Sermon for All Saints Day

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9

I am thinking this All Saints day about one of the least saintly people I have known. Oh, that’s really not fair, who am I to say who is or is not a saint. I guess that is best left up to the Church, which is of course people, like you and me, or to God who would certainly be expected to have the final word on Sainthood. Fortunately for all of us, I think God is a bit more generous in assessing our worth than we tend to be with each other, or ourselves. But the guy I’m thinking of really was a piece of work.

Buz was a life-long member of a church I served right after seminary. He was a bit of a legend, what is sometimes euphemistically called a character. When I got there, Buz was in his seventies, and I’m sure I heard only a tiny sampling of the stories about him that had piled up over the years. There was the one about him racing out to his hunting cabin to cover up the wall decorations because someone in his hunting group had invited the bishop to go hunting with them. There was the story about the time he was mugged on his front porch and proceeded to cuss the mugger out and order him off his property. Amazingly, Buz survived and wasn’t mugged. To say that he never embraced political correctness in much of any category you want to talk about, would be to sugar coat the truth. The way he had always seen things was just fine with him and everyone else could just live with that or leave him alone. Before I arrived, the church had decided that smoking would no longer be allowed inside any of its buildings, except of course for Buz. He just wouldn’t put up with such a rule. On Sunday mornings, he would arrive early for church and take his place at a table in the parish hall where a sexton would bring over the “Buz” ashtray and a cup of coffee. A lot of folks in that church kind of shook their heads when they mentioned Buz, but he was one of them. A part of the family. For as long as anyone could remember, he had organized the Shrove Tuesday dinner, and for years after he was gone, the dinner was named in his honor. Probably still is.

I’m thinking of Buz today for a couple of reasons. He stands as a reminder to me that not everyone who belongs to this communion of saints we celebrate today is the sort of person we would necessarily call saintly. Oscar Wilde once said that, “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.” Some of the Church’s saints have pretty checkered pasts. St. Augustine’s faith grew out of the painful realization that he was not capable of living the virtuous life he wanted to live. St. Paul said in a letter that the good he wanted to do he could not do, while the evil he would have avoided came easily. He didn’t say those words about his life before Christ, but of his life as a disciple and leader in the fledgling Church. He was certainly among “the saints,” which was his term for those, who through membership in a worshipping congregation, belonged to the body of Christ, but Paul, who was a leader among the saints, knew that he was not able to live a “saintly" life.

Saints--the best saints, even the “saintliest” saints--are human, flawed, real people whose lives are not any easier than anyone else’s. I think that the difference between them--those famous saints--and a lot of the rest of us, is that they know their situation. They somehow come to depend on the generosity and love-driven optimism of God. They come to trust in the possibility that God believes we are capable of more than we can imagine, that our loving can compete with our selfishness, that our compassion can grow up in us right alongside our fears. Think of the stories we have about Peter, Peter who denied Christ, Peter whose understanding of what Jesus was about was so flawed that Jesus had to call him down for tempting him away from his mission. Peter became the saint. “On this rock,” said Jesus, “I will build my Church.” The “saint” saints are people just like you and me who learn to rely on the grace of God….to believe in the grace of God. I think they might tell us that we can’t appreciate the gift of grace if we are too confident about our own goodness. Saints are empowered by God as they discover their inability to make any progress on their own. They entrust their lives, their hopes to God and somehow everything turns. Things start to happen in lives that have become conduits for the creative work of love in the world.

One of my favorite theologians, a crusty old Baptist preacher named Will Campbell used to say that the gospel wasn’t all that complicated. He said it is simply this: “we are all bastards loved by God.” I think maybe becoming a saint involves figuring out that simple truth. We are all bastards loved by God.

Saints are known for their ability to love others, to give up for the good of others something they might by rights claim as their own. They have given up riches, health, freedom, often their lives so that others might have health or life or faith. Understanding their need of God not only aligns them in proper relationship with God, but with their neighbors as well. The saints give what they have because they know we are all in this life together and that the gifts we have been given are to be shared. Sainthood involves a kind of humility that fortunately can be learned just by living. It involves having to say at some time about something we really care about, “I can’t Jesus, I hope you will.” That’s when things start happening. That’s when stories get told and names get written in books. Saints become extraordinary people by knowing they aren’t all that extraordinary. Will Campbell had it right.

I told you there were a couple of reasons I was thinking of Buz this All Saints Day. The other reason is I’m pretty sure this reading from the Wisdom of Solomon is the one I screwed up at his funeral. With a couple hundred of his family and best friends in the room, I went to the lectern at the appointed time and opened the book. I read right through to the line where I left out one little “t” and brought down the house. I spoke very clearly as I said, for though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immorality. I’ve heard laughter during the homily at a funeral before, but never during the first reading. Someone near the front said to a neighbor, “yep, he’s here all right.” Several people commented later that the slip was just Buzz playing with us.

It is still my favorite funeral story. I’m sure some of you have heard it. Everyone appreciated what may have been a Freudian slip on my part, but they also appreciated anew Buz’s sense of humor, his determination not to go down without a fight, his independence and maybe even his ability to define himself quite apart from what society was doing all around him. In a way, those are all saintly qualities. Those qualities were brought up often in the hours and days after the funeral and applied to Buzz in a way that seemed pretty generous. We aren’t just baptized into the communion of saints, but held there by the other members of that community who claim us no matter what, and who see in us sometimes more than we see in ourselves.

I’m sure they are still telling stories about that man and smiling, laughing sometimes, shaking heads, wondering out loud how he got away with some of what he did. And I’m sure the stories are told with a good measure of love by people who knew him to be one of them--like them in ways they would rather not discuss, and with them each Sunday in hope that somewhere in the universe there is a power that can help us. Maybe saints are just people who have figured out who they are--people who know that Will was right. We are all bastards loved by God.

JB