We Need Saints

Sermon-All Saints’ Sunday-Nov. 7, 2010
The Cloud of Unknowing, "O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours, that we may be faithful interpreters of that Life to each other, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Every 4 weeks I meet with other clergy to talk about the readings, and worship. They asked what we were doing for All Saints Sunday. So I told them about the blue clouds of saints that we put up on the walls, the reading of the names, the baptisms, the pilgrimage to the memorial Garden. And they just stared at me. Finally one of them said, “why do you do so much?” A fair question. I told them that for me, I wanted people to be on the watch for saints. Once a year we say the names of those who are saints in our lives, and we remember , just for one day-“So many people have gone into making me who I am”. We are not alone. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses-people both living and dead who have touched us and shaped up, and guided us into who we are.
Frederich Buechner, in his book called Wishful Thinking, defines saints this way: "In his holy flirtation with the world, God sometimes drops a handkerchief. Those handkerchiefs are called saints."
We do a lot of things today to call to mind that there are saints among us, people who are instruments, tools of God who are “handkerchiefs” trying to get our attention. And for one brief moment, one Sunday each year, we call to mind those saints in our lives who showed us what it is to be blessed.
David Tiede, Professor Augsburg College in Minneapolis once wrote:
Make sure your observance of All Saints Day celebrates the times when ordinary sinners conveyed God's holy love to you and to the world, probably in unexpected times and places. The first miracle of All Saints Day is about God whose holy reign is still at work in the lives of the likes of us.
And the second miracle of All Saints Day is about us- and how our lives are transformed. We, forgiven sinners, are called and sent to be ordinary saints in God's world, enacting God's love and justice.!" "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20). The saints, "the holy ones" who are "beloved of God" are, by God's grace, mere mortals like us. The old Anglican children's hymn has it right: "I sing a song of the saints of God ... and I want to be one too." Indeed, by the Spirit of the living Christ, we get to be saints too!
Today we take a moment to say, there have been saints in my life-people who showed me God’s grace and love, showed me what it was to be blessed. And to realize that each of us is called to be a saint, too. Perhaps we won’t always be holy, but we are asked to be tools and instruments in the lives of others-showing them grace, and love-just like someone did for us.
John Maynard once wrote in a sermon, “Fifty-seven times in the New Testament the word "Saints" is used. But NEVER is it used in the Bible to designate any particular person. Always the term is used to describe those who belong to Christ - saved sinners. And always it is used in the plural. No specific person is ever called a "saint" in the New Testament Greek, the reference is always to the many: to the holy ones of God. “
I’ll tell you one short saint story. When we moved to the Upper Peninsula, one of the members of my congregation was Dorothy McQuown. Dorothy was famous as the last public school teacher on Isle Royale-a small island in Lake Superior. She was there in 1932-3 for one year to teach the 4 remaining kids on the island.$65 a month and $35 of that went to pay her room and board. She was a 29 year old widow with a small child in the middle of the depression. She struggled through that year. When she finished that year the state closed the school, and all her salary for that year, which had been deposited in a bank in Houghton, was lost when the bank failed. Dorothy and her 6 year old son moved back to the mainland where she continued to teach. When I met Dorothy she was 81, she had lost her legs and sight to diabetes. She was hard of hearing, but she still tutored children in math after school. She had kept a diary while she had been on Isle Royale, and her son and I worked hard to get it published while she was still alive. She was reluctant to let us get it in print, because on one page she had implied that one of her students wasn’t very bright. She made us promise that if her diary was published after she died, that that passage would be taken out. We explained to her that her student was now in his late 60s and wouldn’t care, but she was adamant. No book of her life was worth printing, if it might make someone-even 50 years earlier- feel smaller, or worse about themselves.
Another promise Dorothy made us give was that when she died there would be no service for her-she was an incredibly modest, and shy woman. And that promise, thankfully, we did not keep.
We have been made who we are by the saints in our lives. They influenced us in ways that we never saw coming. There are others waiting for us to be saints for them. Today we remember those who touched and shaped and guided us. And we learn this morning, again, that we are being called and blessed and sent to be saints for those who are also waiting for saints in their lives.. Amen.