“Ordinary Saints”

“Ordinary Saints”

All Saints Day (Observed) Sunday, November 6, 2022

Psalm 103  Job 19:23-27a      Luke 20:27-38     Luke 6:20-31

First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho

Pastor Andy Kennaly

          People, even Christians, are good at compartmentalization. That’s a long word! Compartmentalization. If you search that word on the internet you discover it’s a defense mechanism that our mind uses. When things seem in conflict, we separate them, or disassociate in order to cope. Conflicting thoughts, feelings and emotions, or experiences often involve contradictions, but that’s uncomfortable. By splitting off part of the personality or mind, compartmentalization is an avoidance tactic. We don’t like anxiety or mental angst, and just like two notes on a piano can create dissonance, (maybe Annie can give us an example of that), so also thoughts or feelings can be conflicting. Dissonance is uncomfortable; we long for resolution (ask Annie to move from dissonance to resolution on the piano). At home, work, school, in relationships, people try and cope. The danger is that compartmentalization can actually be maladaptive, and prevent “people from processing their negative experiences.”  (https://www.choosingtherapy.com/compartmentalization/).

In the church we also have conflicting thoughts. We say we are made in the image and likeness of God, but we assign holiness to God. Even though the term “Christian” means ‘little Christ’, when we refer to Christ, this is mostly in reference to Jesus. Divinity is usually promoted as something that we are not, and in fact many church leaders, missionaries, and evangelists go to great lengths to teach there is a gap, a gulf, a sinful chasm that prevents us from participating in heavenly realms, other than through Jesus who acts as a bridge. Many Christians defend Jesus as being the only bridge, the only way to God, as if God is somewhere else.

So, liturgies develop, doctrines form, church practices, dogmas, have a way of moving through traditions and now we have All Saints Day where we mention people who have died, finished the race, fulfilled their baptisms, and now enjoy the unmediated presence of God. We even say that if they did certain things in life, had a miracle or two, they are assigned sainthood.

But this is compartmentalization, saying they are capable of being saints, especially now that they’re dead, but we are not. To say that we are saints sounds spiritually arrogant or religiously presumptuous or conceited, even blasphemous.

Jesus knocks down the dividing walls of compartmentalization. Even distinctions like mind/body/spirit are exposed as thin, misguided categories used by people in denial of the fullness of their true divinity as an Earth creature. If you exist, you are a divine gift, the Christ expressed as your life.

If you disagree with this, you’re in good company. Jesus had some Sadducees come to him with a scenario to help defend their belief system, that there is no afterlife, no angels, no spirits, and when you’re dead, you’re dead. (https://bibleseo.com/luke/sadducees-jesus-question-resurrection/).  But he laughs it off, sees it as ridiculous, and lays out a response that point by point reverses their veiled accusations. More than this, he reveals the mystical core of life, that all life participates in God’s life, and because the presence of life is God presencing through life, this involves fullness, freedom from time, and intimate participation through unity and interdependence.

When I was in college in Ashland, Wisconsin, our pastor, the Rev. Dr. Darrel Robertson, got a Sunday of no preaching because a guest was there. A home-grown pastor serving in Australia had come back to visit this town where he had grown up in that church. I don’t remember his name, but it seems like yesterday I was sitting in the pew as he preached that day, and as he stood in the pulpit, his first words of welcome were said with a strong, Australian accent. “Good mornin’, Saints!” And I looked around the church because everyone laughed. Then he kept preaching in the Australian accent. This person from Wisconsin had lived long enough in Australia that he had that dialect.

Did they laugh because they’d expected an American accent, specifically a northern Wisconsin dialect? Did they feel bad that he wasn’t faking it and here they’d just laughed at him? Or did they laugh at his calling them saints? Is the thought that you are a saint laughable? Do we really deny this as a possibility?

If we think we are not worthy, that we are separate from God, sinners who are opposed to sacred, divine purposes, even if Jesus is on our side to heal us, then it’s probably a stretch to think we could be called a saint.

But if we are not separate from God, if divinity vibrates in every particle of our bodies and the ground we walk on, the air we breathe, and the water we drink and are composed of, and Spirit is as close as each breath, then as a saint we participate in that great cloud of witnesses and the larger creation seen and unseen beyond all time and space.

The Sadducees, who were, by the way, the upper crust of society and the ones in power, are assuming that what you see is what you get and when you’re dead, you’re dead, so you might as well have the best in the meantime. Jesus promotes that God is the God of the living, and children of God cannot die anymore because the center of our soul is God, and God “is.” Doctrines, dogmas, and culturally conditioned beliefs cannot fully define or confine the Spirit.

There are things about this life that are very difficult, and our mind does use coping strategies because realities can be very harsh. We do have formal ways of structuring society, traditions to express religious beliefs, laws to govern civil behavior, and these texts this morning do not deny this. But they take a deeper dive. They go beneath the relative contexts we face, go below the noise and confusions of thought and emotion, of sin and pain, to plumb the depths of our core, which is ‘of God.’

As Job declares, “I know that my Redeemer lives.” Job participates in this life-stronger-than-death reality called grace, gifted through love.

The Luke passage for today is the one with the Sadducees. The gospel reading from All Saints Day is also from Luke and we can call it the Sermon on the Plain as Jesus shares blessings and woes with his disciples. While other gospels have Jesus giving this sermon on the mount, Luke is sure that Jesus is on a level place, so everyone is equal and with Jesus.

Many churches prefer the comfort of tradition and install monuments of the 10 commandments on church lawns. Not many bring focus to the more ambiguous teachings of the sermon on the mount or the plain. But this listing of blessings and woes is reflective of Jesus’ ministry, of who he is and what he’s trying to convey through his life and teachings. These beatitudes have to do with experiential embodiment.

Saints, I hope you embrace your ordinariness. I hope we can all discover ways to clear out the clutter of compartmentalization and the choking limitations of institutional religion shaped around power, the control of empire, or the toxicity of doctrines like original sin and the damage they’ve done to the entire planet. These will not help us process our negative experiences. Only love can do that. I hope we open ourselves to Love, for that is who we are at our core, and Love defines the structure of relationship that is righteousness, everything working properly with everything else as its intended.

Thanks be to God for Jesus who teaches us to laugh our way through the limitations of our own thinking, and to claim a Christ-filled vision of God’s unbounded grace for all the world, the universe, the cosmos, and even saints like us. Amen.