No Saints Here!
Stories
Lectionary Tales For The Pulpit
Series IV Cycle C
The area around Brighton, Colorado, some twenty miles northwest of Denver, has until recently been agricultural. Small farmers put in wheat, but most of them grew cabbage, lettuce, onions, beets, tomatoes, squash, and so on. Come fall, produce stands popped up along the roads and byways of Adams County, and you could buy fresh vegetables for your table that week. Across the county, women used to don their aprons every autumn and can up a storm, putting away canned goods for the winter.
To plant, cultivate, and harvest these crops, farmers relied upon itinerant labor. The workers migrated from the south and moved from place to place wherever work could be found. Generally, they were very religious, but also very poor.
That's why Henderson Community Church started a food bank back in the '80s -- to help these migrants as well as others of the county's poor put food on the table.
One day, a couple of older ladies with long, colorful dresses and shawls wrapped around their shoulders came to visit the food bank. One of them had evidently been to the food bank before, because she was showing her friend around.
She decided to show her friend the sanctuary. I watched as they walked through the narthex and then peered into the sanctuary toward the altar. They stepped inside, and like good Catholics, they genuflected and kept quiet.
Moments later, they reappeared in the narthex, and I heard the first lady say to her friend, "See? No saints here!"
She meant of course, that there was no statuary present or visible in the sanctuary. No Virgin Marys, or crucifixes, no Saints Peter or Paul. None of that.
I smiled. I wondered: "Could it be true? No saints here?"
To plant, cultivate, and harvest these crops, farmers relied upon itinerant labor. The workers migrated from the south and moved from place to place wherever work could be found. Generally, they were very religious, but also very poor.
That's why Henderson Community Church started a food bank back in the '80s -- to help these migrants as well as others of the county's poor put food on the table.
One day, a couple of older ladies with long, colorful dresses and shawls wrapped around their shoulders came to visit the food bank. One of them had evidently been to the food bank before, because she was showing her friend around.
She decided to show her friend the sanctuary. I watched as they walked through the narthex and then peered into the sanctuary toward the altar. They stepped inside, and like good Catholics, they genuflected and kept quiet.
Moments later, they reappeared in the narthex, and I heard the first lady say to her friend, "See? No saints here!"
She meant of course, that there was no statuary present or visible in the sanctuary. No Virgin Marys, or crucifixes, no Saints Peter or Paul. None of that.
I smiled. I wondered: "Could it be true? No saints here?"
