All Saints

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,

let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, 

and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us...

-Hebrews 12: 1

I have known a lot of Saints.

None of them have had churches named after them or gotten special days.  Some of them were cranky and drank too much.  Some of them had not been in a church for a long time. Others were drug addicts and mentally ill. If you looked at them with human eyes you never would have known.

Saints can be sneaky.

Luckily it's not up to us to figure out who they are.  So we just focus on the relatively few who have shown us their true faces, and been recognized. Some of them have cool stories too, many of them did really amazing things. But there is a challenge set before us by Jesus, and that is to recognize the Saints that don't look like Saints, the ones he calls "the least of these, my brothers," and "these little ones."

The "cloud of witnesses," isn't just that dear old lady that taught you in Sunday School, it also includes the coworker who bugs you on a daily basis.  It isn't just the kind and Godly man who sits faithfully in the church pew every week, it is also the crazy lady in the supermarket holding up the line with a wad of crinkled coupons.

Some Saints are here to show you what you could be.

Other Saints are here to teach you how to love, and make you practice.

All the famous Saints know a secret: they're not that good, really.

Each one of them knows how much they were forgiven, they may have even kept a careful record of all their sins.  They sometimes did what they did out of guilt, weighed down by the mistakes they made and all the people they hurt.  Like Augustine, who thought so much and so well about God that most of us don't even realize that everything we think we know about God probably came from something he said or wrote.  But Augustine had a mistress, and he never did right by her, he's still a Saint, with all the honors.

Should we silence his voice because we know what he did?

God does no such thing.

What about Abraham, the Father of us all by blood or faith?  

He sent one of his servants and the child they had together off into the wilderness to die.

How about David, the Great King and the singer of Psalms? 

He was an adulterer and a murderous one at that.

You know the stories of these people we call Saints.

Peter denied Jesus.

Paul breathed threats and murder against the church.

They were redeemed, forgiven, and loved.

The stories ought to tell us that God loves a fixer upper.

The stories ought to tell us that no-one is beyond that sort of grace.

We ought to see that we are the Saints, all of us.

This day, and every day.

Not because we're good, but because God is Love.

-All Saints Day - 2016