Saint Mark's Church

You could probably pick up a major newspaper from any city today and be shielded from any characters wading interminably through the grey areas of life. You don’t look at the morning’s headlines and discover that there are people in a surprising variety of stages of moral development, some with confusing difficulties preventing them from crossing the final hurdle to goodness. You don’t open the paper and read that there are all sorts of people in between really good and really bad, you usually don’t see that there are people with room for improvement on one hand but a set of sometimes tenuous virtues on the other. Instead, although our national newspapers have gotten subtler since the days years ago when they were unabashedly racist and bigoted, still one gets the vague sense that people still come in only a few shades. Let me read off a list of headlines from the last couple weeks, and see if you notice what I’m talking about.

A 25-year police veteran is known for devotion to his family and his job ; The “First of the Fort Dix Six pleads guilty” to his part in an a plot to kill American soldiers. ; John Kanzius invents a new cancer treatment procedure which has had dramatic, initial success ; The masked man who shot three people in center city was a convicted murderer only recently released from prison before he killed again. ; Bill Smith is “Doggedly Devoted to Saving Animals.” ; Two sons of Eagles coach Andy Reid are in trouble with the law again for different reasons ; A quiet, 14 year old student was thanked by the President for alerting authorities about danger in his high school ; A Gang member from the Bronx is arrested under a law designed for international terrorists. ; A family has donated 35 million dollars to cancer research. A young man with matches started one of the largest recent wildfires in California.

Try it sometime: take a look at the local section of the newspaper for the last few days, focus on the headlines that pertain to just one or a couple central characters, and see if those characters are portrayed as simply good, or bad. That seems to be it. We look at the newspaper and see apparently very good and apparently very mistaken or sometimes very weird people, but we have to go to good literature, music, art, the Bible, the Prayer Book, and especially our own lives to discover that these good, problematic, bad or weird people contain all of those qualities at the same time. We’re never just good, or just bad. And that fact brings to bear an important point in our thinking about sainthood: because we are never just good or just bad, we’re also never just saints or just sinners. Ambrose Bierce cynically defined a saint as a dead sinner revised. In fact, as it has been said much more realistically, saints are sinners who just kept trying. Saints are sinners who keep trying.

Just as the newspaper conditions us to think about people as only good, bad, or weird, sometimes we mislead ourselves into building such a class system into the Body of Christ. We get conditioned to thinking that there’s a group of people now and far back in history called saints, and then there are the rest: sinners. Let’s look to one of the most famous saints for evidence to the contrary: I paraphrase St Paul about his struggle with sin:“ I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the moral law is good. But in fact it is no longer I,” exactly” that breaks from the moral law, but it’s more like the evil act I want to do is done by something that dwells in me; it’s" sin that dwells within me. "I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I don’t want is [exactly, in fact]
what I do." So, Paul says, “I find it to be a law that when I want to do good, evil lies close at hand.” How true and how confusing, and how destructive of our cookie-cutter image of sainthood. Evil is very near at hand even when we’re most conscious of the good. And it’s the same with the entire church, the entire body of people given new vitality as the mystical body of Christ.

There are saints, and there are sinners, but the saints are really just a set of famous sinners who recognized the difficulty of doing good, and sometimes failed miserably at it, but kept trying, and tried as hard as they possibly could. In New Testament language, of course, all the baptized faithful were called saints, but over time, the term, which just means ‘holy one’, began to be reserved for those who the tradition deemed to be the holiest of the holy. But Paul, who that early tradition would certainly have deemed to be one of the holiest of the holy, breaks down the wall that would separate the ordinary person from some distant, unapproachable reserve of holiness. The sacred and profane are mingled, and saints have always been sinners who just keep trying.

We often hear of the early Saints beginning their missionary journeys because they were exiled by some tyrant to a foreign land, like Patrick who was sold into slavery to Ireland which would become his mission field. But there are also saints who essentially exiled themselves because they were irrepressibly awful, and it wasn’t until late in their exile that they begin to try to create something new and good in the wake of their own mess. St Columba had an easy, privileged life, coming from a royal family in Ireland, and during his youth he became enraged in an argument with a friend over a book, a psalter like the kind embedded in every book of common prayer. The fight escalated into being about more than just a book, and the animosity spread, and pretty soon Columba’s area was embroiled in all-out clan warfare claiming thousands of lives. Here’s the point at which Columba’s newspaper headline would have appeared; you could guess what it would be like.

St Paul took frustrating pains to illustrate that we can know sinning is wrong even as we do it, and Columba lived with the same struggle. He began to change himself, and accepted the Church's verdict that should do missionary work in a barren part of Scotland, as penance. Among other things, he established the community of Iona, one of the most famous Celtic monasteries. Here again would be the place that a certain newspaper headline of a different tone would appear. You can imagine what that would be. But the Columba who started a war because he couldn’t control his rage, and the Columba who helped initiate what would become 1,500 years of Christianity in Scotland, those two people are the same; the saint is also the sinner, and Paul’s writing suggests that even as a saint, Columba must still have struggled with his anger. Because a saint is a sinner who keeps trying.

I use Columba as one of many possible examples of people we’re tempted to blanket with holiness when in fact their lives all too often contained very confusing moral struggles. Hildegaard of Bingen spoke the truth to power and provided leadership to popes and kings which male monastics, despite their often superior education, were not keen enough to provide. She wrote such strange, haunting choral music that it was only centuries later, not unlike the reappreciation of Emily Dickinson’s work, that her eccentric vision really came into view. Her visions, brought on by migraines or not, portrayed apparent realities which did not always hold to tradition; it’s no wonder that she worried a bit over whether to be open about them. But our tradition at its best celebrates openness, even openness to failure, and whatever inner turmoil confronted Hildegaard, she commit herself to working through it, and kept working through it her whole life. // To take another example, St Francis and so many other saints grew up in luxury and security, and the legends of the saints often portray their shift from wealth to Gospel poverty as being a quick, once-for-all operation. I’m not so sure. I would imagine it took years, if not a lifetime, to really own the sense that the poor, the mourning, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness really are the ones who are blessed. I imagine it must have stung over and over for the most famous saints when they were persecuted for righteousness sake, when they were reviled and lied about and murdered. I bet some saints even thought rather sinful thoughts about their revilers; I wouldn’t have put it past Columba. But a saint is not exactly someone who never sins; a saint is a sinner who keeps trying. And today, we honor, praise and thank God for those women and men who kept trying; sinners of God’s own redeeming who tried, failed, and tried again, over and over, so by grace that the kingdom could gain and keep a foothold on Earth.

I want to finish by adding a question, and that is: what are these same saints thinking about us, now? I mean the obvious questions like, what do those pacifistic saints who gave their lives for peace, what do they think of the wars going on right now? But I also mean that we should ask, what do the saints think about the good things you and I done recently? What did St Francis think when you, in some minor way, cast off the weight of privilege that would have allowed you to sleep in, and instead got up and served the poor and the needy that St Francis knew so well? The female saints who have struggled against sexism in various ways: what have they thought about your struggles at the workplace, in your home, in your education? One thing we know is that, although they rejoice with God in our best moments, they’re not scandalized by the fact that there are bad moments, too. They’ve shared both the good and the bad in their own ways, too. They do deserve our thanks because they kept trying and trying, until (as Richard Strutt wrote,) “in the morning of life, and at noon, and at even, God called the saints away from their worship below; but not till his love, at the font and the altar, had girt them with grace for the way they should go. These stones that have echoed their praises are holy, and dear is the ground where their feet have once trod, yet here they confessed they were strangers and pilgrims” – right here – “and still they were seeking the city of God.”

Preached by the Rev. Paul Francke on 1 November, 2007