“Of Baby Steps...and Endless Vistas”
1 John 3: 1-3
Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.
What we do know is this:
when it is revealed, we will be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.
This final Sunday in October—although occasionally it’s the first Sunday in November...either way, from my perspective, this is always a memorable Sunday: not least because it is a Sunday when I have found myself flipping back and forth between treating it, some years, as Reformation Sunday...marking Martin Luther’s opening salvo in what turned out to be the birth pangs of Protestantism...but in other years (including the year of our Lord 2022) treating this as All-Saints Sunday...a Sunday which for some churches represents an opportunity to celebrate all of the unknown saints, the ones who don’t have their own special designated saint-days but: representing for churches such as the United Church of Canada (I.e. churches which don’t make use of a designated calendar of saints) the day upon which we pretty much remember all of the saints: in short the day when we are most likely (apart, I suppose, from funerals and memorial services) most likely to celebrate instances of human excellence that testify—in a variety of ways—to the Divine Excellence we have come to know in and through Jesus. And I must confess...
...confess that on those occasions when I have shaped this Sunday as a celebration of All-Saints Day, I inevitably find myself bringing to mind a delightful, and telling, episode from Thomas Merton’s classic autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, a book which describes the events that led Merton to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1938 as well as subsequent events that led him to join a monastic order and become a well-known and highly regarded spiritual writer. In conversation with his friend Robert Lax—a fellow student at Columbia University who eventually also made his way into the Church—Merton was discussing his future hopes and dreams in the aftermath of his baptism. His friend turned to Merton at one point in their conversation and rather pointedly asked him: “What do you want to be, anyway?” to which Merton replied: “I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic,” to which Robert Lax rather sharply responded: “What do you mean you want to be a good Catholic; what you should say...what you should say, is that you want to be a saint.” And yes...yes:
In oh so many ways, that is a quintessentially young-man's story: the story of two guys in their 20s still trying to figure out what life is all about...still trying to figure out what their lives were going to be all about. And quite happily—and quite appropriately—it is a story I first encountered at a similar stage in my own faith journey, when I was in my 20s. And I wonder...I wonder how these two brilliant and gifted and in many ways more than a wee-bit eccentric fellows came to regard that conversation decades later. In the case of the more famous of them—Thomas Merton—he died far too suddenly and far too unexpectedly to have had an opportunity to write a subsequent reflection—from the vantage point of a man, say, in his 60s or 70s or 80s—a subsequent reflection in which he might have pondered whether his life turned out to be the kind of life he imagined for himself at the time of his conversation with his friend. My hunch...my hunch is that Merton would have come to acknowledge that life can prove to be a wee bit more complicated than we tend to imagine when we are still in our 20s: that there is more to being a saint than simply wishing to be a saint: more to sainthood than simply flexing our spiritual muscles and deciding to embark on a path we think will lead us toward the beauty and goodness and truthfulness that can be so blindingly radiant in the lives of the saints. Indeed: far from being a matter of flexing our muscles...time teaches...life teaches...that at the heart of the saintly way stands—first and foremost—our willingness to catch the saintly and expansive vision of God’s love for us. Consider!
Consider the vision found in that brief—but potent--reading from the First Epistle of John, the very heart of which resides in that one small verse I re-read at the start:
Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.
What we do know is this:
when it is revealed, we will be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.
Frankly: even were that astonishing statement no longer than its opening salvo—Beloved, we are God’s children now—that in and of itself would be a sufficiently bold affirmation to warrant our full attention. But, of course, the writer of this Epistle goes much further, adding to the good news of our status as God’s beloved daughters and sons, the further affirmation (one which may well strike us as over-the-top) the further affirmation that our ultimate destiny is grander still: one that will see us not merely residing in the bosom of God but, as those who have been granted the vision of God, a future transformation that will see us as full participants in God’s own goodness and God’s own glory. Fair to suggest, I think....
…fair to suggest that it is the Eastern Orthodox tradition—more than any of the other branches of the Christian faith—that has conserved that note of mystical promise. It is within that tradition that talk of “theosis” or “deification” continues to be part of the Church’s living tradition and living vocabulary: an Eastern tradition far more willing to take at face value the sort of scriptural promise with which we find ourselves confronted this morning, a promise in which our identity as God’s children is merely the starting point for the rather impressive things God has in store for us. On the one hand, the tendency in most Protestant and Catholic circles to stress human sinfulness may find us very uneasy with the language of deification, even when it has a solid scriptural basis. On the other hand, as those who cannot help but swim in the currents of our own culture—a culture which continues to find subtle ways of insisting that only that which can be weighed and measured ought to be thought of as really-real...
...as a church that wishes to speak credibly to that wider culture, in ways which won’t instantly have us dismissed as the charming eccentrics down the street, it is an ongoing temptation for us to emphasize the practical side of our Christian heritage and to keep the faith’s more adventurously mystical elements hidden from view. And yet sadly...tragically, I think...given the rather bleak state of the measurable world in which we live, perhaps there is no more pressing mandate for the Church—including its buttoned down “don’t write us off as looney-tunes" Mainline Protestant branches....
...perhaps even for churches such as ours, there is no more urgent agenda than that of bearing witness—all of the contrary evidence notwithstanding—that ours is indeed a world of wonder, a world in which God is alive...magic is afoot. A world in which—for all its worries and woes—glimpses of a vibrant future continue to be available to those with eyes with which to see: those unafraid to catch a glimpse of the endless vistas God yearns to place before us, saints and sinners alike. Then again! There is a further challenge that awaits us, even when we do find the wherewithal to say yes to those endless vistas!
Some of you will recall the title of J.B. Phillips’ most famous book: “Your God’s Too Small”. And yes: when we buy into the lie that those endless vistas are nothing more than the fevered dreams of overworked imaginations, we need to be given a good shake and reminded that our God may well be too small. And yet! Most days, I suspect that the real problem for many of us is that our God is too large: too large, too distant, too uninvolved, too impersonal and yes, far too busy to pay more than passing attention to the likes of anything you or I could manage to whip up, even on our best day. And I think that accounts...
...accounts for the astonishing popularity—a popularity that extends far beyond Catholic circles—the astonishing popularity of the most beloved of all modern saints: Saint Therese of Lisieux, the diminutive French Carmelite who lived during the closing decades of the 19th century, who died before reaching her 25th birthday but whose depth of spiritual maturity and insight continues to touch hearts and minds throughout the world. Therese—like any self-respecting French girl—was deeply moved by the heroic example of that quintessentially French saint, Joan of Arc. But Therese, with profound insight came to understand that she was cut from a different sort of cloth although—quite frankly—I think Therese tended to underestimate her own heroic qualities. Nevertheless, she came to understand her vocation in a very different way than the vocation that defined the heroic way of Joan of Arc. Therese, inspired by St. Paul’s insistence that even our best endeavors without love amount to nothing, Therese found rest for her restless heart as she embraced the truth that “LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS. THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT LOVE EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES...IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL...leading her to the exultant realization that MY VOCATION IS LOVE! And you know...from where I stand...
From where I stand the irony is that we, in our wing of the Church, have—I fear--a tendency to get everything backwards. On the one hand we back away from the genuinely grand vision 1st John wants to hammer into our thick skulls: the good news of our status as God’s precious children who have not even begun to experience the richness of destiny the Holy God has in store for us. And yet, on the other hand, we have a tendency to embrace grandiose visions of a Christian Canada (God help us) or of a World that we might Ecumenically mend through our good-will efforts, all the while dismissing as unimportant—as somehow not even worthy of God’s attention—those very acts of love which are most likely to reveal glimpses in our lives (yes, yours and mine!) of the saintly way of Jesus Christ.
The frightened child comforted because we took the time to hold him in our arms. The recently bereaved widow, her life now turned upside down as she winds her way into the strange new world of a care-home: able to find the strength simply to hang on, because we found time and cultivated the patience to sit with her and assure her that she is still loved, that her life still has purpose and meaning and dignity. Feeding the hungry. Mending the broken. Providing a listening ear to the frightened and forsaken. Taking the time it requires to craft something in which others will delight, in which God will delight! Remembering to pray for someone who has no one else to pray for them. And yes: in the process, coming to terms with our own hunger and thirst, our own brokenness, our own fears including the toxic fear that we have nothing to offer. And while it goes without saying that all such acts of kindness and humility can readily be dismissed as small things...mere baby steps...is it not in fact that case, at the end of the day, that such baby-steps are the very things that open wide the doors to those endless vistas God is readying for us? While it may well be the case that every authentic hero may (at the end of the day) be revealed to have been a saint....not every saint will look and feel anything like we imagine our heroes to look and to feel. Not by the size of our gestures...not by the scope of our actions...but by the spirit of love that permeates them. Please, please: never imagine that our God is too large to bother with such baby steps; never imagine our God too distant to care. The way of the saints...is the way of love. The way of love...is the way of the saints.
Permit a final thought.
Lest we forget, the very word “saint” comes from the bigger and fancier word “sanctification”: a word meant to draw our attention to a key facet of what God is up to in our lives, not only putting us “right” (we call that justification), but then continuing to work with us, (sanctifying us!) helping us become the people God knows us truly to be. And yes: let that serve as a reminder that any celebration of any of the saints let alone all of the Saints...is, above all, a celebration of the Holy One: a reminder of the extraordinary things God can do in our lives. The extraordinary things God is up to right here....right now!
And glory be to God: whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation: in the Church, and in Christ Jesus, this day and forever more.
Amen!