All Are Saints

The scriptures referred to are 1 John 3:1-3.

At the end of just about every movie we see in a theater, I or my son will go to IMDB to see if there is an extra scene or two in the middle or at the end of the credits. If not, we leave, rather than wait for the endless list of names to run out. There is even a joke in The Great Muppet Caper, where Fozzie and Kermit notice the credits for various behind-the-scenes people appearing on the screen. “Nobody reads those names anyway, do they?” asks Fozzie. “Sure,” says Kermit. “They all have families.” But movies wouldn't exist without all those people who do makeup and costumes and lighting and special effects, as well as those who raise the insane amounts of money required to make films today. Yet most of us only know the names of the actors and maybe the director if, like Stephen Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock, they are known for making great films.

In a way, that is the problem with this Sunday in the church calendar. It's called All Saints Day, and we think it's just about those big name saints, like Peter, Paul, Mary the mother of Jesus, Francis of Assisi, and other especially holy people who have churches and hospitals named after them. But in the New Testament, all faithful Christians are called saints. In the original Greek the word is hagios, literally the holy ones. Holy means “different” in the sense of “set apart” for God's purposes. I don't use the communion chalice for drinking tea or Dr. Pepper because it has been set apart to be used when we as the body of Christ on earth come together to share the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. And we Christians who have answered God's call to follow his Son have also been set apart for his purposes: to show the good news of what God has done in Jesus and is doing with his Spirit in and with our lives.

Of course, we remember those who have responded to God's call in extraordinary ways, the way kids who play sports look up to and emulate exceptional athletes. And while not all of those kids will grow up to be superstars we hope that they continue to enjoy playing sports and that they do the best they can. Those who first came to be known as capital “S” saints were either followers of Jesus mentioned in the Bible or martyrs, people who died for their faith. Martyr, by the way, comes from the Greek word for “witness.” Not abandoning your faith when it becomes dangerous to show your allegiance to Jesus was a spectacular witness to how much you trust in him.

But as pagan chieftains and kings became Christians, and ordered their people to be baptized without adequate instruction in their new faith, saints began to be treated in much the same way as the pagan gods who were thought to have authority over certain areas of life. Thus a farmer might switch from praying to Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain, to St. Isadore the Farmer, now patron saint of agriculture. One no longer prayed to the Greek goddess of childbirth, Ilithyia, but to the Virgin Mary, or her mother St. Anne, or St. Raymond Nonnatus who was delivered by emergency C-section which somehow made him an expert on difficult births. Got a toothache? Pray to St. Apollonia, a martyr who had her teeth knocked out or pulled out by an anti-Christian mob in the third century. She is the patron saint of dentists, dental hygienists and their patients. My favorite is St. Wilgefortis. A pagan king chose her as his bride. She prayed that God would save her from such a fate and preserve her virginity. So she miraculously grew a beard overnight! The king rejected her and her name got mangled over the years into St. Wigglesfoot the Unencumbered, patron saint of wives who wished to be free from their difficult husbands.

Unfortunately, this change from saints as spiritual exemplars to saints as heads of heavenly departments in charge of earthly matters turned the popular idea of God's kingdom into a bureaucracy where it was not what you knew but who you prayed to that got you what you wanted. This contradicts the Biblical admonition to bring all our petitions to God. (Philippians 4:6)

Eventually these capital “S” saints began to be seen as magical, so that anything they touched and especially parts of their bodies were regarded as being able to work miracles. This led to medieval churches and monasteries seeking to possess and display pieces of saints called relics which would attract pilgrims who sought cures and favors and left donations in gratitude. I once went to a church in Rome that claimed to have a bottle of the Virgin Mary's breast milk as well as Jesus' foreskin. I saw a cross that contained tiny vials of what supposedly was Jesus' blood. This made it a magical item.

And if there's one thing scripture clearly prohibits, it's magic. Magical thinking holds that by saying certain words, doing certain rituals and possessing certain magical items we can change reality. That's one reason the third of the ten commandments prohibits misusing God's name. (Exodus 20:7) God is not a genie. What the Bible teaches is that instead we are to go to our heavenly Father and ask him for what we think we need. He in his loving wisdom will decide whether to answer our prayers with a “Yes,” a “No,” a “Not yet,” or with something else that he has in mind for us, a different mission or path he wants us to follow instead. (Genesis 40:7-15, 20-23; 41:1, 9-14: Acts 16:6-10)

Sadly, these men and women who, in their earthly life, were devoted to God were now treated as semi-divine intermediaries for God. This is something these saints would have viewed with horror as a kind of idolatry.

Furthermore, the idea that all faithful Christians are saints dropped out of popular thought. Need something difficult done? Pray to a big name saint whose biography connects them, however tangentially, to that concern. It's easier than acting as a saint yourself and asking God to help you do it. Relying on a capital “S” saint can make you think of yourself as a passive recipient of a magical person's help rather than as someone called by God to participate in what he is doing in and through us.

It also makes us see ourselves as second class Christians. It reinforces the idea that it takes extraordinary people to do extraordinary things for God. This isn't helped by some of the fanciful stories that have grown up around certain saints that make them out to be extra-special from birth. For instance, the term Immaculate Conception does not refer to Jesus' conception but to Mary's. The story arose that Mary was conceived without the taint of original sin so that she could be the sinless vessel for God's Son. But there is nothing in scripture that even hints at this. We know nothing about the kind of person Mary was before the angel appeared to her and told her she will be the mother of the Messiah. Luke introduces her this way: “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, 'Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.'” (Luke 1:26-28) He doesn't say, “You're favored because you prayed so hard...” or “because you gave so much to the poor...” or “because you were born sinless, unlike every other human being in the history of the world...” He simply tells her that she is favored by God. The Greek word for “favor,” charis, is also the word translated as “grace.” You cannot earn God's grace; it is a gift. So God's favor towards Mary is his undeserved unreserved goodness towards her, as is his grace towards the rest of us. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

And it's not like Mary immediately accepts the idea that she will be the mother of God's Son. She asks, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” So the angel tells her what is going to happen without really explaining it in detail. Then he tells Mary that her post-menopausal relative Elizabeth is pregnant. He concludes with, “For nothing is impossible with God.” That and the news about Elizabeth convinces Mary.

Which leads to the most noteworthy thing that Mary does: she responds with, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” She puts her trust in God and his promise. She is an ordinary person who just consented to do something extraordinary for God. This wouldn't have happened if she had said “No.” God is love and love requires consent. As someone once said, “Without God, we cannot and without us, God will not.” The God who is love wants to work with us and through us.

Mary and Joseph being an ordinary people does not mean that God left the raising of his Son to chance. God equips those he calls. As it says in Hebrews, “May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” (Hebrews 13:20-21) This equipping is what Jesus is referring to when he said, “And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.” (John 14:13) He also said, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” (John 15:16) Jesus is not promising to give us anything we desire but whatever we need to serve God and bear fruit for him.

So whatever Jesus' parents needed to raise him, the Lord provided. We know they weren't rich because the offering they gave at the temple was the offering prescribed for the poor. (Luke 2:22-24; Leviticus 12:8) But they were able to give Jesus love and their living examples of trusting God, as we see when Joseph decides to go through with marrying his fiancée even though she is already pregnant or when they uproot their lives and flee to Egypt because of the threat to Jesus' life. (Matthew 1:19-25; 2:13-16)

We also know that Mary and Joseph were able to give Jesus a grounding in God's word, which he quotes constantly with a deep understanding of its meaning. We also need to be well-versed in the Bible. As Paul said, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Relying on God's Spirit and grounded in his word, we can do what God calls us to do. As it says in 2 Peter, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” (2 Peter 1:3-4) It is this participation in the divine nature that our passage from 1 John is referring to when it says, “Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” When we accept Christ, we become children of God. But growing up into the full and unblemished image of God that we see in Jesus is a lifelong process. Yet when Jesus returns, “we will be like him.” We will at last be the people God always intended us to become, ordinary people called and made holy by God, sinners redeemed by Jesus who shares his divine nature with us so that we, and not just the superstars, are all saints.