The Final ResCov Sermon: All Saints' Edition

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This past Sunday was not only All Saints’ Sunday (one of my favorite feasts of the liturgical year), but it was also my last service at Resurrection Covenant Church, a beloved community I have served at for 14 years (of my 16-year membership). I will write more about the church in the days to come, but for now, I wanted to share my last sermon with you all because it’s what been on the top of my mind in these tumultuous days as we think about what we can learn from the saints (transcript below).

What makes a saint? Often it seems we give one of two answers. The first is that we all are, or at least all the Christians who have shuffled off this mortal coil. In this definition, Saints then are simply Christians, especially dead ones. And yes, at its core, a saint is simply a “holy one,” someone set apart for the work of God—which is to say all Christian disciples. This is why Paul often addresses his letters, “To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi or Ephesus,” for example. And yes, this is true, as far as it goes. We are all saints, but sometimes that feels a little thin, a participation trophy that everyone gets after the game regardless of outcome. To adapt a line from The Incredibles: “And when everyone’s a saint, no one will be.” Hyperbole, of course.

But I think we’re also aware of those people in the world who seem different somehow, who embody a likeness to a particular aspect of Christ or display a unique gift of the Spirit in ways that make their lives seem to glow from within—a light that guides them and those they accompany on the journey. What makes this kind of saint? I think we again tend toward images of grand acts of faith or extreme obedience: Martyrs who laughed in the face of death, ascetics who struggled in solitary prayer for the world at the wild edges of society, priests who began reformation movements when the guttering flame of the church seemed close to being extinguished, prophets who fought against oppression to create a more just and peaceful world.

But this has problems too. These lives seem so unobtainable to many of us that we place these saints, and even the idea of sainthood, on the dusty shelf of a corner hutch with the rest of the googly-eyed Precious Moments figurines, and move on with our lives in the “real world.” Dorothy Day was aware of just this tendency when she quipped, “Don’t call me a saint, I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” And this is the problem with talking about saints. Too often we’re either all saints, or almost none of us are.

So, if we can avoid these two extremes, what does makes a saint? About a month ago, I was reading Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves’s Tomorrow’s Child, a book about the way rationalism, growth, and violence have constrained the Western imagination. In his conclusion, he uses a musical metaphor to suggest how we might inhabit the world in a different way, and I think this gives us a hint as to how we might define and better embody what a saint is.

“Living is like dancing,” he suggests. “As you dance you move your body according to a rhythm and a harmony which fill the space. The complexity of our human predicament is due to the fact that a number of conflicting rhythms and harmonies are being played at the same time. You cannot dance them all; if you try, you become schizophrenic and your body is split (or immobilized) by contradictory dynamics. Personality demands integration. As Kierkegaard once said that purity of heart is to will one thing only, so we might say that purity of heart is to dance to one rhythm only.

You may dance the tune played by the present reality. Your style of life will be realistic and pragmatic. Or you may choose to move your body under the spell of a mysterious tune and rhythm which come from a world we do not see, the world of our hopes and aspirations. Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance it.”

And to me, this quote proposes three essential components of a saint: two explicit and one implicit. To be a saint involves first attuning ourselves to the melody of God and God’s reign; second, we allow that melody to resonate with the unique and particular way that God has made us; and third, based on that attunement and personal resonance, we dare to step out and join the dance of the saints. I realize that all might sound a little abstract, so let me try to explain what I mean by taking them one at a time.

First, saints are those attuned to the sacred melody of God and God’s reign. And this may be one of the most difficult parts of all because, as Alves describes, there is a cacophony of melodies and rhythms playing at the same time, and many of them have the volume cranked to 11. There is the high-pitched whines of social pressures and expectations (well, Johnny is going to be playing baseball and taking karate lessons on the weekend, alternating with piano lessons and SAT prep. What is your child doing?); the literal and figurative beeps and buzzes of technology with its promises of greater productivity and ease; the easy-listening synth music piped from the spa promising peace and contentment if we spend enough time and money on a complex routine of self-care; the low thrums of fear and anxiety for the future; and then the incessant mm—ss, mm-ss, mm-ss (*noise of thumbing bass at a club*) of consumer capitalism urging us to buy our way to happiness. And when all this music plays at the same time, we experience that split that often leads to disintegration or immobilization—How do we ensure our children’s well-roundedness while being productive while climbing the corporate ladder while caring for ourselves and our bodies and souls while keeping in touch with everyone via social media? We can’t dance to all these melodies without going to pieces.

But beneath the noise, there is another melody. It won’t insist you dance to it by sheer volume or coercive rhythm, but it is always there, constant and unrelenting, though often unheeded or unheard. This is the melody of the future Alves speaks about, the song of God’s coming reign. And in each of our biblical stories today, we hear the prophets and apostles sing a melody of that promised future. The prophet Isaiah pictures a feast on a mountaintop with the best food and drink, where shame is banished, death is swallowed up, and the people rejoice in their salvation. In Revelation, John envisions a new heaven and earth descending, where God fully dwells with humanity and wipes away all our tears—where grief and pain and death are ended and all things are made new. And in John, Jesus gives us a foretaste of that deathless reign when he calls Lazarus out from the tomb, putting an end to the grief of Mary, Martha, and the mourners who had gathered.

These biblical witnesses have done what I think all saints do: they have attuned themselves to the melody of God’s future reign, not as a means of ignoring the pain or heartache or grief in the world, but as a means of hearing that melody so they can dance to it now. Like the old gospel hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing,” they are those who can sing, “Above earth’s lamentation, / I hear the clear though far-off hymn / that hails a new creation.” If we are to learn from the saints, we must learn to listen for that hymn of the future and attune our lives to it.

And this is one of the reasons I believe the contemplative practices are such an essential part of the contemporary Christian life. More and more, I’m starting to think that many of the good things we engage in—church ministries, acts of compassion, mercy, and justice, even many of our worship practices—can sometimes only add more noise if they do not arise from that deeper melody of God. Prayer without listening, action without contemplation, growth above without the corresponding growth in depth—I believe that this type of frenetic and unbalanced faith will eventually collapse on itself. Jesuit theology Karl Rahner once argued, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a mystic…or t[he]y will cease to be anything at all.” I don’t believe Rahner is arguing that we all must become monks meditating for hours in a hermitage until we levitate. Instead, I believe he is arguing that in a future that is only getting more chaotic and discordant, we will need the practices that the mystics and contemplatives throughout history have taught us—prayer, silence, meditation, stillness, breath, centering—to help us hear and attune ourselves to the melody of God’s reign—that far-off hymn that hails a new creation—if we do indeed want to live and act differently in a sustainable way. Saints are those who are attuned to the melody of God.

Second, saints are those who allow that melody to resonate uniquely within them based on the particular way that God has made them. Sometimes we think of saints as two-dimensional carbon copies of each other—all earnest piety, strict asceticism, and bold action. But nothing could be further from the truth. They are incredibly unique—bold and prophetic reformers, timid and scrupulous writers, careful theologians for the church and reckless fools for Christ—as diverse as the creation God has made. Desert Father Abba John explained it this way: “the saints are like a group of trees, each bearing a different fruit.” Or as C. S. Lewis put it, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.”

For us, then, the holy work we were put on this earth to do is not comprised of trying to be something we are not, our mental image of what a saint should be, but to become more of who we are. Trappist monk Thomas Merton is an excellent case study of this. If you read his early autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, it is a moving story of a man struggling valiantly to live a holy life and follow God’s call—and there is much to be praised in the integrity and whole-heartedness of that pursuit. Yet, you can also detect the shrill notes of moralizing, triumphalism, and certainty that often borders on a profound arrogance. He himself would look back on his youthful depiction of his vocational call and admit, “The Seven Storey Mountain is the work of a man I have never even heard of.”

In his striving to be a saint, Merton thought he had to become something different, something completely pure and wholly other. Fifteen years later, he would come to a much different understanding of sainthood, not one of striving for something out there but allowing something to resonate in here. “For me to be a saint means to be myself,” he explained. “Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact he problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”

What if being a saint does not require becoming something beyond yourself—striving for greater sanctity through sheer willpower or larger and larger shows of self-sacrifice. What if becoming a saint means becoming more of yourself—which means nothing more and nothing less than becoming more of who God made you to be?

But how? How do we do this? How we find out who we are? I think this is where the language of resonance can be particularly helpful. Resonance at its most basic is what happens when two sound waves with the same frequency meet and the sound is intensified or prolonged because they share this frequency. Let’s just assume that the song of God carries all frequencies of the good—everything that is beautiful and redemptive and creative is found within that melody. When we attune ourselves to that song, we will know resonance by what feelings of desires or dreams are intensified or prolonged within us. Resonance, to again borrow a line from the hymn, is what “sounds and echoes in our souls” from the song of God.

When you feel most connected to God and the holy, what are you drawn to? What makes you come alive? What brings you joy and helps you bring joy to others? That is your particular frequency at which you resonate with God’s song. Do you love organization and administration? Are you no more excited than when you get everything on the spreadsheet to work? That could be your road to sainthood. Or do you love making things by hand? Does creating something that is both beautiful and well-crafted bring you joy? That could be your road. How gloriously different are the frequencies of the saints!

But I think this is where we often run into two problems. First, because these are gifts that often come naturally to us, it can feel like it is not enough of a sacrifice to do what God has naturally created us to do. We have too often been trained to think that God’s will should be onerous. While we might not state it this baldly, this thinking suggests that if we don’t kind of hate doing something, it must not be God’s will. But if this theory of sainthood is accurate, it will be the things that we love that will draw us toward sainthood. This doesn’t mean there won’t be sacrifices, but they will be sacrifices made for a greater and higher love, not begrudging obedience to tasks we detest.

Second, often the work we are drawn to might seem…well, boring—not dangerous sexy or important enough to be the stuff of real sainthood. Working on a spreadsheet or building a cabinet, for example, doesn’t seem like it will earn us a feast day on future saints’ calendars. But what if those small and forgotten acts by often small and forgotten people is how the world is upheld? Perhaps my favorite quote on saints comes in the final sentences of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In describing the protagonist Dorothea, she writes, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

It may very well be that the greatest of saints are the ones we will never know—the ones who lived hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs—especially if Jesus indeed was serious when he asserted that the last will be first and the least will be greatest, that little children will lead us and foolish things will confound the wise.

Yet, there is one more step: after we have attuned to God’s song, after we have allowed that song to echo within us and resonate with the unique way God has made us, then we must choose to live in fidelity to that resonance, we must risk dancing to that music. And there is indeed risk. As Alves notes, resonating with God’s song will often mean clashing with the other musics of the world—those he calls realistic and pragmatic. To dance to the song of God’s reign will be countercultural because God’s song is one that challenges the foundational values of a sick system. After his beautiful reflection on God’s song Alves ends by saying, “You risk your life, and you take your risk to its ultimate conclusion, even the cross…It is worth the risk—even if we lose.”

Yes, there is risk involved in dancing to the song of God, but there is also risk in staying on the sideline—the risk of the buried talent, the missed opportunity, the half-lived life, of only having visited the world. So, friends, if you feel the resonance of God’s song drawing you to toward something, my hope for you, my challenge to you is to risk it. Get up and dance. For like any good dance, you won’t do it alone. The witness of the saints goes before you; this community dances beside you; and God works to draw all people into the song of God’s future reign.

Friends, as I end my time at ResCov, I cannot begin to tell you the way you have formed me. Over and over again, I have better heard the melody of God’s reign through your willingness to walk together in spite of difference, to extend boundless welcome, to care and advocate for the least of these, and to wrestle with difficult questions of faith without giving up. You have also helped me find my own place of resonance within God’s greater song. It was here where I fell in love with the words and symbols and the rituals of the liturgy, here where my pastoral identity was shaped, here where I discerned my call to teach—sent me out to be trained and received me back when I finished. And so often it was you, each and all, that gave me the courage to even, on occasion, dance.

I don’t know what will happen in the coming days. Tuesday, however it goes, will bring momentous change. But your call will remain the same whoever is president. Like the saints of every age, your job is to attune yourself to God’s song together until you feel it resonate with who God made this place to be. My challenge to you is to risk the dance. Risk the dance! Not for your own glory or good, but for God’s glory and neighbor’s good.