Bad Saints

Propers: All Saints Sunday (Hallowmas), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What is a saint?

A saint is a sinner, who is forgiven by God, and claimed for His own. That’s it. God claims you as His child, as His beloved, as the Son He can never let go. And God gives everything to raise you up and bring you home and embrace you with joy forever. If you don’t believe me, just look at His scars.

We tend to think of saints as heroes or martyrs or theologians or priests. We imagine that they did not sin, that they had superhuman patience, that they always turned the other cheek, always went the extra mile. But some of them were outright jerks. One of the reasons that I talk about the saints on the Church calendar every Sunday is to remind us that they were just like us. They were flawed; they had doubts. Some of them were pirates or killers or thieves. Some of them were terribly antisocial; they’d never get along with a modern church council.

What they had in common is that God claimed them. God set them apart for the service of His Kingdom. That’s what sainted means, “set apart”—just as He has set apart each and every one of you. A saint is not called to do great deeds, or work great wonders. Not often, anyway. A saint is called to come and die: to die to the self, to die to the ego, so that Christ may rise in him, or her, in every single one of us.

That’s what Christianity is: it is death and resurrection. We are drowned in the Font of our Baptism, drowned to sin, drowned to the old, broken, fallen Adam, who is nailed with Christ to the Cross. And then we rise—up from the waters, up from the Tomb—redeemed, renewed, resurrected, so that it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us. And then we are called to go—to go out into the world proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom of God, that sins are forgiven, that death is defeated, that Christ has died, Christ is Risen, and Christ will come again!

That is the Great Commission. That is the vocation of our lives: to go and spread the joy we’ve found, the life we’ve found, in Jesus Christ our Lord; the One True God of all peoples and all times, come down to earth, down to the Cross, down to the grave, taking into Himself all of our violence and hatred and lies and drowning them in the infinite ocean of His Life and Love—filling up hell to bursting and rising again with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train!

We are the Body of Christ, sent out into the world. We are the beachhead of the inbreaking Kingdom of God. We are the foretaste of the feast to come, when Christ shall return, the world shall be remade, and God at last shall be All in All. That is the purpose of your life. That is what makes you God’s saint. We have been given infinite Light and Life and Love and we are to spread it, to scatter it, to use it to enlighten and to liberate and to raise up this whole world from the dead!

And if we fail—when we fail—well, then, we are raised back up again. Because truth be told, you and I die every day to sin, and we rise forgiven every single morning. That’s why we come here on Sunday: to return to our Baptism, to be fed by the Word, and to be sent out again by Christ, in Christ, as Christ, to resurrect a world still very much in need of Him; as it will be until the end of time.

In this, we are not alone. My God, we are never alone: “I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”

Christianity today is the most diverse system of belief on the planet. Did you know that? We have the most even racial and cultural spread of any religion, with roughly equal numbers of self-identified believers living in Europe, North America, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Most Christians are in the global south. By 2025, the most Christian country on earth, by population, is projected to be China. There are more Christians there than members of the Communist Party. Between 2000 and 2019, global Christianity grew from two billion adherents to two-and-a-half billion, a net gain of 500 million souls in less than 20 years.

The Kingdom of God is everywhere ascendant—except here. Except in the West. It’s a weird time to be a Christian in the United States. Church membership in America has dropped 12% in 10 years. That’s freefall. And attendance is even worse. And it doesn’t have anything to do with worship bands or projector screens or seeker services. Traditional congregations with traditional liturgies have been weathering the storm better than those trying too hard to be something they’re not.

And it doesn’t really have to do with theology either. People who leave Church, by and large, don’t become atheists. They still believe in God. Heck, they still believe in bigfoot and ghosts and UFOs. What they don’t believe in is joining. And it’s hard to blame them. Scandals have rocked the Catholic Church for decades now. And most people, when they think of Christianity, think of Pat Robertson or Joel Osteen or other TV preachers peddling politics and prosperity gospels from their Gulfstream jets and million-dollar McMansions.

If it were just about religion, then the PTA and the Boy Scouts and fraternal orders and political parties and bowling leagues wouldn’t all be in the same boat. But we are. It may well be that people are just too overburdened, too overstimulated, too overstressed, too economically insecure and too socially disconnected to imagine joining anything. We’ve done a great job of destroying support structures these last 50 years. It’s kind of amazing that there’s any local community left at all.

So when it’s hard to be a Christian—when it’s hard to keep congregations afloat—take heart. We are not failing. Or if we are, we’re in good company. The Church in every age is a forever-conquered thing that is forever outliving its conquerors. We no longer have to fear being thrown to lions in the Colosseum. Rather, these days we must contend with more nebulous and pervasive principalities and powers: with consumerism, militarism, materialism, mass violence, mass incarceration, and deaths of despair so overwhelming in scope that average US life expectancy has dropped now for four years in a row.

Our society is desperate for a Word of peace, a Word of compassion, a Word of forgiveness; a Word of liberation and of life; in short, for the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord. But if anybody’s going to hear that Word, we’re going to have to practice what we preach. We’re going to have to love our neighbor and forgive our enemies and heal the sick and feed the hungry and teach the ignorant and welcome the stranger and speak truth to power all in the Name of Jesus Christ.

We will have to be Christ for the world. We will have to be Saints.

What a time to be a Christian in America. What a time to be a Saint of the Lord. This here, this place, this country is the mission field now. The Church in other lands suffers violence in ways that we cannot begin to understand, but Christians know how to deal with violence. We’ve been doing it for 2,000 years. What we cannot survive is acedia, apathy, spiritual malaise.

The Gospel’s going gangbusters everywhere on earth right now, but us? We’re all drowning in stress and fear and debt and mountains of useless stuff. And you? You have the Word that sets us free. You have the Word that brings life to the dead. You have the victory that has been won forever and for all upon the Cross.

So rise up, all you Saints of God. And let’s go save the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.