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.”
“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?
