Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9
Though my father never finished high school and my mother never went to college, I grew up in a household that loved learning. There were books, magazines, two newspapers a day, and the evening news, back when there were only three evening news broadcasts and truth still mattered.
I read about endangered species and life in a Soviet republic, watched news reports on the 1972 Managua earthquake and the related death of baseball great Roberto Clemente, so it should be no surprise that I also followed reports of the revolutions in Central America as a young adult, while serving in the Army and after discharge. I eventually made it to liberated Nicaragua, though that liberator is a despot these days.
The civil war in El Salvador was still raging in the mid-1980’s when I was in the region, though the assassination of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was already history.
Most of you know how much I admire Romero, a nerd the Vatican selected because he would not upset the privileged. Radicalized by the murder of his close friend, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, he went on to cause what the late John Lewis called “good trouble,” and paid for it with his life, gunned down while celebrating mass in a hospital chapel.
In 1997, the Roman Catholic pope, John Paul II, allowed a “cause for beatification” to begin, the first step toward being declared a saint. That process stalled under that pope and his successor, both deeply conservative, theologically and politically, both shaped by Cold War “anti-communism.” The beatification process was revived under the current pope, himself a Latin American, and concluded with Romero’s canonization in 2018. He is now Saint Óscar Romero of San Salvador in the Roman church.
The bureaucratic process of declaring Romero a saint in that tradition is an example of the very messy human role in deciding who is considered holy in any particular historical and cultural context, saint, sanctuary, and sacred all meaning set aside as holy.
So let’s place the idea of sainthood in our particular context, as a church of mostly religious refugees in the Protestant, Reform, Congregational, and United Church of Christ traditions, then look at how we might benefit from the idea of saints in our own lives and that of this community.
The three main Protestant reform movements, known to us as Lutheran, Reform, and Anabaptist, all rejected the cult of the saints, a practice that pre-dates the split between Roman and Orthodox, so common to both.
This was part of a broader rejection of the transactional church and mediated grace, most notably Martin Luther’s protest against the sale of indulgences, allowing people to buy their way out of purgatory, which also got rejected.
In some cases, the reformation movements kept the names of biblical saints, like the disciples, for their parishes, but Protestants pray directly to God, not to heavenly mediators. The Anglican Church, a reform over sovereignty rather than over theology, is more welcoming of the saint tradition, though it follows the wider Protestant church in praying directly to God. For us, saints ain’t heavenly bank tellers or defense attorneys.
Congregationalists, a merger of New England’s Pilgrims and Puritans in the Reform tradition, embraced a pretty austere form of Christianity. The first generations would be horrified by our stained glass and our vibrant decorations. Fortunately, we got over ourselves.
Those Congregationalists united with a movement that called itself simply “Christian,” then united with two historically German traditions that retained the light Protestant use of sainthood. Today, you can still find United Church of Christ congregations named things like Saint John’s, almost always originally German Reform or Evangelical and Reform.
Since saints don’t have a prominent role in the traditions of the Park Church and the United Church of Christ, we tend to use the term loosely for members of the church who have died, something we’ll do after the sermon when we read the names of those who have died in the past year and ring a memorial bell.
You’ll also occasionally find weirdos like me who love the idea of saints as exemplars rather then mediators, saints as people who have lived lives that seem aligned with God’s call to restorative justice, radical hospitality, sacrificial courage, and love without limits.
Instead of martyred 4th century virgins, we look to people like Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., even non-Christians like Harvey Milk, who lost their lives in the struggle for justice.
Of course, not all would-be saints are martyrs or men, so we celebrate remarkable people like Audre Lorde, a lesbian poet of Afro-Caribbean descent who gave voice to and empowered women, who embraced the cause of environmental justice, who overcame so many obstacles to compose modern psalms, naming and lifting up what is real and what is truly holy.
There are even living figures who are worthy of our attention in their courage and compassion. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who grew up in internal exile during the Cultural Revolution, would be worthy of our attention purely on the grounds of his art. He was radicalized by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when more than 7000 schoolrooms collapsed in what the Chinese refer to as “tofu buildings,” killing and injuring thousands of students. He launched a “citizen’s investigation,” documenting the disaster and cataloging the names of the victims. He was repeatedly harassed, detained, and beaten by Communist authorities, almost losing his life to a brain bleed.
Some would challenge my description of Ai as a hero since he issued a carefully nuanced statement about the Gaza War, resulting in the indefinite postponement of an exhibition in London, for the extremists supporting genocide have seized the narrative on both sides of that conflict, insisting that anyone seeking justice for both sides must be their enemy.
There are far too many in America who celebrate the wrong things. The turn of the century cult of the fictional Tony Soprano was simply a continuation of a tradition that takes in Billy the Kid and Bonnie and Clyde. Fans watch Nascar for the wrecks. They cheer when the gloves come off in the arena across the street and our hockey player takes a swing at their hockey player.
We spend our time talking about the apartheid baby Elon Musk rather than someone like Wendell Berry… poet, farmer, and activist.
But we in the church are meant to be the weirdos who call the world to a better place, who believe better is possible, and what better way to do that than in celebrating inspiring weirdos.
Let us consider a feast of St. Ida B. Wells, pioneering Black female journalist, not just as a chance to tell her story, but as a chance to remind ourselves that lynching comes in many forms, but our God is a God of grace and restorative justice.
Let us celebrate St. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who explored the intersection of contemplative prayer and mysticism across faiths, who spoke out against the war in Vietnam and the nuclear arms race, who died under tragic and possibly suspicious circumstances, not just to tell his story, but to remind us of the power of prayer in transforming ourselves, and the power of leaning into what we share with the faithful of other traditions.
And let us always bring grace to the table, for we do not have an authoritarian bureaucracy that decides who becomes a saint, and in today’s world no one would qualify as being without sin. We know every single wart and blemish of everyone in modern times. I can’t tell you how many of the men I admired from the 20th century are now tainted by accusations of sexual misconduct. Even the Rev. Dr. King, an American saint by any reasonable measure, was an adulterer. Saints ain’t perfect, at least not for us, for as scripture says, all have sinned and fallen short, and yet he stood there that night in Memphis and placed himself at the mountaintop with an equally imperfect Moses.
Of course, your list of saints won’t be exactly my list of saints, and we’ll miss the everyday saints who care for elders and teach third grade and “accidentally” under-charge that family struggling financially. You’ll look for saints with traits that you admire, saints in your particular context, a patron saint of dinner parties or a patron saint of chemotherapy, while I’ll look for saints that have traits I admire or I need, and maybe by focusing on their courage, on their ordinary and imperfect sanctity, on their creativity, I’ll find wells of the sacred in myself that I can draw on in times of trouble.
Let us celebrate the saints, queer and straight and Christian and humanist and nerd and weirdo and you. And me. And all who love the world and pour themselves into it. Amen.