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“Don’t Call Me a Saint!”

Sermon by Chad Miller
on Luke 6:20-31
given November 4, 2007

Our Scripture lesson this morning comes to us from the Gospel according to St. Luke. We will be reading from the sixth chapter beginning at verse 20. If you would like to follow along you will find the reading on page 55 in the New Testament section of the pew Bible.

As you probably well know, the readings for each Sunday come from the “Revised Common Lectionary,” which is more or less a big long list of Bible passages selected for every Sunday over a three year period that rotates from year A to year B to year C. We are presently in year C. During year C nearly all of the Gospel lessons come from the Gospel according to Luke.

And this fact is making me decidedly more uncomfortable every time my turn to preach approaches.

Perhaps you remember just a few weeks ago when it was my turn to preach, I was lucky enough to have received from the lectionary the wonderful parable from Jesus about the poor man who dies and goes to eternal paradise and the rich man who dies and goes straight to hell.

And this was just one of many, many stories from Luke’s Gospel that make we, who are rich, squirm.

Today will be no different. Luke presents Jesus to us as a person on a prophetic mission to change the way things have always been. Jesus’ mission is to lift up the lowly and bring down the powerful. Luke’s Gospel, from beginning to end, is structured around God’s preferential choice for the poor and marginalized. So, for we who are neither poor nor marginalized, we will either be troubled by Jesus’ words, or we have to dismiss them.

Today we will not read a parable that will make us uncomfortable. No, instead we will read from Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain—Luke’s version of the better known Sermon on the Mount given to us in Matthew’s Gospel. These words of Jesus, I promise, will at the very least make you uncomfortable and perhaps even challenge every rational thought you have ever had.

As the new associate pastor who really likes his new job, I am not convinced that the Gospel according to St. Luke is helping me to secure long term employment here. I am beginning to fear what might happen to me in the future, since every time it is my turn to stand here and talk, I end up talking about how we, the rich, are in serious trouble when it comes to following Jesus.

However after my sermon on Lazarus and the Rich Man a friend and member here handed me a quote that said, “Our responsibility is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

So, I guess I should warn you. Prepare to be afflicted.

Let’s Pray. (Scripture Reading: Luke 6:20-31)

On this celebration of All Saints Day, as we remember those who have died, I would like to turn your attention to a Christian who died in 1980, a woman by the name of Dorothy Day.

You might already be familiar with Dorothy Day. In fact, a movie came out back in the 1990’s about her called “Entertaining Angels.” Dorothy Day was the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, which is a group of Christians who live in radical solidarity with the poor. They literally live with the poor, sharing all they have—food, possessions, and shelter. They do this in order to more fully live as Jesus Christ called his followers to live.

During the great depression, Dorothy Day resided in Hell’s Kitchen, a very rough area of New York City. Her mission was to help feed and house anyone who needed it. She opened her home to anyone and everyone. She created the first of what would be come many “houses of hospitality,” which is a place the poor can stay as long as they have need.

Throughout her life, Dorothy Day lived with the poor, helping those who were often deemed unworthy of help like drunks and addicts. Through her life that was dedicated to Jesus Christ and they way of self-sacrifice he taught his disciples, Dorothy Day helped to save thousands of lives—both spiritually and physically.

But what is most compelling and most wonderful is that Dorothy Day was often known to say, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

Our understanding of the term “saint” has taken a pretty major shift from its original use in the Bible. Throughout the New Testament, a saint is simply someone who is a follower of Jesus. The saints in the New Testament are synonymous with God’s people. According to the Bible, everyone here who is trying to follow in the way of Jesus is a saint.

However, over time we have begun to see saints as people set apart from us—the people who really do God’s work on earth—people like Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King Jr. or Dorothy Day or our own local Bill Perkins.

Sometimes I wonder though; do we set these people apart to honor them of to protect ourselves from them?

I wonder; if at times our praise is really just a complimentary way of letting ourselves off the hook.

It is not just the “Saints” we dismiss with high praise. If you are anything like me, you are also very tempted to praise the life and teachings of Jesus to the point of trying to be a committed, faithful disciple impossible.

O Jesus, Son of God, you go ahead and love your enemies and turn the other cheek. Aren’t you a saint?! Only you could do that; I could never be that good.” Every time I have these dismissive thoughts about Jesus, all I can hear are Dorothy Day’s words coming from the mouth of Christ. “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

So, if we don’t dismiss these challenging teachings, what are we supposed to do with them?

Jesus rejects everything that we assume is rational. Jesus turns common sense on its head. Everything Jesus said in the passage we read is absolutely counter intuitive!

Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the hated?! Despite what we would like to think, according to Jesus, being rich, full, happy, and honored are not the signs of God’s blessings.

To further insult our understanding of what is sensible, Jesus goes on to tell his followers to love their enemies, do good to those who hate them, bless those who curse them, pray for those who abuse them. Jesus even tells his followers to not resist violence and to show a ridiculous level of mercy and generosity to everyone.

You would have to be a, a, a Saint to live like that! These ideals of Jesus are surely not possible or even practical for that matter!

And right as I am about ready to dismiss all this Jesus stuff as at best too demanding or at worst completely insane, a very profound thought strikes me.

The world is a seriously screwed up place.

And if I am honest, much of the time I am a pretty screwed up individual.

Most of the solutions we repeatedly employ to fix ourselves and the world—more work, more money, more comfort, more pleasure, more protection, more power—have been used throughout all of recorded history, but we continue to face the very same problems with the very same failed solutions.

We think that war will solve our problems, but after thousands of years of killing one another, we are still killing one another. We think accumulating material wealth will solve our problems, but again after thousands of years of accumulating stuff we just have a lot of stuff and even more problems. We think that having fun and being happy all the time will solve our problems, but after thousands of years of pleasure-seeking it appears we have only accomplished to create a many cultures that objectify people and are full of brokenness, emptiness and depression.

“I once heard someone say that the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over again expecting different results.” Clearly, most of us are insane. Then along comes Jesus, the only person who speaks of radically different ideas and behaviors. Jesus speaks to us the language of non-violence, peace, forgiveness, grace and love. Jesus’ life shows us the way of self-sacrifice, the cross and transformation. Jesus comes to us and says, “Wake up! There is a better way! Things do not have to be the same as they have always been!”

To be completely honest as I look at our world that is full of wars and rumors of more wars, a world where starvation, slavery and suffering run rampant, I am desperate for that better way, no matter what it might demand of my life. What we dismiss as impossible, ridiculous, something only a saint could do, might just be the key to our salvation.I say this not because I have everything figured out or because I am an exceptionally good disciple or because I think will be easy. What Jesus has laid out, as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, is clearly difficult if not almost impossible. In fact, if being a Christian is easy for you, I would venture to say you are doing it wrong. Following Jesus is really very hard. But when we look at those Saints of the church, the ones we know personally and those we know only by name, who did follow as Christ has called; amazing things have taken place in our nation and the world. As counterintuitive as Jesus’ words may seem, the Saints who have faithfully lived by them have given hope, light, love and life to world desperate for a better way.

But there is not time to tell you of the Saints Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, Edith Stein, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Simone Weil and so many others who walked in the Christ embracing his radical call to discipleship and the better way of self-sacrifice. But let’s not call them saints; so that we don’t so easily dismiss them. Amen.

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