UCC Church of Charlotte

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For all the Saints
Psalm 146
Mark 12:28-34

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.

All Saints Day.  Not a big celebration in the Protestant church.  We
name a few churches after the saints.  Well, the Evangelical &
Reformed side of the UCC did.  Not quite the “done thing” among us
Congregationalists.  We might mention them when we name the Gospel
writers.  But we don’t have feast days.  We don’t often include them
with our prayers.

So we have a strange mix of definitions of saint.  We have a
caricature of the Catholic practice, so we think a saint is someone
from the church a long time ago who is dead.

We have the southern use of the word.  Usually it is used about
someone whose spouse is difficult.  “O Lord, she must be a saint to
put up with him.”

And we have the Biblical use of the word.  The word saint does not
show up in the Gospels.  It is only used in Paul’s writing and
Revelation.  And the word saint is never used in the singular.

So what is a saint?  And why are there no singular saints?

In Mark, we have a scribe, one who is trained in the Torah, the
covenant of God, asking Jesus what the great commandment is.  Is it
the dietary laws, or the Sabbath observances?  Is it the Temple rules
or festivals?

The greatest commandment is this:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one;
and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.'  The
second is this, `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is
no other commandment greater than these.
    
Saints in the Bible are those who are saved, those who follow Jesus,
those who have been touched by the Holy Spirit, those who seek to live
out these twin commandments.
    
In other words, saints are us.  And saints are the long line of
faithful people living in covenant with God, those here today, and
those who have gone before.

Why is saint never used in the singular in the Bible?  Because
covenant and church are about community, community formed for and by
the saints, formed for and by the observation of the covenant of
faith.  It is made for and by the love of Christ which our healing and
our message.

We are the church because we have found our life made whole and made
new in the grace and love of God.  And we are the church because we
come together to live this out with one another and offer it to the
world.

Lest we let sainthood go to our heads, let us remember, none of us is
a saint alone.  And the reason the message is so much about
forgiveness is because none of us has gotten it anywhere near close to
perfect.

But I did experience the church as the gathering of the saints this past week.

Last Sunday, we prayed for my wife Mary who was having surgery the
next day.  It was one of those diagnostic procedures where if they
find anything, they can fix it.  And we had a bunch of saints praying
for and with us, and couple of saints sitting with me in the waiting
area.

The surgery was successful in finding some things that needed fixing
and fixing them.  But one of the procedures was a test, and it
discovered that her fallopian tubes are pretty much blocked.  We have
been trying to have children for a couple of years now.  So this news
came as a mixed message.  On the one hand we learned what it was that
was causing our difficulties.  Not knowing can be incredibly
frustrating.  Those of you who heard her preach this summer, when she
was honest about venting frustration at God, this was the frustration
being vented.  Why isn’t this working?  Why give us a dream of
children and not let it happen?

And then there are the difficulties of those who do not know how to
handle such grief, frustration or pain, and so offer flippant answers,
mostly out of kindness, but extremely unhelpful.  “All you have to do
is…” is usually the start of something better left unsaid.  It ranks
up there with “Oh, that’s nothing, you should have seen…”

Even as the news let us know what the problem was, it left us with
difficulties.  There are procedures to open the tubes, but they have a
low success rate now and a high risk of difficult or dangerous
pregnancies later.  There are in vitro fertilization procedures which
are expensive both monetarily and emotionally.  So we have been
grieving our difficulties this week.  And we are taking the time to
talk, and think, and pray, and discern what is best for us and how we
wish to head forward.

I am telling you this not because we desire a congregation full of
medical advisors.  Rather Mary and I realized as we talked with people
about it that so many people face issues around fertility, but nobody
talks about it.  So many people have come up to her or me and said
that they faced similar difficulties and decisions.  And people have
come to such different places about fertility.  There is no one right
answer to match all situations.  There is no one way through this
wilderness that fits every person or every couple.

And how many other pains and griefs are also experienced by so many
people, but nobody talks about them.  How much depression is caused by
the false belief that we are the only one to go through this, we are
alone in our suffering.

The church ought to be one of those places where we can talk about the
truth of our lives: the truth of God’s love and the glorious moments,
and the truth of our wilderness moments, our frustrations and our
griefs.  This ought to be the place where all parts of our lives
receive a compassionate hearing rather than flippant answers and
misguided platitudes.

And this past week, I have discovered that this is such a place.

The care given by saints in this church to Mary and me has been a
healing grace.  The people who have been honest about speaking their
pain have shared parts of their lives with us in what I hope has been
a healing way as well.

So when we give thanks for the saints in our lives, for the faithful
people who hold us when we hurt and build us up when we feel small and
challenge us to live our faith daily, let us do so for all those who
have gone before, who have made possible such a community as this,
such a faith as this, such a place as this.

And let us give thanks for those saints around us, who by their faith,
our faith is strengthened - those who help us to live out these
greatest of commandments: to love the Lord our God with all our heart
and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength; and to love
our neighbor as ourselves.  And let us speak the truth about our
lives.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.