October 31, 2010 - Proper 26, Year C (RCL)
Tomorrow is All Saints Day, one of the great feasts of the church's year. It began, originally, according to Ephrem the Syrian, who lived something like seventeen hundred years ago, it began as a day to commemorate martyrs, all those people who had died for the sake of their Christian faith. As time progressed, it became a kind of catchall day,
the one that covered all the saints’ days
whether martyrs or not,
so that if you happened to forget to commemorate your local saint, or the saint you were named after,
you could catch up on All Saints Day.
Nowadays it’s still officially one of our major feasts
although it’s pretty much eclipsed by the celebrations of Halloween. But it’s still the day we remember all the saints who have gone before us. We’re reminded of them in our hymns, like the one we began our service with today,
“For all the saints.”
“For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!”
Our hymnal only has eight verses of the original eleven,
but if we had sung the full hymn as it was written, we would have been reminded of saints
where were apostles and saints who were evangelists as well as the saints who were martyrs.
Another favorite hymn, which we sang just before the gospel, is “I sing a song of the Saints of God,”
and it reminds us that the saints were usually fairly ordinary people, not necessarily what we might call “professional” Christians.
They were going about their ordinary business,
but doing it as people who are explicitly Christian. And so we sang,
One was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green,
One was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast.
But all that begs the question, what is a saint?
If you follow Roman Catholic news, you will know that the pope recently canonized six new saints, including the first Australian;
their criteria is being a person of exceptional holiness, and having at least two miracles attributed to them after their death.
But that’s not what the bible says about saints. The word that most often gets translated as saint in the New Testament is the word “hagios”, which literally means “holy.” And in the epistles, it usually simply means everyone who is a follower of Jesus.
That makes us all
saints.
But it still doesn’t tell us much about what it actually means to be a saint,
in practical terms. If we are saints, what does God expect of us?
One way to look a this is to see where in Scripture it talks about living as Christians. This week in bible study, we read where the apostle Paul describes it this way:
Pursue righteousness, holy living, faithfulness, love, endurance and gentleness.
We all agreed that they are good things to aspire to.
But when it came to practicalities, it was another matter. We found it hard to think of what that might look like
in our everyday lives, especially righteousness.
But as we were talking, my mind went to our Old Testament reading today,
to the final verse.
“Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them,
but the righteous shall live by faith.”
After five months of reading the prophets,
we’re well acquainted
with the situation of the people of God
half a millennium
before Jesus.
Things are not good.
The poor are increasing in number
and the rich are increasing in wealth.
There is violence and lawlessness
and justice is far from universal, to say the least.
The borders are threatened,
and national security has become an excuse
for all sorts of abuses.
And God has been
largely forgotten.
But those who still remember God,
who still pray to God,
who still trust in God,
even they wonder
if god has forgotten them.
Their prayers seem to go
into thin air.
No matter how much they plead,
God doesn’t seem
to do anything.
And it’s into this situation
that the prophets speak,
and not least of them
is Habakkuk.
Habakkuk himself
is one of those who are wondering
if God will ever
answer their prayer.
And so we hear him today,
calling out to God,
and standing, as if an army sentry,
watching for God,
waiting for God
to speak.
And then, finally,
then God speaks.
We only have a small part of what God says,
but that small part
gives us a hint.
What God has to say
will not be good.
And for that reason,
God wants Habakkuk to write it down, write it down
so everyone can read it.
Though when they read it, God warns,
they may wish they hadn’t; they may want to run as fast as they can
in the other direction.
Because what God will say
will be condemnation,
condemnation
for all those
who have done wrong - for the unjust, the wicked, the arrogant, the wealthy.
All those
are condemned.
But - and it’s a big but -
the righteous
shall live.
The righteous shall live,
and they shall live
by faith.
So back to our original question.
What does it mean
to be righteous?
Well, it’s pretty clear from Habakkuk
what it doesn’t mean.
People who aren’t righteous
are the sort of people
who make war
in order to secure natural resources
that rightly belong to others.
They build houses and cities for themselves
on the backs of their laborers
who not only don’t receive the benefit of their work
but often die
doing it.
They make loans
at exorbitant interest
and then call the loans in
destroying families and everything they own.
They get themselves into positions of power
and then make sure that the law
favors their interests.
Those descriptions sound familiar, don’t they?
Especially in the last few years.
It wouldn’t take much searching through the pages of the New York Times or Newsday
to find examples of any of them.
Those are the unrighteous.
And God - and Habakkuk - warn,
don’t be a part of this.
Which of course is easy to say - of course none of us would want to be like that -
but it’s harder to do
in practice.
How many political ads have you seen
the last few weeks
where candidates have been accused
of exactly those things.
And while we all know that the very nature of political ads
is to exaggerate the failings of opponents,
the reality is that some of the candidates have done
some of the things they are accused of,
and all of them
are probably caught up in some way or another
with the sort of abuses
that would mark them out
as unrighteous.
Because our whole society is caught up those things
one way or another.
We use oil
to fuel our cars,
and that means we care about the security of natural resources.
We give gifts of diamonds,
even though many of the best diamonds available
are blood diamonds, their cost measured not just in dollars, but in people’s lives.
We have our retirement savings
tied up in the stock market,
and we rely on our brokers or financial advisors
to tell us what to buy and what to sell,
even though many companies engage in unjust practices.
We expect interest on our savings,
but the way the banks make that interest
is to charge others for loans.
The reality is
that most of us are caught up,
one way or another
with the sort of things
that God condemns in the prophets.
And as Christians, we’re called to try to disentangle ourselves
from those forms of injustice.
But righteousness,
righteousness
is more than that.
Because what that last verse of our Old Testament reading points to
is that being righteous
is about not just what we do
but how we live
in relationship with God.
The righteous
shall live by faith.
To live by faith
is to live in a way
that places God,
and faith in God
at the very center
of our lives.
And in Habakkuk
it is contrasted
with being proud.
Being proud, puffed up, swollen with a sense of your own importance and excellence.
The proud, in Scripture,
are the ones who think
they can do - and have done -
every thing
alone. Without the help of anyone else;
without the help
of God.
And in contrast with that,
being righteous
is about knowing
that all we have
comes from God,
including our successes,
and that everything we do
we do with the help
of God.
Being righteous isn’t so much about what we do
as what God does;
it’s about trusting God
and God’s grace at work in us,
and thanking God
when God does amazing things through us.
And that’s what being a saint
is truly about.
Being someone
who depends on the grace of God,
who trusts God,
who thanks God
for everything
and in everything.
And who knows that what we do, whether it’s big or small,
we do
through the grace of God.
The righteous,
the saints,
live by faith,
by faith and by grace,
and each and everyone of us
is numbered among them
as we put our trust
in God.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010