A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

October 28, 2001 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Ordinary People

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 65
Luke 21:5–9
2 Timothy 4:6–8, 16–18

Dear God, as we come into your presence this morning, we know we are not alone. With us are those who taught us to believe and trust in you, those who taught us to love and care and give. They are with you now and they are our saints. We thank you for them. As we worship, surround us with their love—in your love—that we might know you more clearly, follow you more nearly, and love you, and our neighbors more dearly, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

I love the covers of the New Yorker magazine. They are colorful, whimsical, and thought provoking. Often they capture the sense of the moment in American culture. The cover of this week’s edition of the magazine was particularly good, I thought. It’s the Halloween issue. Clusters of little children are trick-or-treating in a Manhattan neighborhood, trudging up and down a leaf-strewn sidewalk, sacks of goodies in hand, climbing up a flight of stairs to knock on the door of a brownstone, as an eager couple peers out the window along with a jolly pumpkin. But this year, instead of donning Batman, Spider-Man, and Power Ranger getups, each of the children is dressed up as either a New York firefighter or a police officer.

That stopped me in my tracks this week: ordinary people, who lost their lives just doing their jobs. Ordinary people who have become for us a reminder that ordinary people have within themselves the potential to do extraordinary things. Ordinary people who, on the eleventh of September 2001, became heroes, saints perhaps.

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

They did—thanks be to God. This is the week of All Saints’ Day, November 1, Thursday. And this year in their name we might begin our reflection by giving God thanks for them and for that potential in all of us.

The philosopher Ernest Becker said that while the word hero seems too big, too romantic for most of us, the truth is that “to strive to be a hero, to rise above the mediocre, really to count for something extraordinary, to outshine death, to be capable of the highest generosity, to feel sacrifice, is what we most deeply need and want” (see Tom Long in Theology Today, July 1994).

Two thousand years ago a man awaiting his death in a Roman jail cell wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” I love these words. They say what needs to be said about the heroes of September 11. They occur to me often when a friend, a dear one, a colleague, a faithful servant dies. “He/she fought the good fight, finished the race, kept the faith.”

St. Paul wrote these words—or someone close to him wrote them for him—as he languished in jail, in Rome, waiting for his final sentence. Paul would die in Rome, a martyr. When these words were written he seems to have known that his life was about over. “I am already being poured out as a libation,” he wrote. “The time of my departure has come.”

He’s writing to his young disciple and friend, Timothy. Paul’s purpose seems to be to encourage Timothy to be faithful in the difficult days of persecution and suffering, and maybe even martyrdom, which lie ahead. The illusion is in part to athletic competition—the fighting, the boxing, the finishing the race—with which Paul was apparently familiar and which then, as now, was commonly used metaphorically. I must add, the experience of being a Cubs fan and watching our first baseman, the very first year after his liberation, play in a World Series, is fairly excruciating and has only limited uses metaphorically or sermonically. But I digress. “Football is like life,” coach Ditka used to say. Baseball is even more so, some of us counter. St. Paul agrees: “I have fought the fight, finished the race, kept the faith.”

Notice it’s not about winning the fight or the race. It’s about the struggle. It’s about finishing. Anyone who has ever tried to do it—a 10K race, a marathon in which there are thousands of contestants—knows that it’s about finishing, not winning. All but a very few know that winning is not an option, but running well, finishing strong is. “By your endurance you gain your souls,” Jesus said.

It is Reformation Sunday today, the occasion Presbyterians and other Protestants remember and celebrate our faith tradition, which for us began in Germany in the sixteenth century and then traveled to Scotland where it became Presbyterianism. October 31, 1571, an Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther marched up to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, where he was on the university faculty, and posted ninety-five theses, ideas about the reformation of the church, which he proposed for debate. The result was the literal historic eruption we know as the Reformation. The world has never been the same since. And there is a sense in which both Protestants and Roman Catholics continue to live in and deal with the aftermath of the Reformation. It used to be a day for Protestants to recall all the things they didn’t like about Catholics and Catholicism. And for Catholics to return the favor and be reminded of everything they didn’t like about Protestants and Protestantism. Unfortunately both of us have provided plenty of material. Protestants stereotyped Catholics—Catholics would cross the street to avoid passing in front of a Protestant church. Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten said, “Catholics couldn’t see the necessity of the Reformation; Protestants couldn’t see its tragedy.” Fortunately in our time, we’re finally expending more energy expressing our essential unity than exacerbating and enjoying our disunity. In a world become suddenly much smaller, much more religiously diverse, and much more dangerous, our differences just don’t seem to be so important anymore. This year, in addition to using our Scottish Reformation heritage as an excuse to get bagpipes into our worship and wear this wonderful Buchanan plaid stole, I want us to think past the Reformation for a moment.

Luther chose October 31 to post his theses because it was the day before All Saints’ Day, the Eve of All Hallows, from which we get the word Halloween, the occasion when the spirits of the dead are out and about. The idea of saints was at the heart of Luther’s argument with the church. The church created saints, and the argument went that the saints were so good, so righteous, that they accumulated more righteousness than they needed to get into heaven. The excess righteousness was available to common sinners. In fact, you could purchase some for yourself or for your relatives. The Vatican issued documents called indulgences, the purchase of which gave the owner enough righteousness to reduce his time in purgatory. In the early sixteenth century, the Vatican sent a sales force out to peddle indulgences—in fact, financed the completion of St. Peter’s by the sale. Luther wanted to debate that. He believed—and no one now argues with him (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God—his hymn—is now sung in Catholic churches too)— Luther believed that scripture teaches that salvation is God’s gracious gift to humanity in Jesus Christ, that you cannot earn it, only gratefully accept it. You certainly can’t buy it from the church. And that simple but revolutionary idea—that Christian faith is more about living in gratitude to God for the gift of God’s love than it is about trying to please God by obeying rules, defending beliefs, practicing rituals, accumulating righteousness by buying indulgences—is why we celebrate Reformation Sunday in worship today.

Much happened at the Reformation that was necessary and much happened that was unfortunate, tragic: the total disappearance of the idea of saints, for instance. Because the idea of saints and their accumulated righteousness was at the heart of what the Reformation thought was wrong with the church, the whole apparatus simply disappeared from Protestantism. And that, I think, is too bad. Not that I want to reintroduce the idea of indulgences—although it is tempting during stewardship season. The chair of the stewardship campaign in a church I served years ago once said to me, “You know, you could help us out a little bit here if you’d just tell them they’re going to hell if they don’t raise their pledges.” I do, however, hope to reintroduce the idea of saints—as ordinary people who do extraordinary things and through whom God’s work of healing, restoring, building, and creating gets done on earth. And I do very much wish to reintroduce the idea that we are not in this business alone: that we are “surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses“ the book of Hebrews puts it. That each of us has saints: those precious people who have helped shape us, inspired us, who loved us enough to correct us, who picked us up when we fell, whom we know and only know from afar, those whose lives inspire us and continue to illuminate our lives—our saints.

Saints, Frederick Buechner wrote are not “plaster statues, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil thing their whole life long.” “Saints,” Buechner says, “are essentially life givers. To be with them is to become more alive” (Wishful Thinking, p. 102).

Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor, whose church has kept the idea of saints alive, says, “What makes a saint is extravagance—excessive love, flagrant mercy, radical affection, exorbitant charity, immoderate faith, intemperate hope, inordinate love” (Weavings, Sept.–Oct. 1988, p. 34).

So you have saints. They may still be around. They may have joined the church eternal, the “vast cloud of witnesses” that the Bible talks about. Either way they are the ones who have shaped and molded you; who loved you with unconditional love and patience, forgiveness and grace; who pushed you to become more than you thought you could be or wanted to be, for that matter; who inspired you by the courage and integrity and faithfulness of their lives. They are your saints, people through whom God worked to make you who you are and who continue to work to make you who you will be.

Some them are extraordinary: the apostles and martyrs, the great towering figures of history—St. Peter, St. Paul, Martin Luther, Katrina [Katharina] Luther (the former nun who became Martin’s strong and feisty wife and partner), John Calvin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa. And some are ordinary people; most of them are, in fact.

Your parents, perhaps, who loved you and encouraged you and whose love continues to be a palpable presence in your life . . .

Or surrogate parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles . . .

Or teachers, or Scout leaders, or coaches who gave what they had to give to you and saw in you what you could not, at the time, see in yourself. People who called you to work hard, to sacrifice, to give, to love, and inspired you to reach deep inside yourself, helped you to become who you are today.

Or ordinary people who, out of nowhere, suddenly do extraordinarily brave and faithful things: those who walked into the fires of hell itself on September 11 to save lives and never came back out.

Todd Beamer, 32, husband and father, on Flight 93, who called a GTE Airfone operator to report a hijacking, told her he knew he was going to die, and asked her to pray the Lord’s Prayer with him, and then she heard him say, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” And then proceeded to save God only knows how many other lives.

“They fought the good fight, finished the race, kept the faith.” Thanks be to God.

And that even greater idea, the reality that somehow in God’s mystery, that they are never lost to us utterly, that their love, their inspiration, continues to be a presence in our lives, the communion of saints, that great reminder that even in our ordinary daily lives, we are not alone.

In the old communion liturgy, the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving used to include the wonderful phrase “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we worship and adore thy glorious name.”

About which Frederick Beuchner says, “All the company of heaven means everybody we ever loved and lost, including the ones we didn’t know we loved when we lost them.”

We are not alone. Sometimes we know that more clearly than at other times. Sometimes those who we loved and lost, our saints, seem closer than at other times. Sometimes we seem to forget them, but we are never alone.

Richard Lischer, who teaches at Duke University, is a minister who has written about his first pastorate in southern Illinois, in a small rural community. He remembers a telephone call one night to come to the hospital. A baby was born with what the physician said were “multiple deficits” and was not expected to live. The parents, members of his congregation, wanted their baby baptized.

When I entered the unit, I found it arranged for a baptism. They had pushed the incubator to one side. A hush had fallen over the room, as parents of other newborns stayed to themselves and cooed over their babies. The parents, the nurses, the residents, and the pastor stood in a semicircle around the incubator. Everyone was gowned and the nurses were in masks. Leeta and Shane, the parents, appeared to be in shock. One of the nurses opened the lid of the small white humming cylinder, and I extended a moistened finger into the chamber. I made the sign of the cross on the baby’s blue chest. . . . I touched one of his downy eyebrows and said, “Shane Arlo Vachel Weams, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

And the witnesses said, “Amen.” That was an amen on earth, choked out by five witnesses in an atmosphere of muffled sorrow, and, I believe, it was an amen in heaven, echoed by many other witnesses who see all things. We knew we were participating in something larger than ourselves, and so did the other parents standing, respectfully, on the far side of the unit. They also bowed their heads and some made the sign of the cross. I could have baptized Shane Arlo many times over that day with the tears of the witnesses.” (Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey through a Country Church, p. 223–225)

The communion of saints: ordinary people, like you and me, through whom God does extraordinary things. Ordinary people who continue to bear witness and to influence and inspire. Ordinary people who “fought the good fight, finished the race, kept the faith.”

Thanks be to God.

Amen.