Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10, 13-14; Psalm 149; Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17; Matt. 5:1-12

The November Epistle has been printed – thanks to Pat and Penny and Judy and Jeanne – so please pick up your copy in the narthex. I bring that point up now – rather than waiting for the Announcements portion of the service – because I learned a very important and humbling lesson in writing my column for the Epistle.   As all of us know, these are challenging times in the Episcopal Church, especially today, when Gene Robinson will be consecrated Bishop of New Hampshire.

As I wrote I struggled to balance truth and compassion, forgiveness and repentance.  I tossed the first two drafts because they didn’t seem right, and I polished and tweaked and edited the third and final draft probably a dozen times.  By the time I finished, I could probably have recited it from memory.  So you can imagine my surprise when I brought the Epistle home to Pam a few days ago and she spent all of about ten seconds reading it before she said, “There’s a typo.”

Well, as you all know, words are very important to me, and I think I do a pretty good job stringing them together. And I’m also something of a perfectionist, so I don’t have much patience when I fall short of my own expectations. And I had a pretty human response when I realized that this piece that I’d worked so hard on had a glaring typo in the third paragraph: I blamed somebody else.  I couldn’t have made that mistake, I thought.  It must have happened after I’d written the column: in the printing, or in the copying, certainly not in the writing.  So I checked the original, and there it was, plain as day for everyone – even me, now – to see.

After I finished beating myself up over the fact that I wasn’t perfect – which seems to be less surprising to everybody else than it is to me – I sensed that there might be a lesson there. A lesson that sometimes we have such concrete expectations of something or someone that we’re no longer able to see them for what they are.  My preconceptions and familiarity with the column blinded me to its details.  I knew it so well that I couldn’t see it for what it was.

Jesus certainly recognized that human failing. He often says stuff like “let anyone with ears to hear, listen” (Mark 4:9).  At first that might seem a little redundant, or even non-sensical, but it’s actually pretty profound. He’s saying that a lot of the time we make up our minds way in advance, and we might not even know that we have.  So we go through the motions, but since we already know the conclusion, we don’t have the ears to listen, or the eyes to see, what’s really happening.

Today’s first reading is a perfect example of that.  Now most people haven’t heard of Ecclesiasticus – which is a book in the Apocrypha that only crops up twice a year in our lectionary – but they have heard of a book by James Agee and Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which takes its title from Ecclesiasticus. The reading begins by talking about famous people: rulers and wise men and composers and other well-to-do folks. And so we probably assume that Agee and Evans, who were hired in 1936 to write an article for Fortune Magazine, wrote about the rich and famous. Maybe CEOs or senators or even the president himself.

Not so.  Agee and Evans spent four weeks with a poor family of sharecroppers in the Deep South. The extreme poverty they witnessed led them to take their title Ecclesiasticus, because after all the mentions of the rich and powerful, it goes on to say that

of others there is no memory;
they have perished as though they had never existed;
they have become as though they had never been born,
they and their children after them.

And that’s precisely who Agee and Evans wrote about: poor families struggling day to day, nameless, ignored, forgotten.  So it was that the preface of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was a quotation from King Lear:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?

The folks at Fortune magazine were expecting an article; Agee and Evans brought them a four-hundred-page manuscript, which they promptly rejected, as did several book publishers.  Their book was finally published in 1939, and quickly faded into obscurity.  It came back into print in 1960, though, when we as a society were ready to read it for what it was: an indictment of injustice and poverty, and a recognition of who the real heroes are. The ones who really deserve recognition, even though they rarely get it, and even if they did, would trade it in in a heartbeat for a roof, a bed, and a hot meal.

The reason that we read this passage from Ecclesiasticus on All Saints Day is that it’s easy to think of the saints as the rulers and wise men of Christianity.  A lot of the saints are famous, starting off with the apostles down through St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Teresa of Avila and on and on. And even among the saints we make distinctions between the minor ones, and the really important ones who get printed in bold in the Prayer Book. 

We must ask ourselves, though, what makes someone a saint? Is it fame, or recognition, or a certain number of miracles?  Are saints people who were especially holy, especially devout, recognized by everyone around them as saints-in-the-making?  Are they the ones who, in the words of Ecclesiasticus, “have left behind a name, so that others declare their praise?”

Or, perhaps, could some who “have perished as though they had never existed” also be saints? Could saints have walked among us and been ignored by the rich and famous? Could they have led their faithful lives and returned to God without the world ever taking notice?

Frederick Buechner once wrote: “In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief.  These handkerchiefs are called saints.” I think that’s a lovely image, because a handkerchief is silent, and humble, and overlooked by those who have it all. But when someone really needs a handkerchief – to dab a tear of mourning, or wipe a nose of sickness – it can mean the world to them. A handkerchief offered them means that someone else cares, that they can regain their composure and dignity, and yet never be asked to deny that they’re ill or sad or human.

Random, silent handkerchiefs-in-waiting rarely make the headlines in the newspapers or the bold print in the prayer book. They would never be considered famous. But these quiet, countless acts of selfless devotion are the stuff of which saints are made, and remembered.

In just a few minutes I’m going to read a rather long list of names. 202 names, to be precise.  And in order to get through the service before it’s time for lunch, I’m going to read them one after the other. Maybe take one second for each one, or two seconds if it’s an especially long name.  But these aren’t any old names: they’re the names of people who mean a great deal to one or more of us here.  Who lived on this earth for years and years, and made other lives the better for it. Who were silent, willing, loving handkerchiefs on the road of sorrows and ills, never asking for thanks or recognition.  And now remembered in a heartbeat, without context or explanation.

Why do we read this list of names today? It’s All Saints Day, we’re told, so we remember our loved ones whom we hope are with the saints in heaven. Or perhaps we dare to believe that our parents and siblings and children and spouses and cousins and friends who are on this list are saints, small-S without bold print or italics, saints to us, if nobody else. 

I ask you to dream grander this morning. To dare to dream – to claim – that the loved ones who have preceded you on this earth are the very saints we remember today. That they sit in the heavenly kingdom beside the apostles and Francis and Thomas and Teresa.  That they are precisely whom the writer of Ecclesiasticus was talking about when he said of those who “perished as though they never existed:

These also were godly men,
whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten,
Their offspring will continue forever,
and their glory will never be blotted out.
Their bodies are buried in peace,
but their name lives on generation after generation.

These also were godly men, and women, even if their names will never appear in history books and are remembered by us alone.  They are the saints who inspire us; who live on in the wisdom they passed down to us, even when we didn’t feel like listening; who move us to tears in their remembrance, precisely because of the joy they brought us while they were still here. And their names live on generation after generation, precisely because we remember them here, together.

It’s easy to get distracted from the reason why we’re here, today, of all days.  To look to the events in New Hampshire that threaten to split our hearts and evoke tears of joy for some and of sorrow for others.  And it’s easy to get caught up in what we do, and the efforts we make to be perfect, when all we end up doing is assuming we know the answers at the very beginning, and not taking the time to see that God, more often than not, gloriously fails to live up to our expectations, and instead keeps dropping handkerchiefs with names here remembered along our path, “in his holy flirtation with the world.”

Today, of all days, is when we need to have the ears to hear.  To hear the voice of God, amid the tumult of dissention and disagreement, and amid the proclamations of society that the rich and powerful – and famous – are the ones who deserve to be remembered. Today, in this place, the people who deserve to be remembered are the people who are dear to this community, who made us what we are, and who will never, ever be forgotten. They are our saints, and the saint of any one of us is the saint of us all. Let us join together to remember the people who, in so many ways, paved the way for every one of us to find our way to this place today. Famous or not, it is their praises we sing this morning.

[Home] [Worship] [Sermons] [Youth] [Mulch] [Projects] [Info]