Forty years ago, or even more recently than that, we never would have had something like an All Saints Day as a red letter day on a Protestant church calendar. Now, we Protestants know that the Roman Catholic Church has a host of saints immortalized in stained glass, ever ready to intercede for the devout. We may even sneak a statue of St. Francis feeding the birds into our gardens or have a St. Christopher’s medallion, the patron saint of travelers, in our jewelry box or hanging from the rear view mirror.
But Protestants, as a general rule, have shied away from the temptation to have a list of perfect people placed on the holiness pedestal. I suppose that’s partly because we live under the long shadow of the doctrine of original sin which has been deeply drilled into our spiritual DNA; partly also because democracy, at least in principle, is founded on an egalitarian value system where no one should ultimately be considered better than the next person, and to elevate a particular person to the special status of sainthood may seem oddly un-American.
For many and various reasons, we might find suspect any day with the word “saint” in it. Nonetheless, each year, this Sunday rolls around, and we pause to list and to remember the faithful departed and dear to us, those who are saints not in the sense of perfection, but of fidelity; we recall not so much the celebrities and the famous, but the anonymous ones who gave us an example to emulate, a legacy to live by, a rope to hang onto when life got tough. And that’s no small gift to stop and appreciate.
So, it’s the season of remembrance and thanksgiving, but also the season when sports get a lot of attention. While football was always king when I was growing up and, moreover, the boys of summer got plenty of press as the Autumn classic rolled around each October (way to go Red Sox!), I must confess that in our sport-crazy society, for a couple of years, high school girls soccer was #1 for me. I sometimes even pondered the heretical thought of why marching bands didn’t march during the halftime of a girls soccer match just like they marched for the boys football game, but I knew such thoughts should only be whispered, never spoken too loudly for fear of bodily harm!
But to get back to the Catholics, probably my favorite memory of my oldest daughter’s junior soccer season was when we played at Knoxville Catholic high school. I doubt anyone else there ever thought in these terms, but being a historian of Christianity myself, I couldn’t help but reflect on the many theological battles and literal warfare and bad blood between Catholics and Protestants ever since the days of Martin Luther in the early 16th century. I doubt any of the girls on either the Kingston or Catholic side cared the slightest for church history that day, but I was perfectly positioned to hear their pre-game warm up ritual, which included, on the Kingston side, praying the Lord’s Prayer, and on the Catholic side, praying, the Hail Mary, full of grace . . . . Only, they were praying simultaneously, praying not to God but AT each other, each one trying to pray louder and harder than the other. Indeed, the prayer of the devotee had become a battle cry for victory on the sports field!
There was a time 150 years ago in this country when the Protestant establishment regarded immigrant Catholics from various Easter European nations just as harshly as we treated African-Americans, denying them fundamental freedoms and relegating them to second class citizenship. But aside from the political power plays of that era in American history, when you cut through the bias and persecution on each side, when you get right down to it, we really do share quite a lot of history, we Protestants and Catholics.
It’s certainly an arguable point, but perhaps the most important watershed event in the history of the entire Christian Church was in the early 1960s when, following a new openness demonstrated by the Catholic Church at Vatican II, Protestants began to reclaim the forgotten liturgy and history that predated Martin Luther and his 16th century Reformation. We become a church with a memory as we in the Protestant tradition began to value the thousand years between the early church fathers and the 16th century Reformation, instead of merely referring to that period as the “dark ages.”
Whatever side of the aisle we find ourselves, All Saints Day is a vivid reminder that we do play on a level field, whatever be our particular ecclesiology or theology; that, moreover, on a personal basis, whatever be our sins or superlatives, our merits or mistakes, we have been welcomed into the arms of God through the grace of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Twice the passage from Ephesians we heard read today spoke about saints, the Greek word being the same root word from which we get the word holy. Holy ones, meaning not people with S-t-. in front of their names, but holy in the sense of those set apart by God’s mercy and grace, those, moreover, who shared in the everyday rough and tumble of life, who felt hope as well as despair; who forgave and judged, loved and despised, lifted up and tore down. Like the earliest Christians, we, too, are far from perfect.
You may have read several months ago in Newsweek (9/10/07) or some similar publication, about the faith struggles and doubts of no less a saintly figure than Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the diminutive Catholic woman known for her ministry among lepers and the world’s poorest of the poor. The publication of her private letters has revealed times when she stumbled through the “dark night of the soul,” when she desperately ached but to feel the presence of God once again. Do such honest doubts and groping for the divine presence lessen the holiness of her life?
Scholars will certainly debate that very question, and I, for one, would hardly agree with many of the ultra-conservative views she held in her international crusade against divorce, abortion, and contraception; nonetheless, her humility, sacrifice, and enduring love for the most unlovely of God’s children does speak volumes to me about a life well-lived and a life lived as a disciple of Christ, discipleship I can hardly hope to emulate. As a measure of her impact, you may remember how Mother Teresa’s funeral in New Dehli rivaled even that of Princess Diana in the press coverage it received not long after the Princess’s premature demise.
Then there is someone like William Sloan Coffin, former Protestant chaplain at Yale, recently deceased, who, among other things, protested the Vietnam War, advocated for the right to life of persons on death row, founded the relief organization called “Bread for the World” and who was a constant prophetic voice calling the American people to a new and more biblical understanding of what it meant to claim status as God’s chosen, holy people. While poles apart from Mother Teresa, William Sloan Coffin, at least in my book, is no less a holy one of God.
My point is that saints really do come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. I, for one, choose to be as inclusive as possible when we start tossing the adjective “holy” around. That’s, finally, what All Saints Day does for me – it reminds us that we are all, each and everyone, holy in the sight of God, that Christians past, present, and future join together in that long and glorious procession of the faithful from every time and place who seek God’s favor and who seek to reflect the divine image we have seen in the countenance of Jesus Christ.
One of these All Saints Days our names will be read. We are the shoulders on which others will stand. Will we be ancestors who sat on their hands and missed opportunities to be faithful, or ancestors who raised their hands and did the work given to us?
As Ephesians puts it: “with the eyes of your heart enlightened, may you know what is the hope to which God has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints” (Eph. 1:18).
Thanks be to God that we all have the word “saint” in front of our names! Amen!
