the Saints of God
These sermons are not extemporaneous, you know. We read and think and plan, and write these things out ahead of Time. Even so, it often ends up not at all having said what I started out meaning to preach.
Please be seated.
Frederick Buechner, gifted writer and clergyman, remembers* two completely different novels, one by a Christian, one by an atheist, with the same contemplations of being a saint in two completely different men.
In one novel is a disgraced Catholic priest, a seedy drunkard who, facing death, is contemplating how easy it would have been to be a saint instead of the failure that he let his life become. This priest realizes that he could have made everything so different at every turn, every decision, every crossroads, so easy to have been a saint.
In the other novel there’s a conversation between two atheists, one a journalist, the other a physician, a doctor who is trying to halt a devastating plague. Contemplating life, one of them says to the other, “It all comes to this: what interests me is learning to become a saint.”
I’m thinking about blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. My birthday was Tuesday.
Monday morning I woke up realizing I would never again wake up so young as 85,
but knowing that if you make a wish,
and keep it secret, all to yourself,
and take a deep breath, and
blow out all the candles in one puff,
your wish will be granted, your wish will come true.
Instead of being 86, my wish was to wake up Tuesday morning SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD.
That’s no wilder than some of the credible fantasy fiction I read that captures my imagination.
But instead, Tuesday morning I was granted the privilege of waking up at all - -
- - to look in the mirror, and accept what is, and contemplate what film critic Roger Ebert in his delightful memoir calls “Life Itself ...” - -
- - how I have done these 86 years.
And (now that I did not get my birthday wish) knowing I will never again be younger than 86, contemplating how and what to make of whatever may be ahead of me ~ in life.
Is it too late to become a saint?! I sing a song of the saints of God, but truly, I never even thought about being a saint.
I am what has been called “a cradle Episcopalian,” meaning my parents were Episcopalians, who raised me in the Episcopal Church, with a deep awareness of it.
I grew up having drilled into me that I was in a family of Episcopal clergy, eight priests before me, including one bishop; and knowing what was expected of me as “my call” in life, my destiny - -
- - one might say, my fate - -
- - which I accepted within myself when I was ten years old. I remember the moment, it was very personal and private, I’ve never shared it, never will.
You know when you are alone with God, and that was my moment of commitment, as in the hymn “All to Jesus I surrender”!!
But in my life I bolted from that commitment, renouncing it at age 19 and changing to a career as an officer in the U S Navy - -
- - not picking it back up for a quarter-century, until I was 43 or 44, the day my Pennsylvania rector at the time summoned me to his office and confronted me with “How much longer are you going to deny God’s call on your life?” - - and, stunned, I responded (as I’ve often told you), “Oh what the hell, I give up.”
The relief was instantaneous and overwhelming.
A year or so later - - on my 45th birthday, September 14th, 1980, my first day in theological seminary, I knew I was “home at last, home at last, thank God Almighty home at last”. You know you’re “true to your call” when it’s so comfortable that you finally feel right in life.
It has not been perfect, not by a long shot. FAR from smooth and easy: a challenge of Being - - every pastor encounters difficult people, plus ordained into a structured religious institution, yet being myself no matter what. I’ve found over the course of my life, including as a priest, that others’ expectations of me were vastly different from my knowledge of myself, who I was and am (and am NOT).
I am not so great. I am fortunate, blest in life, I have loved very deeply and been loved, but I am neither wise nor brilliant. I know myself.
I have not been, nor especially wanted to be, what, at various times, others have thought of me, for me. (Even at times against me! But as someone wrote, “Anybody who never made an enemy ain’t worth a damn”.)
Just before being ordained, we take a series of nationally administered General Ordination Exams, we write over a period of several days; and I remember a question on the first day: Is your faith settled, or still forming? And I realized and wrote that my faith was still in process of development.
That was forty years ago, as long as the children for Israel were in the wilderness with Moses, and it’s still true: church theology, liturgy, lex orandi lex credendi, Baptismal Covenant and Creeds aside, I’ve been all over the religious and spiritual map. That can be a plus or a minus: I’m certain of nothing except that for me freedom to ask questions is worth more than being given somebody else's answers, doubt is more faithful than certitude**.
In my seminary years I studied at Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, and Roman Catholic seminaries in a Washington DC area consortium, and the most assuring thing I remember is a proverb inscribed in the lintel over the library door of the Episcopal seminary: SEEK THE TRUTH, COME WHENCE IT MAY, COST WHAT IT WILL.
I can warn you that seeking, the search, can become very costly indeed, as anyone who has taken EfM surely knows. “What IS truth?” Pontius Pilate asks Jesus as he looks into the face of Truth Itself. I look at you and see Jesus, but I do not find absolute Truth in creeds, dogma, doctrine. I find Truth in honor and integrity. And I will say that being open to Truth still, everyday, in groups or alone, in EfM, here with our adult Sunday School class, seeking Truth is my salvation. At 86, all my life an Episcopalian and more than forty years clergy, I’m still questions seeking answers that I know I’ll never find, because they are not MEANT to be found: have you ever gazed out into the universe, the heavens, the night sky through a powerful telescope? God is incomprehensible, and will not be fully known to us, even in Jesus Christ - -
- - settling into that has become my faith as a Christian, that:
Jesus healed the sick, but Jesus did not come to heal.
Jesus raised Talitha, Lazarus, and another Young Man from the dead, but Jesus did not come to raise the dead.
Jesus forgave sins, but Jesus did not come to forgive sins.
Jesus saves, but Jesus did not come to save.
[[For adults: if your Christian faith is that Jesus came to be crucified and die so God could forgive your sins and save you from hell into heaven when you die, your God is too small, you are living in Sunday school kindergarten or nursery, you need to grow up as a Christian]]
Jesus came ~ To Proclaim The Gospel that the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, a realm of love: chesed, agape, lovingkindness, and to invite you IN.
Nothing else matters.
I’m no saint, never have been, may never BE. And it’s okay. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Jesus loves me just as I am, the way I am - - anyway, nevertheless, and notwithstanding. Jesus loves me, and calls me to love you; to love you no matter what.
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Sermon/homily in Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, Panama City, Florida on Sunday, 19 September 2021, Proper 20B. The Rev Tom Weller, Episcopal Priest (Retired), Priest Associate of the Parish. Text: Bible readings for the day, Sequence hymn, “I sing a song of the saints of God”, and Frederick Buechner’s essay “Two Answers” (reprinted below). TW+
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* Buechner, "Two Answers" (scroll down)
** notwithstanding John Irving/Johnny Wheelwright's bitter cynicism toward the Reverend Lewis Merrill's doubt ("A Prayer for Owen Meany")
Two Answers
WHAT DOES IT mean to be a human being? There are two fine novels, written over twenty-five years ago, one by a Roman Catholic, the other by an atheist, both of which are much involved with this question. In The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene, the hero, or nonhero, is a seedy, alcoholic Catholic priest who after months as a fugitive is finally caught by the revolutionary Mexican government and condemned to be shot. On the evening before his execution, he sits in his cell with a flask of brandy to keep his courage up and thinks back over what seems to him the dingy failure of his life. "Tears poured down his face," Greene writes. "He was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint, and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint." And in the other novel, The Plague, by Albert Camus, there is a scrap of conversation that takes place between two atheists, one of them a journalist and the other a doctor who has been trying somehow to check the plague that has been devastating the North African city where they live. "It comes to this," says one of them. "What interests me is learning to become a saint."
-Originally published in The Magnificent Defeat