Preached at Christ Church, Worton and St Mary’s, Potterne
Ephesians 1.11–23; Luke 6.20–31
“…from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.”
‘Like A Good Hand At Bridge’—the East Wall at All Saints’, Margaret Street, London W1, © Gerry Lynch, 17 November 2017
“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” Dorothy Day, the American pacifist, radical Socialist, feminist, and devout Catholic, has this among the pithiest of her large collection of pithy sayings.
And we can all see where she’s coming from, can’t we? Who’d want to be a saint? Saints have to be good all the time. I mean—boring! And anyway, we all know we’re not good all the time. We swear at people when they cut us off when we’re driving, and most of us, when we thought nobody was looking, have probably picked our noses. And we all know that we have a few faults that are rather worse than that.
Sainthood is all very well and good for the saints, but for most of us, it feels like setting out on a lifetime of dreariness only to set ourselves up to fail in the end. It can also feel like something that takes us out of doing practical good in the world for the sake of an impractically otherworldly set of ideals. I think that’s where Dorothy Day was coming from: it’s easy to dismiss a saint as someone whose actions are well beyond the capacity of the rest of us to achieve, and whose ideas are well beyond the capacity of any society to put into action.
But hang on a minute. The Bible, and the Gospels in particular, tell us lots about the first generation of Christian saints. And all of them, at least some of the time, were total car-crashes! They often don’t get what Jesus is really about because their image of God is so limited, but more than that, they’re often selfish, vain, glory-hunters!
The St Peter of the Gospels is a case study in self-centred cluelessness, who liked to play the tough nut but couldn’t deal with the pressure when Christ was arrested—yet he was the rock on which Christ built the Church. St Paul was so hard to put up with that even sweet, gentle, St Barnabas – Barnabas the encourager – stormed off and abandoned him. And when you put Peter and Paul together in a room, there could be fireworks, because they couldn’t stand one another. That’s even before we get to the Sons of Thunder and all the rest of them.
In the Creed every Sunday, we say that we believe in “one holy catholic and apostolic Church”. We say that our Faith is the same as that of the apostles, that we are part of the Church founded by the apostles. Well, this is what the apostles were really like, if we believe the Bible—not pious plaster statues, but real people with real faults; real faults that didn’t prevent them being the instruments of God’s work in the world.
That’s what being a saint is about: not being someone who is always good, but someone whose dark side hasn’t prevented them from living for Christ, from doing the Father’s work, in the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s not just people like Peter and Paul and Augustine and Alban and all that lot who are called to be saints: I am called to sainthood, and so are you, strange as that may sound.
Today’s Gospel reading is full of what seem to be demands impossible even for a saint. Let’s start with, “Love your enemies?” How good are you at doing that? I don’t mean tolerating your enemies’ existence, or grudgingly forgiving them through gritted teeth because it’s your Christian duty, but actually, you know, loving them?
It might be possible if your enemy is some abstract figure in the distance – some ancestral enemy of your people like a Samaritan or a German or a Muslim. That’s relatively easy: Jesus taught us about a Good Samaritan, and we all know there are good Germans and good Muslims. Anyway, we might not even encounter many Samaritans or Germans or Muslims in an average day.
But what if your enemy is someone who, day in and day out, is making your life miserable: the violent spouse, or the spiteful boss in the job you can’t get yourself out of, or the drug-dealing neighbours whose badly-raised children fill the early hours with blaring music and screamed arguments? Can you really love them?
What about the idea that if someone strikes you on the cheek, you should turn the other one to them? Or that if someone takes your coat, you should offer them your shirt too? Are you always with Jesus on this? Because I can foresee some problems with how all this hangs together. One is the obvious question of whether, when we turn cheeks and give to those who steal, we’re just empowering people to go on and abuse others, others who may be weaker than ourselves. Beyond that, if we take seriously that human beings have immortal souls and will, after their lives in this world, face divine judgement, are we actually doing unto them as we would wish others would do unto us, if we turn the other cheek and let them steal from us? Even a saint couldn’t pick their way through that thicket of moral quandaries.
On the surface, these are simple commandments in principle but very difficult to live out in practice, a beautiful call to live with superhuman love. Dig deeper and even the principles are more difficult.
I’ve heard these lines, and similarly challenging aspects of Christ’s teachings rationalised: that Jesus didn’t really mean what he was saying, you know fully and completely, he was just trying these things to grab people’s attention.
That conveniently puts these tough teachings in a little box and domesticates them so they can’t disturb us. But I think that’s a nonsensical approach. I think Jesus meant these sayings to disturb people across time and space. Why has Jesus set us these impossible standards? I can think of two reasons why.
One is that if we try valiantly to live out these precepts, that even when we fail to match their standards fully, they stretch us to live better lives, with more love and forgiveness, than we would otherwise manage.
The second reason is that all of us fail sometimes, and need God’s forgiveness. Therefore we should try to make space for God to forgive others; to make space for God to love others in all their faults even when it is beyond our capacity to do so; to accept God will judge even our enemies with forgiveness with which we trust He will judge us. Even saints need to be forgiven much.
God calls you and me in all our failings to be his saints. Real saints, like the Peter and Paul of the Bible rather than the Peter and Paul of the pious plaster statues, saints who get things wrong and even do things they know are wrong, but persevere in trying to live lives that share the love their Saviour has for them, mostly in very ordinary ways in very ordinary lives. You might not be comfortable with the idea that you are a saint; that doesn’t mean God isn’t making you into one.
Even Dorothy Day couldn’t escape that. In 2012, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York opened the case for her canonisation with the Vatican.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
