A Sermon for the Sunday in the Octave of All Saints

Let the words of mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be always acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord my strength and my redeemer, Amen.

            On Thursday, 1 November 2012, The Feast of All Saints, the following e-mail was forwarded to me from an old college friend: “With great sorrow we have learned that Dr. John Reist, Professor Emeritus of Christianity and Literature, died after a long illness early this morning at Hillsdale Community Health Center.  May he rest in peace.  The Provost’s Office”

I still remember the first day I met Dr. Riest.  He was assigned as my academic advisor.  I met him, and was immediately terrified.  He was a short, bombastic Midwesterner who was not afraid to speak his mind.  He would wander around our conservative little campus dressed in a tweed jacket and cap, giving the peace sign combined with a quick and abrupt “QUACK!” or, “Hey-Whoa Man!  Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!”  He was quite a shock for the quiet, just-out-of–high-school me.  I spent most of my first semester terrified of my academic adviser, trying to figure out how to dump him for someone else.  I never did, and I am so thankful for that.  He was a tremendous professor, mentor, and above all else, Christian, and to this final point he touched many lives including my own.  As a product of the un-catechized generation, I sat one afternoon in his office, distressed over something, but I cannot even remember at what now.  He asked, “Ian, what do you believe?”  Stunned, unsure what to say, I just sat there, and sputtered.  Then he said, “Well, what about, “I believe in …?,’” and continued to recite the Apostles Creed.  I sat for a few moments, and went on to struggle with that question for a long time.  He was one who delighted to pop bubbles, to challenge, and to help his students grow.  It was in this that he introduced me to the following poem by W. H. Auden:

(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

            It was in this poem that I became familiar with what it really means to be a saint, and that we live in a world that redefines it as simply to being good, and doing what the world says to do is not to be a saint; this is what Auden ridiculed in his poem, to be a saint is not a tidy thing that can be defined by a bureaucracy.  To be a saint is to live un-abandoned for Christ.  Dr. Reist -- Big John -- is a saint.

            I want to swing now back to the 6^th Century, and talk about a saint who is very much a part of our English Christian Heritage, and one of my favorites.  He had many names, but I always refer to him as Saint Columba; I think simply because it reminds me of the name of the movie character Columbo, but that is neither here nor there; others refer to him as Colum Cille, or Chille.  Saint Columba was an Irish missionary monk to the Picts, but his story is much more complicated than that.  He was a noble tribesman in Ireland.  He felt the call to be a monk, and started to live as one.  He was passionate about many things, and many miracles were attributed to him.  However, one day, after studiously copying a Psalter from an Abbot, a disagreement erupted.  The Abbot wanted both the Psalter, and the copy, back.  In Columba’s hot-headedness, he went to war with the Abbot.  At the end of the day about two hundred men lay dead.  This was unacceptable to the church, and punishment had to be laid down.  The church decided to give him a chance for repentance and exile, which he took. He left Ireland with twelve companions, and traveled to the Island of Iona in Scotland where he started what would become the famed monastery on Iona.  He chose this little island, because from there he could no longer see his homeland.  From his new home he would go on to evangelize the Picts, shining the light of Christ in a very dark land.  I think I like Columba so much because he so thoroughly messed up, so completely fell away from the life of righteousness, and so much followed the way of the flesh, it is painful to think of.  Yet, in true repentance and true acceptance of the wrong he had done, God took his life, and used him as a powerful force to spread the gospel in dark lands.  St. Columba’s life reminds me that no mater how badly we fall away, there is sufficient enough grace to cover that.

            These are but two stories of saints gone before us, ancient and modern, and we can think of many more.  The man who must come to everyone’s mind is our priest and friend Fr. Henthorne; another saint gone before, and of course Clyde, and Indira, and Caroline, and the list goes on and on.  This is only a part of what a saint is.

            Last week, as people filled out their All Saints remembrance cards, I thanked one of you for doing it and teased to make sure you fill it completely, and you joked back, “I don’t know that many saints.”  We laughed, and then you said, “Well, perhaps I’ll put myself down as well.”  You were much closer to the truth of the matter, as I’m sure you knew, when you made the joke.  For we, too, are saints, in the truest sense, for it is saints that make up Christ’s church.  And, if we remember the traditional three-fold break down of the church -- the church militant, the church expectant, and the church triumphant -- we are the church militant; the faithful here on earth.  What then is it to be a saint?

            To be a saint is that we abide in Christ.  St. John, the Epistle writer, says several times in the New Testament Lesson for this morning, “abide in Him,” for this is the mark of a Christian, that we might fully live in the grace of Christ.

He warns, do not love the world.  He is not talking here about the created world, or the people of the world, for these are things that God created, and God loves.  Rather, he is talking of the realm in which sin reigns.  We are to flee from sin; we must flee from the world, that is, the world of sin.  St. John goes on to describe the root of this evil, of this ‘realm’ of sin.  For the ‘realm’ of sin is rooted in lust and selfishness.  Lust being the passionate and overarching desire for something, the desire to selfishly rule over another. This is why sexual lust is so dangerous; it does not love, but rather desires to rule over the entirety of the other person.  But, it is not just sexual lust that the Saint is talking about; it is all lust.  Lust for power, lust for stuff, lust for things that are not ours; in this so much sin is rooted, for it does not trust in God for His provision, and it does not trust in His love.  The second part of the root is the same -- selfishness, and self-boasting.  For when we boast in ourself, we do not boast in God.  And, we do not truly trust in Him, realizing all good things come from Him.  Our labor may be much, but it is by His grace that we labor, and it is to His glory.  These two things stand in stark contrast to each other -- the lust for things and glory, or the giving of ourselves, and dwelling in God’s glory.  Saint John knows the only choice is to give up our selfishness, to put on Christ, and to live in His glory.  For in the love of God, there is life.  In the Grace of God is the fullness of all things, apart from it is only destruction.   For lust does not give life, it destroys life.  Lust can do no other thing, so we as saints, flee from such things.

Saint John continues to divide these two things, and describes one type of person; the Antichrist as he who is against Christ; he who denies the divinity of Christ, the incarnation; he who would deny the will of the Father.  This type of person is against Christ, not for Him.  The fruit of this are lies and deceit.  John realizes that he who would be against Christ, cannot dwell in the community of Christ, for there is a stark contrast between those who are against Christ, and those who are for him.  They cannot abide with Christ, because they long for things that Christ cannot provide.  Saint John is of course speaking about a very specific group of people here.  He is speaking about the early Gnostics, who were the root of the first heresies confronting the church.  Gnostics claimed to have a secret wisdom and knowledge, which only they possessed.  Theirs was not the Gospel of Christ, for the Gospel is freely given; it is no secret.  The Gnostics rather, desired power, and to give glory to themselves instead of to Christ.  They wanted something in return for the knowledge they claimed to posses.  This is not the way of the Gospel of Christ, for the Gospel is freely given, it is freely understood.  The Gospel of Christ is nothing new.  Rather, the Holy Spirit freely rereleases it.  But this revelation does not make something new.  Rather, it reinforces the old.  It does not divide; it unites.  There is an old rule of faith, called the Vincentian Canon, that says we shall not believe anything that has not been believed at all times, in all places, by all people.  I think this is exactly what St. John is talking about.  We cannot create our own faith.  Rather, we dwell in that which is reveled to us by the Holy Spirit, of that which is old, that which has been passed down from our grandfathers, to our fathers, and to us.  The faith of the Church, is not new, but stands firm on the Law of Moses, revealed through the prophets, completed by Christ, and understood through the Apostles. It is this that the patriarchs lived in, and it is this that we must live in.  It is when we dwell in the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which we know that we cannot, and will not shrink away from the grace of Christ, that we dwell in Christ’s righteousness.  For we put away ourselves, we put away those desires and lusts and we put on Christ’s righteousness.  It is in this that our old selves die, and it is in Christ that we are reborn, and made anew.

This is what it is to be a saint; that we flee from the realm of sin, that we flee into the arms of Christ, that we abide Him, that we are anointed by the Holy Spirit (for this is what confirmation is an outward symbol of, the anointing of the spirit), and from this place we continually strive for Christ’s righteousness; not our own.  For this is what the saints who have gone before us knew, this is what St. Columba knew, this is what my dear friend John knew, this is what our dear Grandville knew, what Clyde knew and what Indira, and Caroline knew so well.  And, this is what we know and we pray every day; that we would grow in this knowledge, and that it would be our guiding motive for every moment of our life.

Amen