Saints

Outside St. James Church in Shere, England, you will find a metal plaque marking the site of the cell of Christine Carpenter, Anchoress of Shere 1329.

An anchoress was a person who would withdraw from common life to dedicate themselves to God and bind themselves to the church by living the rest of their earthly life within a small cell. Much like many anchorite abodes, Christine’s small cell was attached to the church and installed with a small opening through which she would receive food, and a squint window into the church that allowed her to participate in services.

As noted on the plaque, Christine’s life as an anchoress began in 1329. She explained to the Bishop of Winchester that she wished to be removed from the world’s distractions to lead a more pious life. This request was granted following queries into Christine’s moral qualities and chastity, and she was sealed into the cell in July of the same year. As she began her lifelong vow of seclusion, a burial service was read for she was considered dead to the sinful world, the cell being her symbolic tomb.

Despite her oaths, Christine broke out of the anchorage after almost three years and attempted to rejoin society. Having broken her holy vow, Christine was threatened with ex-communication. It is perhaps this threat that led Christine to return to seclusion and isolation. By October of 1332, she had called on the Pope to pardon her sin on the condition she return to her anchorage. This she did, and there she remained for the rest of her mortal life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It may sound attractive to seal ourselves away from worldly temptations. However, God calls his people to something much more difficult: Dying to the world while still living in it (Gal. 6:14). We are to be living saints (Phil. 4:21, Eph. 4:12), in the world with all its temptations and trials, so that we become testimonies to God’s grace and salvation.

Some say that prayer, and "the spiritual life", or "the inner life", or the soul's private love affair with God, is an unaffordable luxury today, or an irresponsible withdrawal from the pressing public problems of our poor, hurting world. I say just the opposite: that nothing, nothing is more relevant and responsible; that nothing else can ever cure our sick world except saints, and saints are never made except by prayer.

Nothing but saints can save our world because the deepest root of all the world's diseases is sin, and saints are the antibodies that fight sin.

Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.

Paul likens us to shining stars, and the word shine means to reflect. The scientific term is albedo. It's a measurement of how much sunlight a celestial body reflects. The planet Venus, for example, has the highest albedo at .65. In other words, 65 percent of the light that hits Venus is reflected. Depending on where it's at in its orbit, the almost-a-planet Pluto has an albedo ranging from .49 to .66. Our night-light, the moon, has an albedo of .07. Only seven percent of sunlight is reflected, yet it lights our way on cloudless nights.

In a similar sense, each of us has a spiritual albedo. The goal? One hundred percent reflectivity. We, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord. You cannot produce light. You can only reflect it.

There was a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a metro-transit operator named Linda Wilson-Allen. She loves the people who ride her bus, learns their names, and waits for them if they're late and then make up the time later on her route. A woman in her eighties named Ivy had some heavy grocery bags and was struggling with them. So Linda got out of her bus driver's seat to carry Ivy's grocery bags onto the bus. Now Ivy lets other buses pass her stop so she can ride on Linda's bus.

Linda saw a woman named Tanya in a bus shelter. She could tell Tanya was new to the area and she was lost. It was almost Thanksgiving, so Linda said to Tanya, "You're out here all by yourself. You don't know anybody. Come on over for Thanksgiving and kick it with me and the kids." Now they're friends. Linda has built such a little community of blessing on that bus that passengers offer Linda the use of their vacation homes. They bring her potted plants and floral bouquets. When people found out she likes to wear scarves to accessorize her uniforms, they started giving them as presents to Linda.

Think about what a thankless task driving a bus can look like in our world: cranky passengers, engine breakdowns, traffic jams, gum on the seats. You ask yourself, How does she have this attitude? "Her mood is set at 2:30 A.M. when she gets down on her knees to pray for 30 minutes," the Chronicle states. "'There is a lot to talk about with the Lord,' says Wilson-Allen, a member of Glad Tidings Church in Hayward."

When she gets to the end of her line, she always says, "That's all. I love you. Take care." Have you ever had a bus driver tell you, "I love you"? People wonder, Where can I find the Kingdom of God? I will tell you where. You can find it on the #45 bus riding through San Francisco. People wonder, Where can I find the church? I will tell you. Behind the wheel of a metro transit vehicle.

In his book The Pastor, Eugene Peterson describes his wife Jan's understanding of what it means to be a pastor's wife. As I read Peterson's words, I was struck with how apt the description was not only for pastor's wives but for all Christians as they enter fully into the life of the body of Christ.

And so, I would like to modify Peterson's words slightly and substitute church member for pastor's wife. See if you don't think this is a good description of what life in the church should be:

Being a church member is a vocation, a way of life. It means participation in an intricate web of hospitality, living at the intersection of human need and God's grace, inhabiting a community where men and women who don't fit are welcomed, where neglected children are noticed, where the stories of Jesus are told, and people who have no stories find that they do have stories, stories that are part of the Jesus story. Being a church member places us strategically yet unobtrusively at a heavily trafficked intersection between heaven and earth.

The following list contains four distorted images of the church:

• The church as a gas station. For some people today, the church is a place where you fill up your spiritual gas tank when you're running low. Get a good sermon, and it will keep you going for the week.
• The church as a movie theater. For many people, the church is a place that offers entertainment. Go for an hour of escape, hopefully in comfortable seats. Leave your problems at the door and come out smiling and feeling better than when you went in.
• The church as a drug store. For other people, church is the place where you can fill the prescription that will deal with your pain. For many the church is therapeutic.
• The church as a big box retailer. Other people see the church as the place that offers the best products in a clean and safe environment for you and your family. The church offers great service at a low price—all in one stop. For many people, the church is a producer of programs for children and young people.

Anglican priest and author Michael Green shares the following story to remind us of the impact of our actions long before our words:

I read about a missionary candidate in language school. The very first day of class the teacher entered the room and, without saying a word, walked down every row of students. Finally, still without saying a word, she walked out of the room again. Then she came back and addressed the class. "Did you notice anything special about me?" she asked.

Nobody could think of anything in particular. One student finally raised her hand. "I noticed that you had on a very lovely perfume," she said. The class chuckled.

But the teacher said, "That was exactly the point. [It] will be a long time before any of you will be able to speak Chinese well enough to share the gospel with anyone in China. But even before you are able to do that, you can minister the sweet fragrance of Christ to these people by the quality of your lives."

Chris Heuertz is the international director of Word Made Flesh, an organization that helps the world's poor. In his book Simple Christianity, Heuertz writes that one night in particular stands out in all his world travels. While walking the streets of Kolkata, a destitute region in South Asia, Heuertz and his companions—Josh, Sarah, and Phileena, Heuertz's wife—stumbled across a person lying under a filthy, fly-infested blanket. A three-foot trail of diarrhea was making its way toward the gutter. It was obvious to anyone passing by that the person under the sheet was either dead or dying. Heuertz writes:

My pal Josh tapped the body on the shoulder to see if the person was dead. The body moved. Josh pulled the blanket down from the face that it covered to see a helpless young man, maybe twenty-two years old and visibly stunned by our approach. As soon as he realized we were there to help him, he began weeping uncontrollably. A crowd gathered. He continued to cry.

We didn't have much to work with, but our friend Sarah grabbed a bottle of water and some newspaper. She began cleaning the young man, wiping the diarrhea off with the newspaper and rinsing him with the water. We asked him his name. Tutella Dhas. He was lost, afraid, alone. His body was a leathery-skinned skeleton, and his bulging eyes accentuated the shape of his skull. He kept crying.

We tried to get a taxi, but none would stop. The crowd grew. No one wanted to help. Two more friends happened to be walking down the street just then, and they were able to find a taxi. They took Tutella Dhas with them and headed off to Mother Teresa's House for the Dying. Phileena, Sarah, Josh, and I stood there in disbelief.

I lifted my head and caught sight of a church and its sign less than five feet where we found the dying Tutella Dhas. The sign read, "All are welcome here." It may have been what inspired someone to drop Tutella in front of the church. But was he welcome? People from the church watched as we helped Tutella, yet the gate remained closed.

Eighteen hundred years or so of Hebrew history, capped by a full exposition in Jesus Christ, tell us that God's revelation of himself is rejected far more often than it is accepted, is dismissed by far more people than embrace it, and has been either attacked or ignored by every major culture or civilization in which it has given its witness: magnificent Egypt, fierce Assyria, beautiful Babylon, artistic Greece, political Rome, Enlightenment France, Nazi Germany, Renaissance Italy, Marxist Russia, Maoist China, and pursuit-of-happiness America. The community of God's people has survived in all of these cultures and civilizations but always as a minority, always marginal to the mainstream, never statistically significant.

—Author and pastor, Eugene Peterson

In Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness, Kathryn Greene-McCreight describes her tortured journey through ten years of extreme depression and bipolar disorder. Concerning the importance of Christian fellowship while in recovery, she writes:

This is why it is so important to worship in community—to ask your brothers and sisters in Christ to pray for you … Sometimes you literally cannot make it on your own, and you need to borrow from the faith of those around you. Sometimes I cannot even recite the Creed unless I am doing it in the context of worship, along with all the body of Christ …When reciting the Creed, I borrow from the recitation of others. Companionship in the Lord Jesus is powerful.

Milton and Laura Acosta were a part of a church family while Milton studied nearby at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. When he finished his PhD, they returned to Milton's native Columbia to teach at a seminary. Milton once wrote about their church building in Medellin, Columbia:

We are attending a Baptist church in Medellin. We are using what used to be one of the houses owned by a prominent drug dealer. The guy was shot dead by the police a few years ago. Now all his properties are in the hands of the government. Some of them are rented out to people. This particular house where the church meets has a discotheque, movie theater, soccer field, basketball court, swimming pool, fitness room, bar and kitchen, a stable for ten horses, and a huge house with a fountain at the entrance. The sanctuary is what used to be the discotheque.

Now that's a transformation to thank God for! A drug dealer's compound is now a church building. Churches—the people, not the buildings—are supposed to be miracles of transformation, like a drug dealer's playground becoming a home for the holy.

In the later months of 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was angered by General George B. McClellan's inactivity despite superiority in numbers over the Confederate forces. In the end, he wrote McClellan a letter consisting of only a single sentence:

"If you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully, A. Lincoln."

If you are a saint, God will continually upset your program, and if you are wedded to your program, you will become that most obnoxious creature under heaven, an irritable saint.

All our action ... must be peaceful, gentle, and strong. That suggests ... an immense depth, and an invulnerable steadiness which come from the fact that our small action is now part of the total action of God, whose Spirit, as another saint has said, "Works always in tranquility."

Fuss and feverishness, anxiety, intensity, intolerance, instability, pessimism and wobble, and every kind of hurry and worry--these, even on the highest levels, are signs of the self-made and self-acting soul; the spiritual parvenu.

The saints are never like that. They share the quiet and noble qualities of the great family to which they belong: the family of the sons of God.

If we desire a simple test of the quality of our spiritual life, a consideration of the tranquility, gentleness, and strength with which we deal with the circumstances of our outward life will serve us better than anything that is based on the loftiness of our religious notions, or fervor of our religious feelings.

Not only are we the freest of kings, we are also priests forever, which is far more excellent than being kings, for as priests we are worthy to appear before God to pray for others and to teach one another divine things.

I have a friend who radiates joy, not because his life is easy, but because he habitually recognizes God's presence in the midst of all human suffering, his own as well as others'. ... My friend's joy is contagious. The more I am with him, the more I catch glimpses of the sun shining through the clouds. Yes, I know there is a sun, even though the skies are covered with clouds. While my friend always spoke about the sun, I kept speaking about the clouds, until one day I realized that it was the sun that allowed me to see the clouds.

Those who keep speaking about the sun while walking under a cloudy sky are messengers of hope, the true saints of our day.

Saints are people who manage to love God more than life itself. They manage to love neighbor more than self and thereby find true life. Saints are people who just push their way into our modest present and make the God-question and the neighbor-question the only interesting intellectual questions. Christians are those who've learned to think with the saints, and thereby we think much more creatively than we could if we'd been left to our own devices.

St. Francis, Martin Luther King, Gideon, Mary--they help us to think beyond ourselves. They help us to think despite ourselves and thereby in this act of holy remembering and saintly thinking, new options are envisioned. We are encouraged; a new world not of our own devising is offered to us. We get some big ideas.

One of the great nineteenth-century preachers was a Scottish Presbyterian, Alexander Whyte, a wonderful man with a powerful sense of the evil that resided in the depths of his soul. His biographer says Whyte served a congregation that dearly loved him for nearly forty years.

One day a lovely lady came to him and said, "Dr. Whyte, I just love being in your presence. You are so saintly."

Alexander Whyte looked at her with great seriousness and said, "Madam, if you could look into my soul, what you would see would make you spit in my face."

Oh, sweet it is to know, most simply, that the soul loves Him; not as it should love Him, truly, and not "more than these," with a glance of self-consciousness around; but that indeed it does love Him.