Re-membering the Saints

An All Saints Sermon

This past Sunday many churches celebrated the feast of All Saints. Below is a version of the sermon I preached at Christ Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Gospel text was Luke’s version of the beatitudes found in Luke 6:20-31.

In Wendell Berry’s novel, Remembering, Andy Catlett is a broken man.  He is away from his home in Port William, Kentucky—lost in the anonymity of a San Francisco hotel.  It’s a place where he feels the peril and promise of being whatever and whoever he wants.  No one knows him here and so he has a kind of freedom that he rarely feels in the community in which he has lived all his life.  And that freedom is tempered and tempted by the brokenness of his body.

A few months before, helping some neighbors with their harvest, Andy suffered the loss of his right hand—caught in a corn picker and severed from his arm.  The loss has left him depressed, quarrelsome, not sure of who he is anymore.  He is a man who has been dismembered and is longing for a wholeness he cannot grasp.

We may not have lost a hand, but many of us have a similar longing to be made whole.  We feel disconnected—from ourselves, our community, the life of the world around us.  For some that disconnection is a longing for a home to which we cannot return, our way blocked by obstacles rising from the seas around us.  For others it is a feeling of unsettledness in our soul like a silty lake stirred up, the waters muddied.  Whatever the source and symptom, our response is a desire, a longing for which we need a name.

Saint may seem an odd word for the object of that longing.  Yet in its truest sense, I think saint is just the right name.  To be a saint is to be made whole, to discover and live into the fullness of who we are at our center.

That definition of sainthood is one I learned from another Kentucky writer, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton spent much of his time in a small off the grid shack at the Abby of Gethsemane, 80 miles south of the farm where Wendell Berry wrote Remembering.  There in the quiet of the woods he wrestled with his call to be holy.  Holiness might seem a straightforward thing for a monk, but in his reflections written from that place, New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton came to a vision of sainthood far different from what any stereotypes might present.  Merton wrote that “For me to be a saint means to be myself.  Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”

Finding out who we are, our true selves, is difficult and dangerous work.  The danger is that in our desire to be ourselves, to be whole, we may think that we can become ourselves all on our own, that our identity is one we get to control.  “Be yourself” is a mantra captured by the marketers who have selves to sell.  They package them in the air brushed images of people we long to be—rich, full and laughing, praised by all. 

We see those possibilities flashing like mirages in the deserts of our lives; empty oases emanating from our screens.  Yet however full our stomachs have been, we know that it has not ended our craving.  However much we’ve laughed, we realize that it is a comedy of the absurd. Despite our purchases of paid for happiness, the prosthetics of our souls, we are still poor in spirit, hungry in heart, mourning the hard realities of being human. 

And it is exactly here, in this place of empty longing, that Jesus offers an openning to wholeness, the blessedness of being a saint.  I think Eugene Peterson’s Message translation of our Gospel reading captures Jesus’ teaching best:

“You’re blessed when you’ve lost it all.

God’s kingdom is there for the finding.

You’re blessed when you’re ravenously hungry.

Then you’re ready for the Messianic meal.

You’re blessed when the tears flow freely.

Joy comes with the morning.”

When we can recognize our need for wholeness, we are ready for healing, we are ready to be remembered in the life of God’s great communion.  But we must watch that we don’t fill the gap with substitutes before that healing arrives.  It is here is that the warnings of woe come in:

“…it’s trouble ahead if you think you have it made.

What you have is all you’ll ever get.

And it’s trouble ahead if you’re satisfied with yourself.

Your self will not satisfy you for long.

And it’s trouble ahead if you think life’s all fun and games.

There’s suffering to be met, and you’re going to meet it.”

On this occasion of All Saints, we are invited to be ourselves by being re-membered in the fullness of God’s love.  In the church year we celebrate the coming of Christ in the incarnation on Christmas, we celebrate the resurrection of Christ on Easter, and the coming of the Spirit to the Church on Pentecost.  But it is on this holy day that we remember ourselves, connected to all those that have gone before us and will come after us, each of us uniquely beloved by God and belonging to one another.  And when we forget our unique belovedness, as we so often do, we can trust that God and the communion of saints to which we belong will remember for us, recalling us to our fullness, reminding us of who we really are.

At the end of Berry’s novel Remembering, Andy Catlett returns home, home from the temptations of another life, home from the possibilities of the city.  When he arrives, his family has gone to visit neighbors and so, tired from his journey, he lies down to sleep.  He is drawn in a dream out into the countryside, guided by a shadowy figure into a familiar landscape that is now energized by light and song, “the song of the many members of one love.”  In the joy of that singing, Andy is able to see his community in its completeness, the veil of its seeming brokenness drawn back for a moment.  In his vision he sees every being from grass to trees to people, even the dead long lost, are gathered in a common “membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.”  And in this song, Andy remembers and is remembered—he is restored in joy, his lost hand now healed in the communion of Love’s great belonging.

This re-membering is the reality we celebrate on this day, recognizing that our wholeness is made not by being ourselves alone, but by being members of the one great song of all creation.  It is a song of love and praise, a joyful song to the God who holds us all, never forgetting who we are, ready to remember us even to very end of all time.  And those of us who go by the name of saints, the great chorus of this choir, are not those who have it all together or figured out, who are never poor, tired, or hungry; we are not those who have all our limbs or wits intact.  Instead, we are the ones who know that when we forget, we are held in God’s remembrance.  And whenever we need to know who we are, we can let God look at us; a gaze in whose reflection we can see ourselves again, alive in the unique reality of our belovedness.  God has called us to be saints, and however much we may forget who we are, God will not.  May we ask God and this communion of God’s people to remind us whenever we lose our true selves—we are, each of us, God’s unique and beloved children, saints made whole in God’s love.  Amen.