Hope United Church of Christ – Sturgeon Bay
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Ephesians 1:11-23
They include Wang Zhiming, a clergy person who fell victim to China’s Cultural Revolution, that conflagration of Maoist purity that killed only a million or so, far fewer than the 30 million that died five years earlier in the Great Leap Forward, and not really that big of a deal since authoritarian communism takes a utilitarian view human life, no inherent worth, just use.
Then there is Esther John, a Pakistani Christian nurse, Elizabeth, a Russian Grand Duchess, and Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda. Others are better known, like Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who gave his life in place of another at Auschwitz. Archbishop Óscar Romero is there, as is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
They are in a class we might hope to never join, martyrs for their faith, ten men and women of the Twentieth Century carved above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey.
Some have been officially recognized as saints by denominations that have a formal process for that sort of thing, while others are considered saints informally. Lutherans, Anglicans and other Protestant riff-raff like, you know, us, considered Romero a saint long before the Vatican got around to it, that recognition blocked in Rome by conservatives who suspected him of commie pinko leanings, or worse still, of believing in a liberating God, the core concept in the theology that bears that name.
Ironically, Romero was chosen as Archbishop of San Salvador because he was conservative, a milquetoast of a man who would ruffle the feathers of neither the twelve families that controlled all of El Salvador’s arable land nor the assassins and thugs they employed in the nation’s military. His spirituality was heavily influenced by Opus Dei, a Catholic movement with close ties to the Fascist regime of Spain’s Francisco Franco. He was anything but a commie pinko.
But Romero was able to maintain friendships with people who had different opinions on things, something few manage these days. It was the assassination of one of his close friends, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, that opened the Archbishop’s eyes to the human rights abuses taking place in his country, to the incredible poverty all around him. He went first and always to scripture, to Jesus, was a pastor before all else, and it made him radical, at least in the eyes of the corrupt and powerful. He spoke about justice, was clear that God’s law superseded any earthly power. So those with earthly power did what they did, what they always do.
On March 24, 1980, as he celebrated mass at the Hospital de la Divina Providencia, Archbishop Óscar Romero, like his friend Padre Grande, was assassinated.
He was an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances who found strength in prayer and scripture, a most improbable saint.
J. Edgar Hoover, one of the greatest criminals in our nation’s history, targeted the Rev. Dr. King with his COINTELPRO unit, even sending him an anonymous letter suggesting suicide. But it didn’t take great paranoia nor great sophistication to figure out that King was imperfect. He had just left the room of his mistress when he was assassinated. Yet few can deny the power of his vision, the courage and conviction, and more than a few of us are willing to concede that his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” sure looks like prophecy.
He was an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances who found strength in prayer and scripture, a most improbable saint.
Now, there is a whole lot to learn about how ordinary and imperfect humans can find the courage to speak love and hope into the world in extraordinary times, but sometimes God’s saints are called to speak love and hope into the world in ordinary times.
So I give you Saint Phyllis. She didn’t die young, murdered for her faith. She died of lung cancer at the age of 81, a decently long life. She was not a priest nor a theologian. She was a teacher and a writer.
Oh, and a prophet. But we’ll get to that.
She was the daughter of a Tennessee academic, a Southern Episcopalian, which is to say of a certain socio-economic class, and married Sam, a pulmonologist. She taught Latin, served as dean of an art college, and worked in publishing with a focus on Christian books. She wrote a few books of her own along the way, including a bestselling multi-volume adaptation of the ancient daily prayer cycle called the Divine Hours.
Her work brought her into contact with a great many Christians, both traditionalists and innovators. She was in a position to hear the cold hard facts and the despair of organized religion in decline. She was also in a position to hear stories of resilience and re-creation, to see glimpses of what the church might become in a changing world. She became friends with leaders half her age, so very different, and became a sort of matriarch to a whole movement in modern Christianity that thinks of itself as the Emerging church. She looked at the deep cycles of history, at sociology, and drew on her own deep faith and practice and wrote three books on that Emergence movement, inspiring and hopeful and real. She might have been genteel and educated, but she was always so very real.
She said things to us that we didn’t all exactly want to hear, and that thousands of declining and aging churches across America still refuse to hear. She saw patterns, put pieces together. In this she was a prophet. And to those of us who found in her a near perfect balance of pragmatism and belief, she is a saint, no matter what committees, synods, and denominations might decide now that she has shed this mortal coil.
When we celebrate the saints of God, we are not just celebrating the Romeros and Kings of the world. We’re not even always celebrating Saint Phyllis and those like her that had an ecumenical and popular impact, who inspired and challenged thousands of Christians. In our tradition, the saints of God are not always extraordinary, not always larger than life. Sometimes they look just like us. Sometimes they’ve taught Sunday School to several generations, unpacked more rummage than they care to remember, got in the car at two in the morning because a friend was on the way to the E.R. These are the sort of saints the author of Ephesians has in mind when he uses the term. There was no Vatican bureaucracy, no verified miraculous intercessions. The author of Ephesians just meant faithful people.
Those faithful might wonder about the efficacy of church, as Bonhoeffer did in prison. They might enjoy a Jack Daniels, like St. Phyllis. They might even commit bold sins like adultery. But God doesn’t call the perfect. If perfection was what was needed, our pews and pulpit would be empty. And our God is a god who calls us to our better selves, who forgives, is not the angry egotistical false god found in so many churches.
What is needed is practice, not perfection. And that is the thing we have lost, in our lives where we are over-scheduled and sometimes over-medicated, in our institutions, where we have all too often forgotten that the purpose of church is to change lives through the good news and demanding faith preached by an itinerant un-credentialed rabbi in Palestine two thousand years ago.
It was the good news that God was good, that the holy was breaking into the world. It was the demanding faith that said love was bigger than family and tribe, that it was demanding and dangerous.
It was good news and demanding faith for blue collar types before there were collars, for bureaucrats and business people, those who fished, those who collected taxes, even financiers and, god help them, the religious. It was good news and demanding faith for the disabled, the unclean, for sinners.
It is good news and demanding faith for me. It is good news and demanding faith for you, if you want it.
And if you are thinking you’re “not good enough, so why bother,” I’ve got some not good news for you. God wants you anyway. I know a thing or two about “not good enough.” God doesn’t care, not one iota. God is going to call and challenge and tug at your heart and send prophets and perfect autumn leaves and love and creation your way until you either chase after the holy or die. That is simply how creation is wired.
So you don’t have an hour a day to give to prayer. Pick some sort of cue for mini-prayers. For years, anytime the clock had the same numbers, say at 3:33 or 4:44, I’d say a mini-prayer for my mother and grandmother. Gram is gone, but I still say those prayers for Mom.
Not ready to get arrested in front of an ICE office? You can at least politely correct folks who are repeating lies about immigrants, which is a pretty courageous and uncomfortable thing to do.
Can’t serve on the Board of Deacons? You can stand at the door one Sunday a month when you are in town and make people feel welcome in this place, no matter how different or frazzled they might look.
The saints of God, saints with the little “s”, are those who did their best in this life, imperfect humans in an imperfect church in imperfect societies and nations that were open to the more of God, the plus of God, the just beyond of God. Not the folks who got there. At least not in this life.
I’m not going to be commemorated with a statue at Westminster Abbey. I might get a marker in a memorial garden or veterans’ cemetery, if I’m lucky. But when the day comes, tomorrow or decades from now, when this body fails and I run headlong into mystery, spirit-long into that great mystery, I know that I will join the saints of God, messy and imperfect and loved. May it be so for all of us.
Amen.