Meherrin Presbyterian Church
November 2, 2014; All Saints’
1 Samuel 21:10-15; Psalm 34:1-8, 22; Matthew 5:1-12
Madmen and Other
Saints
On the occasion of
All Saints’ Day, an event in which the church sets aside time for a recognition
and remembrance of those who have passed before us in the life and history of
the church, the Revised Common Lectionary offers up a couple of curious
scripture passages for our reflection.
Now I could have preached from Revelation 7, an apocalyptic vision of
the saints in glory, or from I John 3, similarly concerned with
post-apocalyptic glories.
On the other hand,
the Beatitudes, as recorded in Matthew 5, points us towards our own behaviors
in the here and now, and if we want to fit it into the theme of the day one
could suggest that conforming to these behaviors is one way to live as a
“saint,” whether of the more formal, Catholic type or the unofficial but no
less meaningful Protestant usage.
We shall come to the Beatitudes later. First, though, this psalm demands our attention.
On the surface,
perhaps we could wonder why this psalm is appropriated for this particular day
in the liturgical year. Don’t get
me wrong; it is a wonderful psalm of praise. It puts before us the image of unceasing praise before God –
a beautiful, if daunting, task. It
offers the witness of the psalmist to the constant care of God, testifying to
the reader that God preserved the psalmist in “every kind of trouble.” It
encourages the reader to trust in the Lord. It closes with the beautiful reassurance that “The Lord redeems the life of his
servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.”
It
is beautiful and reassuring, and again, one could stretch the example given
here as an exemplar of the attitude that might be characteristic of those we
call “saints.” However, the psalm,
and the whole connection to this talk of saints itself, takes a different twist
when we consider the heading attached to the psalm.
Someone
– we don’t know who, and there could be many people involved – gathered these
psalms up from different sources and compiled them into the collection we have
in our Bibles today. Beyond
arranging the texts, someone or ones attached descriptive sentences or phrases
to the beginning of many of the psalms.
Sometimes that heading simply indicates the presumed author, such as
David. Other times another
descriptive phrase is added, possibly indicating a particular type of song or
even a particular tune to which the psalm should be sung.
The
description of Psalm 34 is a little different. It reads, “Of David,
when he feigned madness before Abimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went
away.” Curious story, it
seems, and that’s where the added reading from 1 Samuel comes in. The psalm seems to come from that
period of David’s life when he was on the run from an angry King Saul. He flees to Gath, where the king –
Achish, not Abimelech – and his court seem to be under the impression that
David is in fact a king, which causes David to fear for his life, and to
pretend to be insane rather than have the king attempt to detain him or kill
him. Why the psalm names a
different king we don’t know, although earlier in 1 Samuel 21 David encounters
a priest named Abimelech, so perhaps we should just allow for the possibility
that some poor scribe got confused.
Now
it’s probably not news to us that the course of David’s life did not run
completely pure. His notorious
adultery with Bathsheba, and subsequent murder-by-military-maneuver of her
husband, are hard to ignore even for the staunchest of saint-makers. On the other hand stories like this one
– David feigning madness to get out of a fix – is an altogether different
characteristic to consider. It’s
not exactly a sin, or evil, but it is … well, kind of goofy. Odd. Quirky. And yet
David remains one of the great heroes of Hebrew Scripture, and revered as one
of the earthly ancestors of Jesus of Nazareth.
On
the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. If we look closely at the lives of some of the most revered
saints in the history of the church, we find some oddities there as well. Take, for example, Francis of Assissi,
namesake of the current Roman Catholic pope and possibly one of the most famous
or highly regard of saints in that particular canon. Francis, like the famous theologian and fellow saint
Augustine, had lived a fairly raucous and roisterous high life before entering
the church and taking up his peculiar service to it. One of the more famous stories about Francis is his
practice, for which he claimed the compulsion of the Holy Spirit, of going out
into the fields and preaching the gospel to the birds of the air and creatures
of the field. Now the story has
become familiar with time and perhaps has lost its shock value, but let’s face
it; were we to see a preacher take off from the pulpit and start preaching
sermons in the open field to the passing pigeons or blackbirds, we most likely
would not regard the act as one of extreme holiness. We’d probably wonder what’s wrong with that person, and
perhaps think about calling for help.
Francis’s contemporaries had roughly that kind of reaction to his
pastoral sermons.
Lots and lots of 'em...
The
novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner put it this way on the idea
of saints:
Many
people think of saints as plaster saints, men and women of such paralyzing virtue
that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil deed their whole lives
long. As far as I know, real saints never even come close to characterizing
themselves that way. On the contrary, no less a saint than Saint Paul wrote to
Timothy, "I am foremost among sinners"… .
In
other words, the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and
their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for
some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene
was possessed by seven devils, that Saint Augustine prayed, "Give me
chastity and continence, but not now," that Saint Francis started out
as a high-living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint
Simeon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pillar, you figure
that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even
ourselves.
God chooses some highly imperfect, sometimes rather strange
human vessels to accomplish divine things. Maybe this is a comfort to us, a reminder that we, no matter
how unfit or unholy we might consider ourselves to be, are still capable of
being used by God to do God’s work in the world. Or maybe it’s not such a comfort, reminding us that no
matter how unfit or unholy we might consider ourselves to be, we’re still not
off the hook. Either way, the
result is the same; a saint is a vessel for the action of God, and that still
just might include us.
Turning to those Beatitudes from Matthew 5, we are again
reminded that it is no frivolous business to take up Jesus’s challenge to
follow. As one reads through these
blessings – “blessed are the poor in
spirit … those who mourn … the meek … who hunger and thirst for righteousness …
the merciful … the pure in heart … peacemakers … persecuted for righteousness’s
sake … when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil
against you falsely on my account – Rejoice and be glad!” That’s really what it says – “Rejoice and be glad!” First of all, it’s impossible not to
wonder “how do I ever get to the point where I can do that?” OK, being merciful we can manage
sometimes, and mourning we can do sometimes, but let’s face it; this list is
profoundly challenging and difficult to conceive in our lives.
Beyond
that, though, it’s hard to avoid a second question: “what happens to me if I
live like that?” It’s hard to
conceive of the meek inheriting the earth when we mostly see meek souls getting
trampled into dust. Peacemakers
tend to be reviled and passed over in favor of warmongers and practitioners of
violence. We need only to hear
about another gruesome video out of Syria or Iraq to understand being
persecuted, and to know we aren’t persecuted no matter how much some alleged
Christians might whine.
And
yet there are those who try.
Clarence Jordan turned from theology to farming, opening up an
interracial ecumenical community in south Georgia in the teeth of Jim Crow-era
racism. There were threats and
attacks, but Koinonia Farms still carries out that legacy today, long after its
founder’s passing, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, an offshoot of those
efforts, still continues the fight for racial justice today.
Doctors
continue to give of their time and skills to fight horrible diseases in some of
the poorest countries in the world, even when they get treated with disrespect
and cruelty at home. Volunteers
continue to seek out disaster areas to help rebuild. Teachers still teach in the midst of grinding poverty and
hostility. Missionaries reach out
in the face of hopeless conditions.
Ordinary Christians reach out to help children in border zones when
political and media talking heads scream outrage. And sometimes these saints are even Presbyterians.
None
of these people are perfect. They
may have cheated on their spouses or cheated on their taxes. Yet they are being used to do justice
in the world. They are being used
to show love to all of God’s children.
They are being used to show mercy to those in the most need of it. And when the simple act of receiving
the stranger in your midst can get you branded as un-American or treasonous or
worse, or demanding justice can get you tear-gassed, it’s no small thing to
continue to be used that way. It
can become more than a quirk or oddity; it can cost you your reputation, your
job, your family, maybe even your life.
In that respect, there is something a little saint-like about it.
You
know who the saints have been in your own life, or in the history of this
church. Treasure those names. Remember them. But don’t turn them into plaster saints
or airbrushed portraits, bereft of all human failings. You know that’s not what they
were. They were human beings, full
of both good and bad, whom God inhabited and used – despite their best efforts,
sometimes – to bring justice and mercy and love and hope into places and lives
that no longer remembered what those things looked like or felt like. We have been preserved by their
example. We have learned from
them. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ve
even been them, sometimes. Or
maybe we will be.
For
madmen and madwomen and other saints, Thanks
be to God. Amen.
...who thee, by faith, before the world confessed...
Hymns (PH '90):
For All the Saints (526)
The Church's One Foundation (442)
Lord, I Want To Be a Christian (372)
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