Preached on Friday, November 1, 2024, All Saints’ Day, at Trinity Cathedral, Little Rock.

Jesus said to Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” (John 11:40).

As a boy and as an adult, I sang Lesbia Scott’s hymn each and every year, just as we have done so tonight: “I sing a song of the saints of God, patient, brave, true.” Perhaps this hymn holds a special place in your heart, as well. The end of the final stanza goes like this: “For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.” Now, tonight, I find myself drawn back to that remarkable hymn and its straightforward faithfulness. “Just folk like me,” she has me sing, “and I mean to be one too.” But tonight, I wonder: do I really think it’s true? Do I really think that the saints are just folk like me? And do I really mean to be in that number?

Frankly, no. No, I don’t think that Scott’s hymn has convinced us––not yet, anyway. And here’s why: I think that, when we come to the feast of All Saints’ each November, or whenever we think about that glorious company of the saints in light, we tend to get tripped up a bit, in one of two ways. (And here, I welcome to the pulpit one of our own Anglican treasures, John Webster, a priest and a teacher and a theologian who tragically died at age 60 in 2016. I count Webster amongst the holy saints of the Lord.)

So, we get tripped up in one of two ways, Webster cautions us. First, we might “think of saints as a super-breed of believers, a race of genetically modified Christians who grow to gigantic proportions and undertake feats of spiritual heroism that we mortals couldn’t possibly aspire to” (Webster, Confronted by Grace, 169). “Or, if we don’t have a taste for the legends of the saints,” second, we might think of the saints as possessing “an awesome moral purity which sets them apart from the rest of the human race––unapproachably and almost embarrassingly upright figures whom we may admire but cannot hope to emulate” (169). “Both ways of thinking about the saints are common enough,” Webster reminds us, “but they don’t really serve us very well” (169)––and they certainly don’t move us any closer to Lesbia Scott’s vision of sainthood.

“Part of the problem,” says Webster, is that these two ways of thinking “hold saintliness at a distance; saints are utterly unlike anything we might recognize as human in the ways that we are human” (169). Sainthood is literally unrealistic. And honestly, that understanding of sainthood is pretty nice. “Thinking of the saints in these very unrealistic ways actually makes it a great deal easier for us to excuse ourselves from taking the [call] to saintliness seriously as something addressed to us. We know we aren’t superheroes, we know we’re only moderately good, and so we can safely [pass the buck] for living a saintly life on to someone else, some larger-than-life figure made for that sort of thing” (169).

And herein lies the deepest problem: “Talking of saints as superheroes starts from the wrong place” entirely. “It starts from our end of things” (169). As Webster puts it, “it suggests that what being a saint is really about is being a bigger, more spectacular, more upright human being. But it isn’t. Sainthood is about God. And the rule in talking about saints, as with talking about most things to do with the Christian gospel, is this: to talk of saints, we need to talk of God” (169).

Webster puts it best: “When we celebrate the saints, we’re talking about the human side of something which God does” (170). That’s what we celebrate tonight: the human side of something which God does. The word we use to talk about all this is “holiness”: the “holiness” of the saints, of course, but first and foremost, “the holiness of God.” That’s where we begin.

God is holy. “Saints, [the] holy ones, are what they are because first of all God is Himself the Holy One” (171). When we say, “God is holy,” what we mean is this: God is utterly unique. God is radically “other.” God is Who He is and does what He does uniquely. The Psalmist puts it this way: 

Question: “Who is He, this King of glory?” 

Answer: “The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory.”

He is the One Who is strong and mighty, the One Who founded the world upon the seas and Who made firm the rivers of the deep, the One Who blesses us and saves us. “The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory.” God is God, and God alone. God is unique, which is to say that God is holy.

“And God’s holiness is not solely His own possession. This holy God makes other things holy; He, the Holy One, is a God who sanctifies” (171), Who sets things apart for His holy purposes. And amazingly, this includes human lives. God sets apart, dedicates, people for His service. God chooses the people who will live with Him and love and serve and obey and––above all!––praise Him. And as God chooses, as God sets apart, He also judges: that is, God the holy one overcomes our resistance and opposition, our own willfulness, overthrowing it, setting it aside. When God makes people holy, He overcomes any obstacle. God’s call to holiness is inescapable. Despite our waywardness and frailty, God prepares Himself a way. In all of this––in this choosing and judging and sanctifying––“God the holy one [reforms and perfects] a human reality which echoes His Own holiness” (171), the human side of God Himself. And just like that, we have the saints of God.

All of this may seem a bit too theological or abstract, but it’s crucially important we get this part right: “saints are what they are because of God” (171). It’s crucially important because, if we start elsewhere, if we start from the idea that the saints are saints because of their own uniqueness, we very well may miss out on this bit of shocking and beautiful good news: God calls each of us to sainthood. God calls even us, “folk just like us,” to be His saints.

We believe that this takes place in Holy Baptism. In Baptism, we are called by name and set apart for God’s purpose, elected, chosen in our sinfulness to be vessels of God’s goodness. In Baptism, God acts upon us, “[generating] the human echo of His Own holiness” (172), the human side of something which God does. In Baptism, we enter into the life of faith. And remember, faith isn’t something we do––a kind of Godly merit badge. No, faith is that strange activity in which we don’t do much at all, an “emptiness which lets God and God’s work be, which receives Who God is and what God does, which says Yes to God’s work” of choosing us and overcoming us and sanctifying us––making us holy (172–173). Humility and repentance: these are the watchwords of sainthood! This is what takes place in Baptism, and really, what takes place over the whole course of the Baptismal life: day by day, God fashioning us for God’s purpose, not because we’re superhuman and morally superior, but because we’re very human and altogether sinful.

I think that one of the most helpful, though not very obvious, illustrations of how God fashions His saints comes from the Gospel of John, our passage tonight. For you see, this is a story about the human side of something which God does. Lazarus falls ill and dies. There’s nothing extraordinary about this. In fact, it’s the most ordinary thing in the world. And, like his sisters, Mary and Martha, we grieve this bare fact of our existence: we live and then we die. What else is there?

But then enters Jesus. Then enters Jesus, even though Lazarus is decidedly dead, decidedly limited. Jesus says to Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” And then, Jesus calls Lazarus by name. He has been dead for four days, but Jesus calls him by name. His hands and feet are bound, but Jesus calls him by name. And when Jesus calls the dead man by name, the dead man comes out.

Just this is what it means for God to make His saints holy. The God Who is Holy, Who is unique, enters into our ordinary existence. The God Who is always More descends to our limitations. The God Who is Life puts death to flight. And God calls us by name, elects us, summoning us out of our ordinariness, our limitation, our lifelessness, setting us free for a new day, making us holy––that is, making us His saints. And it’s in belief, in faith, in the radical openness to God doing what God will do, that we see His glory, unveiled before our very own faces. And we remain the same old us––not some superhuman, not some genetically modified specimen, but the same Lazarus, the same you, the same me––now made holy by our holy LORD.

But it is easier to think of the saints as superheroes, isn’t it? It’s easier to keep the saints of God at a distance. Just look at the saints that surround us in colored glass, beautiful, yes, and yet so domesticated, so composed, so untroubled. But don’t be fooled for a moment! That’s not how any of this works, not by a good measure. Saints are troubled––shaken to the core by the fact of their humanity and by the miracle of the Gospel, caught up in the faithful repentance required of them when opening up to God’s grace, disrupted by God’s inescapable call from death to life, a bunch of sinners set apart by the Good God. That’s what we celebrate tonight. That’s what inspires us tonight. That’s what we hope for tonight. And that’s what we sing about tonight: “For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.” Amen.