I Corinthians 16:1-4
In an earlier chapter of my life I used to go to an old Catholic Church in Rochester for the Saturday 4:00 o’clock mass. It was a reciprocal arrangement. Roberto’s mom went to my church on Sunday, so I went to hers on Saturday. And my lucky son Roberto got to go to both services every weekend. Wouldn’t you say that you were lucky to go toi church twice each weekend, Roberto? Anyway, that big Catholic Church It was nothing like this church. It was the size of a cathedral, or as I often said, you could park the Goodyear Blimp inside it with room to spare. It was that big! Just like here, people were nice, the food was good, we read the same Bible stories and sang most of the same songs. Sometimes I even borrowed some sermon ideas that I could use the next day at my church. The place was absolutely beautiful with incredible furnishings, decorations, and architectural marvels made by incredibly skilled artisans. Nothing like the simple Presbyterian churches I’ve served. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing. There are plenty of cathedral-sized Presbyterian churches in the world. One time I went to the 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City and I think you could park the Goodyear Blimp in there, too.
But there was one thing about that Catholic Church that puzzled me. All around the perimeter of the sanctuary were dozens of statues, beautifully carved in white Italian marble. It must have taken dozens of sculptors to make them, at an incredible expense. Statues of who? Sure, I recognized Jesus up in front, but there were dozens of others and it wasn’t at all obvious who they were. I even went up to some of them to see if there was a label of some kind. Nope, none. I looked in the bulletin for some sort of explanation, but not a word of explanation was in print. The priest made no mention of the statues in his sermon. Finally I decided to ask someone sitting near me. “Who are these guys?”. “Oh, those are all the saints”, she said. Well, I had heard about saints, of course. A lot of the Catholic kids I grew up with were named after saints. John and Mary were common, but I would have felt very sorry for any kid named after Saint Aloysius or Saint Bartholomew. Actually one of my friends was named Bartholomew, but everyone called him Barney.
Anyway, back to the conversation I was having with the woman sitting near me. “Well which saints are they, and how did they get to be saints?” The woman couldn’t identify any of them by name. I thought that was odd because she had been attending that church for most of her life. But she seemed to think that saints needed no explanation because as far as she was concerned everyone knew about them. “Saints get to be saints because they live extraordinarily saintly lives” seemed to be her simple explanation. Later I heard a more disturbing explanation, very disturbing actually: “most people who become saints died violent deaths”. Yikes! Not a good recruiting theme is it? “Join the Navy and see the world” might work, but “Become a saint and die” might not work so well.
Later, I asked the priest if he could identify any of those saints. He was able to point out Peter and Paul, but that was about as far as he got. Not even he knew which ones were which. One thing was clear: all those marble statues depicted saints who had been dead for centuries. I really didn’t see the point of having them there, especially if no one ever talked about them, or explained who they were or what they had done.
So it was more than interesting to me when I read that the theme of this year’s stewardship effort was going to be “Saints Alive!”. “Saints Alive!” What could that mean? It sounds like something my grandmother might have said if she saw anything astounding. “saints Alive!”. It must mean that there are saints somewhere in the Presbyterian Church. Of course, if you look around here you won’t find any marble statues sculpted from fine Italian marble. So if there are any saints to be found around here they are going to be of the living kind. I’m eager to meet them! How about you?
So what is a living saint? Well, I looked it up. In describing saints some special adjectives are used: exemplary. extraordinary, selfless. Do these words describe you? Is anyone here in worship exemplary, extraordinary and selfless? Most of the time we are fairly ordinary. Exemplary, extraordinary, selfless? That’s a pretty high standard to meet, isn’t it? How about this: is there anyone here who had even a brief moment of extraordinary, exemplary, or selfless behavior? Just once? That’s promising. It seems like we’re pretty far from the standard that would have to be met to become a saint. Yet Paul refers to people like us as saints.
Maybe words like extraordinary and exemplary get us off track. So for our purposes today I would contend that a living saint is someone who is in touch with the love, kindness, care and peace of God. It doesn’t mean we reflect those things perfectly or exactly, in fact sometimes we fall short, disastrously short. But what makes us saints is that we know the source of where our hopes and blessings come from, we know that it all comes from God, and that God is eager to shower us with hope and abundance beyond measure.
In I Corinthians 16 Paul encourages the people in Corinth to give generously to support the saints in Jerusalem. From the way he phrases it it sounds like he is referring to every participant in the Christian witness Jerusalem as a saint, not just the exemplary ones, not just the extraordinary ones, not just the selfless ones, but everyone there who was doing their best to be faithful, everyone willing to move closer to God, everyone willing to move closer to the example of Jesus Christ.
Following that logic, I would claim that the people in Corinth that Paul challenged to give to the saints in Jerusalem were also saints, not because they were perfect, but because they were willing. I heard a great phrase this week, I can’t remember where I heard it, but I will connect it to us. The phrase is “fanning the flames of willingness”. We’re not out to find only the perfect people in this world to carry the hope of Christ, we’re out to encourage the ones who are willing to walk alongside of him, not perfect, not extraordinary – though at times we are, not exemplary - though at times we are, not selfless – though at times we are, but those who are willing to walk alongside of Jesus. Are you willing?
Subscribe