Among the Saints
Ephesians 1:11-23
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On his hit song, Only the Good Die Young, from the classic 1977 album The Stranger, Billy Joel sings: And the say there’s a heaven for those who will wait/ some say it’s better but I say it ain’t/ I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints/ the sinners are much more fun/ you know that only the good die young. It’s one of his catchier hooks. And that’s saying something about someone who had 33 top 40 hits over the course of twelve studio albums. It also echoes a common refrain. Most people I know, whether they go to church, believe in God, have what they would consider a spiritual life or not aren’t very comfortable being called a saint. “Oh no,” they protest, “not me.” They might be embarrassed at the suggestion, or confused, or unwilling to be identified as being so very holy. That sounds so dour, so serious, and like just an awful amount of pressure to be something that they’re pretty sure they’re not. And besides, it sounds kind of lonely too. It’s not just Billy Joel, either. Way more people would rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. You can’t blame them, really. The official saints, the ones who have been canonized and memorialized with hospitals, schools and churches- those saints come with dates and often gruesome accounts of their martyrdom; from St. Stephen whose stoning is recounted in the book of Acts to Saint Oscar Romero who was gunned down by a right-wing death squad in El Salvador. I don’t think that sounds like anyone’s idea of a good time. Then there are the unofficial, self-appointed saints who not only don’t mind being identified as such, in fact they aspire to it. In the process they become so insufferably self-righteous that they can be really hard to be around. If that is what it means to be a saint, you could understand why someone might want to pass. If that’s what it means to be a saint, the sinners definitely sound much more fun.
That is really too bad. Because I think saints have gotten a bad rap. Or maybe it isn’t so much that they’ve gotten a bad rap as the word itself has been so misused and elevated from it’s original use to mean “outstanding Christian,” that it’s kind of lost its original meaning. Because in the letters of the early church, in the letters written by the apostle Paul and the letters imitating the apostle Paul, the word saint was used to talk about everyone in the church; the good, the bad and the ugly. Paul would open a letter by addressing the saints and then go one to catalogue any number of ways those folks were falling down without a hint of inconsistency between the two ideas. But as Eugene Peterson has observed, “accustomed as we are to hearing ‘saint’ used as a term of honor, when we hear the word used without qualification for the mixed bag of people that is us, it creates dissonance.” We aren’t used to thinking of ourselves as saints, and we aren’t so sure we want to start now. Again, see Billy Joel, or St. Stephen, or Bishop Oscar Romero. In a sense, the correction goes back to what we were talking about last week when we celebrated the Reformation. If we’re oriented to think that faith and salvation have to do with what we bring to the table, our good behavior and impressive works, then sainthood becomes a kind of Hall of Fame for only the best sort of Christians. But if instead we understand that both faith and salvation are gifts that come to us freely and unreservedly from the hand of God, then sainthood is simply another way of talking about what God has done and continues to do for and in us. We don’t make ourselves holy for God’s sake. We never could and we never will. God makes us holy for our sake. God takes us as the mixed bag that we are and makes us into something new. Not something different, not something other than what we were created to be in the first place, not some unrecognizably pious version of ourselves, but wholly ourselves. The words sound so alike in English you would almost think it was by design. Because in making us holy, setting us apart from the unholiness of so much that surrounds us, God also promises to make us whole, complete. The unholiness that surrounds us would reduce the fullness of our humanity to our function, our productivity, our appearance, the roles we’ve acquired or been assigned as workers, parents, students, consumers, and more. So to be a saint, to be made whole and holy is to be set apart as human. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less. Fully human, with all our nuances, peculiarities, and imperfections. More than anything, what I think we get wrong about what it means to be among the saints is that we’re afraid that means we are somehow expected to be perfect, or homogenous, indistinguishable from the crowd. But it’s quite the contrary. When we embrace the fullness of our humanity as created and made holy by God, then everything that makes us who we are becomes a gift that we have to offer, a unique and irreplaceable brushstroke on the larger canvas that God is painting, the kingdom come, the realm of God’s power and influence all around us.
As it happens this is our inheritance, to be who God always intended us to be. That is how inheritance works. Someone dies. Their will is read. And what we discover is that they made a plan, they thought ahead. We receive what they always intended to give us. They set down in writing what they wanted us to have. What they wanted to pass along. The same is true of God’s will. When God died in Jesus on the cross we became inheritors of a new kind of life, one that isn’t defined or dictated by the powers that put him on that cross or our own fear of death, because in raising Christ we have seen the power of God to overcome even death itself. What we receive is a life unburdened from all that would bury us, a life that is free to step fully into what has been passed down from Jesus himself to those who would follow him generation after generation.
With all due respect to Billy Joel, I can’t for the life of me figure out how finding ourselves in the company of generation after generation of imperfect people who nonetheless are raised to new life and made holy by the perfect will of God in Christ could be cause for anything other than a celebration. It certainly isn’t a reason to cry, except for the sheer joy of what we have inherited. And so, along with the writer of this letter, we do not cease to give thanks for the faithfulness of the saints who came before us, the men and women who shared their inheritance with us, passing down their gifts in the form of this church building, or the endowment that funds our ongoing mission as a church. And we are among them, carrying out God’s mission to heal what is broken and feed those who are hungry in body and spirit alongside and after them, so that we might raise up yet another generation of imperfect saints who will continue to the praise of God’s glory after us. To be sure, we haven’t always gotten it right in the past. Here in New Mexico, in particular, we are mindful of the ways in which the same people who helped build this church contributed to the cultural destruction of indigenous people and their communities thinking they were doing good. The bad behavior of the past doesn’t cancel out their sainthood because it was never a function of their behavior, it was their inheritance every bit as much as it is ours. If anything, as saints ourselves, that shameful legacy has become ours to name and repent of. In fact, it is our inheritance as saints that enables us to put right what our own forbears got wrong. If we are the beneficiaries of what they have handed down, then we must also take responsibility to try and repair in whatever way we can the damage that was done by them. This is what the spirit of wisdom and revelation show us. This is what it means to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened. That our hope- the riches of our glorious inheritance among the saints- is in the power of God beyond any measure to make saints out of sinners, to put right what we get wrong, and to have the last laugh by bringing new life out of death itself.