Grace to you and peace ~
Along with Holy Week, All Saints’ Sunday is one of my absolute favorites. It offers a very clear opportunity to consider the saints in our lives. Which, depending on how you understand “sainthood,” may seem an odd thing to think about.
In his book The Remarkable Ordinary: How to stop, look and listen, Fred Buechner (who is one of my favorite writers and who was also a preacher, theologian and ordained Presbyterian pastor) writes: We’ve all had saints in our lives, by which I mean not plaster saints, not moral exemplars setting for us a kind of suffocating good example, but I mean saints in the sense of life givers. People through knowing whom we become more alive.
And, originally published in Wishful Thinking (and later in Beyond Words) he writes:
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints…Many people think of saints as men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a [bad] thought or did an evil deed their whole lives long. As far as I know, real saints never even come close to characterizing themselves that way. On the contrary, no less a saint than Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, “I am foremost among sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15)…In other words, the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else’s, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them.
And in a sermon titled “To be a Saint” and published in The Magnificent Defeat (1966), he says:
To be a saint is to live with hands stretched out both to give and to receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews. Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night…It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full.
I give thanks for each one of you saints who take seriously our mission to live and love like Jesus, as we eagerly welcome all and work to bring healing, help and hope to the world. It is a privilege to work alongside you to this end.
God’s peace and much love ~
Pr. Sara