In Search of a Useable Communion of Saints
A sermon on the difference between heroes and holy ones
This is the manuscript of a sermon I preached in 2019, using the readings for that year’s All Saints’ festival. Given that the terms “saint” and “person I generally admire” have only become more closely conflated, even in iconography, over the last four years, I thought it would be worth sharing now.
It’s a hard season for heroes. A lot of famous, influential, and sometimes admired people have been knocked off their pedestals, literally or figuratively. To take one minor example: A writer and editor I admired, and who, more importantly, gave me glowing comments on a paper I wrote in grad school, was exposed by former staffers as a lecherous and very inappropriate boss. There are much more important people out there, and much more grave offenses. But it stung a little bit to learn this about someone I have looked up to. I’ve heard galling stories from women I know about the vicious private behavior of people who are very highly regarded in their fields, and not without reason—people whose names are on marquees or etched in university walls.
And that is without considering the many historical figures whose memories have been reassessed and revised in light of concerns that were suppressed or discounted for a long time.
People naturally get defensive and indignant when their heroes are shown to have had feet of clay. This can take the form of saying that we judge people in the past by an unfair standard. But there’s really only one standard where cruelty and viciousness are concerned, whether it’s in the 1970s, the 1860’s, or the first century A.D.
The real problem, I suspect, is that we need heroes. We make the pedestals. We need the pedestals. We put people on them, and fight to keep them there, because we want and need them to validate something about ourselves. We really need the inspiring president to NOT be a monster behind closed doors. We really need the gentleman general to NOT be a war criminal. We need the swashbuckling writer to NOT be a petty creep.
It’s hard to look at the full picture of a prominent, influential person because we want them to represent something for us. The mixture of good and evil, insight and foolishness, courage and villainy that can be found in almost every human life needs to be boiled down to something simpler in order to be useful, in order to be worthy of an admiration we need to feel toward someone.
In the church, the pantheon of our heroes is composed of the people we call saints. And the same emotional rollercoaster of admiration and disappointment happens when you get acquainted with them, too. I have spoken in adult education of my love for St. Augustine. So it was hard, when I was reading his biggest book, to come across the really viciously anti-Semitic passages. Or his miserable treatment of the woman who bore his child. I know many devout Christians who try to make excuses for the failings of the saints—to say that it was the age he lived in, or to bend over backwards to put a good construction on some bad deeds. We can’t say that thus-and-so is always wrong, because the saints did it, or believed it. We need someone on that pedestal, to be better than we are, to be admirable for things we don’t think we’re able to do ourselves. To have integrity.
Since the very early days of Christianity, the saints have been part of our worship. We gathered at the tombs of those who were martyred for the faith. We remembered them in great litanies and prayers. We recounted their deeds and used them as an example. We asked for their prayers, they who had fought the good fight and kept the faith and were now around the throne of God. The world had its heroes. There were generals and statesmen and famous authors to model yourself after; there were gladiators and athletes and actors to cheer for. We Christians had our own heroes—the people who had overcome the world in their own lives.
And so they are celebrated and revered and remembered in the places where they lived and died, in their work, and in the example they set for us. On the festival of All Saints, they are celebrated, revered, and remembered together—a great cloud of witnesses that held the faith through trial and tribulation, through violence and slander, through boredom and indifference so that it could be delivered to us.
In today’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples: Blessed are you who are poor, who are hungry, who weep, who are excluded and slandered. Those are the rewards of the prophet.
On the other hand: Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are full. Woe to you who laugh. Woe to you when you are admired. That is the reward of the false prophet.
That’s the devastating message. It’s the same message we heard in the story of Lazarus and the rich man a month ago: you’ve already been rewarded. You get what you seek.
The world will give you those things if you seek them hard enough. But they are their own reward.
On the other hand, if you seek God, and God’s kingdom, you may well have to go without some of those good things. Your cause and your hope and your wealth will be in God’s hands. And just like seeking the goods of the world, seeking God will give its own reward. You may lose everything else, but you’ll have God, and it’s better to have nothing with God, than to have every good thing without God.
In the end, that’s the difference between a hero and a saint: The saint does not need to be defended because the saint is the person who will take God’s side against him or herself. The saint does not need to be justified because the saint relies entirely on God’s righteousness. The saint does not validate us. The saint validates God. The saint does not need our admiration, because the saint is exactly the person who would rather be cursed or slandered or forgotten by all the world than to lose God. The saint does not need our pedestals, because the saint has been fully rewarded already. No one can give them anything or take anything away from them.
The hope of our faith, here in the readings today, is that in the end God will be all in all. Just as God was in the beginning, but with company. And in that company will be many we do not expect to see. There will be many lost and forgotten by the world who were held and treasured by God. There will be the veterans of struggles that looked final and hopeless. There will be the world of our own failures, our own inadequacies, our own inconstant following, made good only for the sake of Jesus Christ and his love for those who set out to hear him. And those who led us there, with their words and deeds, with their presence and love, with their continual prayers, will be overjoyed to be just part of the great cloud.
Amen.
A problem in churches as well where people get territorial or won't share. Had a Bishop/Rector who "retired" and undercut me as Rector to the point I had to resign because he couldn't give up control. I still struggle with feelings about that seven years later, but I've moved to the belief it was God's plan. That Church no longer exists as the congregation was elderly and CoVid put the nail in the coffin.