United States. It seemed like a nice enough neighborhood, but the year prior to our visit, about 48 children between the ages of eleven and 21 were knifed or shot to death there. We watched a videotape in the parsonage basement Sunday morning about the mission's neighborhood and ministry.
For what seemed, to me, to be forever, it showed a string of wallet-size school pictures of boys -- giving that school-picture smile like they must have promised their mothers. They were all children that were killed the previous year in gang assassinations on the street outside of St. Mary's. Gary told of one funeral for an eleven-year-old where a rival gang with guns drawn stormed into the funeral service, pushed the bereaving family aside, knocked Gary to the floor, took the body of the slain boy out of the casket, carried it out into the street, and threw it on the top of a car. These were desperate teenagers trying to steal everything from their enemies -- even hope. To them there was no meaning to anything -- even the words of the funeral or the tears of a dead child's mother.
We slept that night in an office that had a bullet hole through the window, the bullet lodged in the wall. We worshiped that next morning in the boiler room, which doubles as their sanctuary. We worshiped in both Spanish and English and shared together the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
I sat next to a teenager who had no expression on her face. She never sang or said one word. When we shared the peace she would not look into anyone's eyes, or say a word, just offer a limp hand. What had happened in her life to cause her to lose all expression? She did take communion, and she held around her neck a crucifix and she listened to the words of love. Over ninety percent of those from the neighborhood who come to worship went to no church before St. Mary's moved into the neighborhood.
Here is where Pastor Mills, who is fighting his own battle with cancer at the moment, and his wife, Diane, have decided to live and speak words and do deeds of gospel love. Blest are they who sow mercy: mercy shall be theirs. Blest too the peacemakers: they shall be called the children of God. Who are the Mills -- saints?
Then we visited Dennis Lauritsen, pastor of Bethel Lutheran Church. He told us how his small church decided to use their basement as a winter shelter for homeless people. People can come in the late evening, receive a warm meal with a mattress and clean sheets and a blanket for the evening. And who are these people? People laid off of work, refugees, alcohol and drug abusers kicked out of their own families for a while, many social rejects, all of them most desperate at the moment. The church started a food pantry for needy families and a used clothing exchange.
Why did they do it? Dennis said, "This is the Word of God, the life of Jesus, and the Bible calls us into caring for the well-being and safety and future of others." Who is this Dennis Lauritsen? A saint? I think so.
But wait a minute. Do you know what he said to us? He said, "This is all sort of easy. The needs here are so obvious; these men are freezing in the street in the winter; they have no safe place to stay, no warm meals. The families that come to us for food or clothes have children who are crying because they are hungry and have no shoes. This is obvious." Then Dennis said, "I know about Wittenberg and our other Lutheran church-related schools, and it seems to me that a lot of kids are going there just to learn the skills to get out of there, earn a big salary, get the big house, and drive all those cars. Students in life for the money. You guys got the big job, bringing God's will and Word for love and justice and compassion to those people. You've got the tough job of ministry. You guys are saints to attempt ministry in the battleground at Wittenberg."
In his lectures on the book of Galatians, Martin Luther spoke about those who should rightly be called saints. Luther wrote:
The saints do not live without temptations of the flesh, nor without sin. Saints are not stones, or like in the imagination of monks and students, saints are not senseless blocks without all affections. When I was a monk I did often times most heartily wish that I might be so fortunate to see or converse with a saint. I imagined such a saint as one who lived in the wilderness abstaining from meat and drink, and living only by eating roots or herbs and cold water. Now, in the light of the gospel, I plainly see that those whom Christ and his apostles call saints are those who are called by the gospel and baptized. Saints are those who believe that they are sanctified (of worth and purpose), as well as cleansed by the death and blood of Christ.
Therefore Paul, when he wrote to any Christian anywhere, called them all holy and the children of God. Whether they be male or female, bond or free, they all are saints; not because of what they do, but because of what God does through them. So whether ministers of God's Word, the magistrates of the community, parents, students, children, masters, servants -- all are true saints if first and before all things they assure themselves that Christ is their wisdom, their savior, and their purpose for being. They are true saints if they attempt to do one thing in their daily living: God's will.
Sainthood does not pertain only to the saints which are in heaven, or on earth as hermits and monks who do certain great and strange works, lurking in caves and dens, fasting, wearing hair shirts, hoping this will single them out for heaven. Let us now learn by the Holy Scriptures, that all who faithfully believe in Christ are saints.
With great rejoicing I give thanks to God, for God has given to me the grace to see not one but many saints. Yea, an infinite number of true saints ... as Christ himself and his apostles do describe, of which I also, by the grace of God, am one. For I am baptized, and I do believe that Christ my Lord by his death has redeemed and delivered me from all my sins and has given to me eternal righteousness and holiness.
According to Luther and Saint Paul, All Saints' Sunday is our day. The day is for those who have been grasped by Christ. The day where the Word of God is piercing through our lives. Blest are the peacemakers: blest are those who show mercy. Saints not as supra-humans, not persons in some mystical state of moral perfection, but those, like us, in the process of growth, in grace. Saint and sinner rolled into one, daily death and rebirth, baptized children of God attempting to be open to the moving Spirit of God. All Saints' Sunday is our day. A day we share with the big name saints and with those who have labored in obscurity and silence but who nevertheless within their own sphere of influence, repeatedly have been witnesses to their living God.
Today is a day, as is every day, to be challenged by all the saints around us to match their obedience and dedication. A time for us, the present saints, to reexamine our contacts with others, in our social transactions, in the classroom, dorm, Greek house, apartment, in our family life and love life, in our voting on Tuesday, in our allocation of money, and our use of free time, our occupational discussion making, in how we influence others -- a day to ask ourselves if we are putting the integrity of our inner selves as saints on the line for our faith in daily living here. As sinners we pray for God's guidance, direction, strength, forgiveness so that our sainthood may be the dominant force in our lives together -- allowing loving interaction to form the very heart and soul and purpose of all our relationships. Amen.
As you are all aware, today is All Saints' Sunday. In the year 835 A.D., Pope Gregory IV established for the Western church November 1 as All Saints' Day.... The Sunday following became All Saints' Sunday.
The day was intended to be a day of celebration and commemoration of all the saints of God, known and unknown -- a victory party for those who shared in the mystery, yet continuity, of resurrection eternity.
Unfortunately it is hard for many of us today to get into the party mood because saints seem so distant -- so removed from the action of our daily living. The whole theme of "All Saints' Day" seems to take on a rather musty air like something experienced when peering into a dusty corner in the attic of history.
Saints are from a different time of self-perception; a fascinating topic in the realm of church history, but are they really relevant to the bottom line of our daily interaction?
I asked a study group of students once to define "saint" and then to name some saints. Their definitions and candidates all seemed to fall into one or more of three categories: "A saint is someone who is either deified, dead, or different."
First there were those saints who are practically deified. From the ancient stories about them, they seem pretty godlike in total personality. We envision them with halos. They are the superstars of past ecclesiastical piety. You can easily tell who they are because "saint" seems to be a part of their name. Saint John, Saint Mark, Saint Augustine, Saint Francis -- yet also all are apparently removed from us by a large slab of time.
And all the saints that were listed by the students in my study group, except for one, were dead. They were people in the past who had died in the faith, and in most cases died for the faith due to intense persecution. This was important for canonization by my study group -- Saint Stephen and Saint Peter -- and listed here were more modern names -- like Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- a young pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis toward the end of World War II -- saints as people who had put their bodies on the line for their faith and were killed.
Then there was the third category. The students agreed that saints were willing to go against the people that are faithfully different. Saints were willing to go against the flow of the ordinary, to risk and sacrifice their lives for their faith. In our initial discussion, it was in this category that the students placed the one, contemporary saint that was a part of their list: Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa was a little, fragile woman living out her life as a part of a religious order serving in the city slums of India and other parts of our world where human need and desperation seem to peak.
In the eyes of our society, she was a very different kind of person -- a woman who, it appeared to the world, had sacrificed what most people seem to define as pleasure and comfort and success so that she could minister to those who are most obviously in physical need. Her ministry was in the very style of Jesus Christ. She was a woman who had forsaken a biological family and personal safety and any kind of possessions. She was a woman who fasted, wore a habit, spent hours in prayer -- a person who was very different -- like Saint Francis caring for the birds and talking to the birds.
Respected, revered -- Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize. A contemporary at that time, but it appears to us she was someone who was very different from us.
Well the odds are good, of course, that all the people, represented by the names that I mentioned, were or are saints of God.
But deified? These people were lifted up in our memory, in most cases, because some of their actions were godlike, or more specific in human interrelational terms, Christlike. But if we study the record closely, we quickly discover that they are also human creatures of limitation and separation -- just like us.
Many are certainly dead, but let's also look around -- in our very midst. Yes, saints are always different, in the sense of living a faith that results in actions and philosophies that often fly in the face of societal expectations that are based on ego or self-interest. When the will of God acts through a person, that person, now a saint, becomes in that very moment a divine corrective to loveless action and momentum.
Let me describe to you some "different" people that were encountered during a chapel field trip to Chicago some time ago. It was different in the sense of being saintlike.
The first person I'll describe is Dan Jorenko who works for the Northwest Community Organization -- a neighborhood action-justice organization in a low-income neighborhood of active shops and stores. All the signage there was in Spanish. Most of the people on the street seemed to be Mexican or Central American.
It was about noon when we arrived in this neighborhood. I went into the storefront office to find Dan. The front office had the feel of a Dickensian sweatshop for accountants. There were five or six ancient wooden desks buried under a sea of papers. I found Dan in the back room, his hands covered with ink, cranking out flyers on an old mimeograph machine. The flyers were about a neighborhood meeting at St. Mark's parish hall -- a meeting to help convince city officials of the need for low-income apartments in the neighborhood, places to live that are rehabilitated and sanitary. There were many families desperately seeking a place to live. One side of the flyer was in Spanish, the other side in English. At the bottom it said, "For a ride ... call Dan at NCO."
We went to lunch at Arandas Cafe at the corner of the block to talk. Over Mexican sausage sandwiches and enchiladas (ask Jeff about beef brain burritos) we tried to talk. That was somewhat of a mistake because this was an authentic Mexican cafe and the music was blasting away -- so maybe only six or so of us could actually hear Dan.
Dan told of political wars that were trying to bring about justice in his little area of the city. They were getting very poor people to see that they, too, have rights; trying to build a sense of dignity in people who for the most part felt that they had been forgotten by the normal process of goods and services. Dan was a graduate of Michigan State and then a Methodist seminary. He decided not to seek a call as a pastor of a church because he was afraid that he would not be placed in a poor section of the inner city.
Almost three years prior to our meeting, he took this poor paying job with NCO, living in an old apartment two blocks from the office. He works days and most nights. Wearing a torn shirt and ripped jacket, holding a burrito in ink-stained hands, he talked about how he cared for people. He had a certain smile and a sparkle in his eyes, and could see only the positive things that were happening around him, even when his stories seemed to all be about uphill battles against forces of prejudice and apathy, which were affecting families in desperate need. Dan kept a spark of hope and joy in the midst of all this. It was a part of his faith. Is this a saint, perhaps?
Blest are they who show mercy; blest are the single-hearted for they shall see God. Blest are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you because of me.
During the same trip, we talked to Gary Mills at St. Mary's Lutheran Church. It's a mission church in the basement of a low-rent apartment house now owned by the American Lutheran Church. The pastor's parsonage is across the street -- that street and the few blocks around it have the highest homicide rate in the United States. It seemed like a nice enough neighborhood, but the year prior to our visit, about 48 children between the ages of eleven and 21 were knifed or shot to death there. We watched a videotape in the parsonage basement Sunday morning about the mission's neighborhood and ministry.
For what seemed, to me, to be forever, it showed a string of wallet-size school pictures of boys -- giving that school-picture smile like they must have promised their mothers. They were all children that were killed the previous year in gang assassinations on the street outside of St. Mary's. Gary told of one funeral for an eleven-year-old where a rival gang with guns drawn stormed into the funeral service, pushed the bereaving family aside, knocked Gary to the floor, took the body of the slain boy out of the casket, carried it out into the street, and threw it on the top of a car. These were desperate teenagers trying to steal everything from their enemies -- even hope. To them there was no meaning to anything -- even the words of the funeral or the tears of a dead child's mother.
We slept that night in an office that had a bullet hole through the window, the bullet lodged in the wall. We worshiped that next morning in the boiler room, which doubles as their sanctuary. We worshiped in both Spanish and English and shared together the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
I sat next to a teenager who had no expression on her face. She never sang or said one word. When we shared the peace she would not look into anyone's eyes, or say a word, just offer a limp hand. What had happened in her life to cause her to lose all expression? She did take communion, and she held around her neck a crucifix and she listened to the words of love. Over ninety percent of those from the neighborhood who come to worship went to no church before St. Mary's moved into the neighborhood.
Here is where Pastor Mills, who is fighting his own battle with cancer at the moment, and his wife, Diane, have decided to live and speak words and do deeds of gospel love. Blest are they who sow mercy: mercy shall be theirs. Blest too the peacemakers: they shall be called the children of God. Who are the Mills -- saints?
Then we visited Dennis Lauritsen, pastor of Bethel Lutheran Church. He told us how his small church decided to use their basement as a winter shelter for homeless people. People can come in the late evening, receive a warm meal with a mattress and clean sheets and a blanket for the evening. And who are these people? People laid off of work, refugees, alcohol and drug abusers kicked out of their own families for a while, many social rejects, all of them most desperate at the moment. The church started a food pantry for needy families and a used clothing exchange.
Why did they do it? Dennis said, "This is the Word of God, the life of Jesus, and the Bible calls us into caring for the well-being and safety and future of others." Who is this Dennis Lauritsen? A saint? I think so.
But wait a minute. Do you know what he said to us? He said, "This is all sort of easy. The needs here are so obvious; these men are freezing in the street in the winter; they have no safe place to stay, no warm meals. The families that come to us for food or clothes have children who are crying because they are hungry and have no shoes. This is obvious." Then Dennis said, "I know about Wittenberg and our other Lutheran church-related schools, and it seems to me that a lot of kids are going there just to learn the skills to get out of there, earn a big salary, get the big house, and drive all those cars. Students in life for the money. You guys got the big job, bringing God's will and Word for love and justice and compassion to those people. You've got the tough job of ministry. You guys are saints to attempt ministry in the battleground at Wittenberg."
In his lectures on the book of Galatians, Martin Luther spoke about those who should rightly be called saints. Luther wrote:
The saints do not live without temptations of the flesh, nor without sin. Saints are not stones, or like in the imagination of monks and students, saints are not senseless blocks without all affections. When I was a monk I did often times most heartily wish that I might be so fortunate to see or converse with a saint. I imagined such a saint as one who lived in the wilderness abstaining from meat and drink, and living only by eating roots or herbs and cold water. Now, in the light of the gospel, I plainly see that those whom Christ and his apostles call saints are those who are called by the gospel and baptized. Saints are those who believe that they are sanctified (of worth and purpose), as well as cleansed by the death and blood of Christ.
Therefore Paul, when he wrote to any Christian anywhere, called them all holy and the children of God. Whether they be male or female, bond or free, they all are saints; not because of what they do, but because of what God does through them. So whether ministers of God's Word, the magistrates of the community, parents, students, children, masters, servants -- all are true saints if first and before all things they assure themselves that Christ is their wisdom, their savior, and their purpose for being. They are true saints if they attempt to do one thing in their daily living: God's will.
Sainthood does not pertain only to the saints which are in heaven, or on earth as hermits and monks who do certain great and strange works, lurking in caves and dens, fasting, wearing hair shirts, hoping this will single them out for heaven. Let us now learn by the Holy Scriptures, that all who faithfully believe in Christ are saints.
With great rejoicing I give thanks to God, for God has given to me the grace to see not one but many saints. Yea, an infinite number of true saints ... as Christ himself and his apostles do describe, of which I also, by the grace of God, am one. For I am baptized, and I do believe that Christ my Lord by his death has redeemed and delivered me from all my sins and has given to me eternal righteousness and holiness.
According to Luther and Saint Paul, All Saints' Sunday is our day. The day is for those who have been grasped by Christ. The day where the Word of God is piercing through our lives. Blest are the peacemakers: blest are those who show mercy. Saints not as supra-humans, not persons in some mystical state of moral perfection, but those, like us, in the process of growth, in grace. Saint and sinner rolled into one, daily death and rebirth, baptized children of God attempting to be open to the moving Spirit of God. All Saints' Sunday is our day. A day we share with the big name saints and with those who have labored in obscurity and silence but who nevertheless within their own sphere of influence, repeatedly have been witnesses to their living God.
Today is a day, as is every day, to be challenged by all the saints around us to match their obedience and dedication. A time for us, the present saints, to reexamine our contacts with others, in our social transactions, in the classroom, dorm, Greek house, apartment, in our family life and love life, in our voting on Tuesday, in our allocation of money, and our use of free time, our occupational discussion making, in how we influence others -- a day to ask ourselves if we are putting the integrity of our inner selves as saints on the line for our faith in daily living here. As sinners we pray for God's guidance, direction, strength, forgiveness so that our sainthood may be the dominant force in our lives together -- allowing loving interaction to form the very heart and soul and purpose of all our relationships. Amen.
