Searching For Saints - Mark 12:28-34
Today, we observe All Saint’s Sunday. A lot of times when we think of saints, our
minds may go to the Catholic Church and their many saints…they seem to have a
patron saint for everything. For
instance, one we are familiar with is Saint Christopher, the patron saint of
travelers (and for the stock car race this afternoon, he is also the patron
saint of automobile drivers). There are
Saint Barbara, the patron saint of storms.
Fishermen get double coverage with Saint Peter and Saint Andrew. Brendan the Navigator is the patron saint of
boatmen and mariners, along with whales and dolphins. Other animals have their own saints, Gertrude
of Nevilles is the patron saint of cats and Vitus is the patron saint of
dogs. For teachers, there is Saint
Catherine of Alexandria; for salesmen and saleswomen, there is Saint Lucy of
Syracuse; and for accountants there is St Matthew the Apostle. If you have a job, there is mostly likely a
“saint” of that occupation. For those,
however who are looking for employment, there is Saint Cajatan who is the
patron saint of the unemployed and of job seekers. Saint Gratus of Aosta is there for those
afraid of insects and I’m not sure if this is for the parents or the youth, but
Saint Aloysius Gonzaga is the patron saint of teens. In 1999, St. Isidore of Seville became the
Patron Saint of the Internet. One of the
newest saints, just canonized mid-October, was St. Manuel, patron saint of
educators and scientists.
Yet, you know, we Protestants don’t really recognize
the whole multitude of saints and venerate them the same way our Catholic
brothers and sisters do. And it really
isn’t the Catholic Church that makes a person a saint. So what does makes a person a saint?
Let me begin by offering to you what doesn’t make a
person a saint:
There were two
brothers, corrupt and evil in their ways.
They were rich and used their money to keep their ways from the public
eye. They even attended the same church
and looked to be perfect Christians.
Then, their
pastor retired and a new one was hired.
Not only could he see right through the brothers’ deception, but the
Holy Spirit definitely flowed through him, and the church started to swell in
numbers. A fund-raising campaign was
started to build a new sanctuary.
All of a
sudden, one of the brothers died. The
remaining brother sought out the new pastor the day before the funeral and
handed him a check for the amount needed to finish paying for the new building.
“I have only one condition,” he said.
“At his funeral, you must say my brother was a saint.” The pastor gave his word and deposited the
check.
The next day
at the funeral, the pastor did not hold back.
“He was an evil man,” he said.
“He cheated in business and abused his family.” After going on in this vein for a small time,
he concluded with: “But, compared to his brother, he was a saint."
You cannot buy someone sainthood…however, I think in
today’s Scripture passage, Mark gives us a clue as to what a saint looks like…
Jesus and the Sadducees were arguing about the
resurrection (they did not believe there would be a resurrection, yet they
tried to trap Jesus by asking him whose wife a woman that was married multiple
times would be when she got to heaven).
Noticing the debate, and possibly trying to catch Jesus off-guard, one
of the scribes comes up and asks Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?”
Without missing a beat, Jesus responded: “The first
is, “Hear O Isreal, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with
all your strength. The second is this,
“You shall love your neighbor as your self.
There is no other commandment greater than these.”
When the scribe, probably awestruck, acknowledged
Christ as giving the right answer and said that this love of God and neighbor
was more important than any burnt offering, Jesus said, “You are not far from
the kingdom of God.”
Where is Jesus talking about a saint in that
passage? Well, he does not actually say,
“this is the definition of a saint” or “this is what a saint looks like,” but I
would offer to you that he paints us a picture of a saint. A saint would be those who follow the
commandments of God, meaning that a saint would be one who loved God with all
her or his heart, soul, mind, and strength and loved their neighbor as their
self.
What it mean to love God with all one’s heart, soul,
mind, and strength? What it means is
that our love for God is to be a total commitment. It means that we are called by the Word, by
Christ, to love God completely. Our love
for God is to be a total commitment of our whole lives. It means we cannot claim love of God on
Sunday morning and be either Saturday night “sinners” or Monday morning
“slave-drivers.” It means we cannot
claim to love God with our thinking, but continue living any way we please, or
seek to live God’s will in one area while disregarding another---we cannot say,
“God, you can have my have my money but do not tell me how to run my business”
or “God, I will give up my gambling and drugs for you, but leave my sexual
activities alone.” God wants it all…loving
God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength means that we are seeking
to love God with our whole lives…every aspect of our lives…all the time…24
hours a day…seven days a week…365 days a year….
Jesus says the second is like it, “Love your neighbor
as yourself.” But who is our
neighbor? Mark does not go into that
here…but when Luke records a version of this conversation, someone asks Jesus,
“who is my neighbor” and Jesus responds with the Parable of the Good Samaritan[i]…suggesting
that anyone that we come in contact with, anyone that our lives touch in any
way…that is our neighbor. Jesus tells us
to love our neighbors, to love everyone we come in contact with, to love
everyone our lives touch, just as we love ourselves. This does not mean that if we hate ourselves
we can hate other people. It is the
premise for the golden rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.” You are to love everyone, treat
everyone, just as you would want to be loved or treated. To love our neighbor as ourselves means that
we have to reach out to everyone, anyone who we interact with the love that
Christ has given us, the love that we want to feel from God. We cannot pick and choose who we love, it has
to be across the board…we are called to love them regardless of their age,
regardless of their gender, regardless of their income, regardless of their
social standing, regardless of their education, regardless of their skin color,
regardless of their background. We are
called to love them in the same way we desire to be loved.
“But preacher, Jesus said that the first commandment
was to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. Can’t we just focus on that, can’t we forget
about this neighbor thing…that is even harder than loving God 24/7/365. Let’s just do one and forget about two.” My neighbors, it is not that easy. We cannot claim to love God and not our
neighbor…John dealt with this in one of the congregations he interacted with
and wrote them: Those
who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are
liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have
seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love
their brothers and sisters also.”[ii]
Brothers and sisters, to be a saint, to
aspire to be a saint, means loving God completely, with every aspect of our
lives and loving those around us, regardless of who they might be. I do not say all of this to suggest it is
hopeless, to suggest that none of us our good enough to be “saints” (because
we’re not). I offer this because we need
to know where we need to go with out lives.
And we cannot do it alone.
Sainthood is not attained by those who try to do it all by
themselves. Sainthood comes to those who
look up to God and say, “My life is a mess.
I am having trouble turning my (social, business, personal) life over to
you. I am having trouble loving this
person. Help me Lord. I want to do what is right, I want to be a
saint for you. I want to live for you in
all that I do.” And my friends, when we
take that step, when we just turn to God and admit how helpless we are without
him, we have begun the journey to sainthood because God will reach down from
the heavens and touch our lives and give us the strength and the direction that
we need if we just open ourselves up to it.
He will fill us with His Spirit to strengthen us and enable us to love
as He asks us to.
Are we searching for saints? Let us search no longer and allow God to
create one anew, right now, today, in us.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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