Luke 6:20-31
You already know the Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Benediction of Judaism, though you likely do not know it by that name. It is:
May the Lord bless you, and keep you;
May the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
May the Lord lift up His face to you, and give you peace.
The text is found in the Book of Numbers in the Torah, and if a Kohanim is present for synagogue worship, he delivers the blessing, just as he has precedence in delivering the “aliyah,” or first reading from the Torah. This special Jewish caste, the Kohanim, is recognized to this day and claims patrilineal descent from the Ancient Israelite priesthood. Specifically, the Kohanim claim descent from Aaron, brother of Moses. Because this caste is based on patrilineal descent, Kohanim generally have one of five last names, the most common being Cohen.
Trekkies routinely use a version of the hand-gesture associated with the blessing, adapted by Leonard Nimoy as the Vulcan salute. Millions of people received the full Birkat Kohanim blessing from Eliezer ben Nisan ha’Cohen. He delivered it at the end of his concerts, the singer-songwriter performing under his common name, Leonard Cohen.
Some of you may know that Leonard Cohen spent years studying Zen Buddhism, and was ordained as a monk of the Rinzai School in 1996. He was also quite fond of Jesus. But he remained faithfully Jewish his entire life, and when he died in 2016, he was laid to rest in a simple pine box in the Jewish cemetery of his hometown in Quebec.
So what does a priestly-Jewish Zen Buddhist Jesus-fanboy have to tell a bunch of semi-Protestant heterodox religious refugees about sainthood?
Our first reading, Cohen’s description of a saint, does not fit the tradition of the Roman church, where sainthood requires obedience to the institution and the pope, and a tragic death if one is at all available, preferably martyrdom for refusing to break with the faith, or not quite as good, martyrdom as sacrificing one’s life for others, for even in the canonization process, institutional obedience trumps enacted compassion.
The saint as an escaped ski sliding through the twists and turns of life is more Zen than anything else, even though the novel our reading is taken from was written years before Cohen began practicing Buddhism.
And yet, there is that title he bestows upon saints at the end of the passage. He calls them “monsters of love.” I can think of no better description, for the love we are called to by the gospel is monstrous when judged through the lens of end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism and our system of retributive justice. For a group of people who deny natural selection, view Darwinism as having a demonic source, evangelicals sure do love Social Darwinism, the idea that wealth and poverty are based on individual merit.
In recent months, I’ve been introducing an alternative calendar of saints, but before I review how and why I am using that term, it might be helpful to consider what I am not saying when I call someone a saint.
In some traditions, salvation operates through third-parties, a proxy system of divine intervention. The living pray to get those loved ones who could not afford to purchase an indulgence out of purgatory. The living in turn pray to saints or the Virgin Mary to intervene on their behalf, for healing, for no interceptions in Friday night’s game, or for help finding lost car keys. Priests act as proxies for God, solely authorized to consecrate and to distribute communion, to confirm forgiveness for the penitent. You cannot go to heaven without access to a priest to serve as God’s proxy, for you will be unbaptized and unforgiven.
I don’t do grace by proxy. That is one of the theologies thrown off in the Protestant Reformation. Even in my pantheon, you can pray to Saint Harvey Milk all you want, but I don’t think he’s going to get you a date with that cute doctor or make you look good in those skinny jeans.
In strict Calvinism, part of our own Reform theological heritage, the term “perseverance of the saints” refers to pre-destination, specifically the belief that if you are part of God’s elect, there is nothing you can do to lose your salvation, and if you are not part of that elect, too bad, so sad. But the God who creates sentient beings pre-destined for damnation is a monster, and not worthy of our worship.
Even in our progressive tradition, we will sometimes use the term “communion of the saints,” a generic term for both the living train wrecks like us who make their way to the church and the mosque and the zendo, to the soup kitchen and the public hearing and the No Kings Rally, working out our individual and collective salvation, as well as for beloved individuals who have died, who lived with authenticity and love. We celebrate that latter group this morning.
But I’m not using “saint” in any of those ways when I lift up alternative saints.
I started using the term saint in my own unauthorized way many years ago to refer to my own religious heroes. I mean, if people in the Roman communion can have the little statues and icons and necklaces, why can’t I?
Maybe it was just tchotchke envy, but some interesting iconographers started producing holy images of figures like Harvey Milk and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., icons of folks I admired, and I thought, “Why not?”
Those iconographers were part of the Roman communion, so they got into trouble for depicting queers and non-Catholics as “saints,” but the horse was already out of the barn. Milk and King were both martyrs for their faith, which is to say for our faith, a faith that is open and affirming and anti-racist, a social gospel faith of restorative justice and love. Milk wasn’t even Christian, wasn’t even an observant Jew like St. Leonard of the Eternal Hallelujah.
The Roman church may use saints as proxies, but it also uses saints as exemplars, as models for our faith, and that is precisely how I am using the term when I call someone a saint. We may not find ourselves looking down the barrel of a gun like Milk or trafficking humans to Canada like Harriet Tubman, but then again, given our current situation, we might find ourselves in either of those situations if only we have the courage to do what is right.
No matter what we do, we can certainly try to live our lives in our own context with the sort of authenticity with which these alternative saints lived their values in their own contexts.
I’ve restricted my new calendar of saints to the dead, because who knows what scandal might be uncovered among the living, though even the dead seem to have plenty of skeletons in their proverbial closets. Not that imperfection is a dealbreaker. King was touched by the Spirit, delivering his prophetic mountaintop speech the night before being martyred in Memphis, but he was not faithful in marriage.
Saint Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement, not yet recognized by the Roman church, said:
“All are called to be saints, not to do the extraordinary – if sanctity depended on doing the extraordinary, there would be few saints.”
Though she believed what she said, that all are called to be saints, she objected when she herself was called a saint, afraid that people would think she was somehow different, that living faithfully came easy for her. She wanted people to know that doing what was right could be hard.
Living members of the Catholic Workers Movement and those who knew her well are split on the Vatican canonization process that seeks to elevate her to official sainthood. We, who stand outside of that institution, can certainly embrace her anti-capitalist pacifism and direct mission, view her as an exemplar of a life of faithful service.
My alternative saints list includes young people, like Hans and Sophie Scholl, siblings executed for their roles in the White Rose Resistance against the Third Reich, and individuals who lived long lives, like the Zen Master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. It includes religious folks like King and the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, secular folks like Milk, poets who spoke powerfully and prophetically in their context, including Walt Whitman, semi-closeted a century before Stonewall, and Audre Lorde, who lived through the Stonewall Resistance and other dramatic moments in the struggle for freedom, as a member of the queer community, as a woman, and as a Black-identified person of color.
I love the imperfection of ordinary saints in ordinary days, for like Saint Dorothy, I believe we are all called to be spiritually and compassionately aspirational, leaning into the core values of our faith for as long as we can. Messiness is not disqualifying. In fact, it seems to be a prerequisite.
Besides, we do not live in ordinary days. Alternative saints like Oscar Romero of San Salvador, assassinated after he called on Salvadoran soldiers to disobey immoral orders, feel more real than ever as we watch the jackboots of our own nation break both U.S. law and international law. Those of us in Elmira have been lucky so far, but the time is coming when we will have to put our bodies on the line, for first they came for the people with brown-skin and an accent. How long until they come for the queer community?
Our “alt” saints were creative and courageous. They lived their spirituality by connecting with something bigger than themselves, with the over-story, and with love for others. We are potentially creative and courageous. We have everything we need to be living saints, not impossibly perfect, but maybe perfectly impossible, dragging God’s kingdom into existence one little bit at a time.
May you be a monster of love, and may we sing a song of the saints of God, for I want to be one too. Amen.