Oii, WHEN THE SAINTS John M. Buchanan
Hebrews 11, 12 selected Broad Street Presbyterian Church
October 31, 1982 Columbus, Ohio

In Charleston, SC this summer, I visited St. Michael's Church, a magnificent
old building with a spire visible from the harbour. The church has played a
major role in that interesting city for several centuries. The man who was
showing me around, however, kept telling me about the structure, but I kept
being distracted by the many historical plaques on the walls. I am an inveterate
reader of plaques. Whenever I visit an historic church, regardless of the beauty
of the architecture or stained glass, the first thing I do is look for the
plaques on the walls. They contain the story of the church, apart from which
the physical facility is merely a monument...'To the glory of God and in memory
of the Rev. so and so; Beloved Pastor Who Labored Among Us For Twenty Years;
In Sacred Memory of Artillery Sergeant so and so, Army of the Confederate,
Killed at Vicksburg; In Memory of Mrs. so and so, Dedicated Teacher, Lover of
Children..."

I read the plaques because they, not the soaring arches and intricate
carving, tell the story of the church. They contain the names of the saints, the
people, the individual men and women whose faith is confirmed by the very exis-
tence of the church they once loved long ago.

Yet the more Protestant we are, the less we talk about the saints. There
is a story in that and it needs telling every so often, particularly on this
Sunday, Reformation Day. Actually there are three events which bear on the
story: the ancient church holiday called "All Saints Day"; the eve of all
saints, known in history as "All Hallows Eve", “Hallow's Eve" - or "Halloween";
and the day of All Hallow's, one day before All Saints. Today, the occasion
Augustinian monk Father Martin Luther chose to nail his 95 Theses to the church
door in Wittenberg to start a Reformation.

All Saints Day was the occasion in the Middle Ages to think about the
saints ‘of the church, to revere and adore the saints in Masses for that purpose,
to invoke the favor of the saints in acts of piety and devotion. But as often
happened in the Middle Ages, a good idea got mixed up with superstition and
economics and politics and the result was disastrous.

The dead, superstition had it, were a little nearer the world of the living
on the occasion of All Saints. As they were being thought about, revered, and
invoked, it was understandable that some would imagine their actual presence.

In fact, if you were quiet, you might see them in the grave yard, emerging from
the shadows. It was a good idea to be prepared to ward off the unwelcome spirits
too, by carving a frightning face in a gourd or large squash. All Hallows Eve
became a hybrid part of the feast, particularly entrancing to the young.

Martin Luther chose the day before All Saints to nail his Theses to the
church door in Wittenberg because a lot of people would be passing that way the
following morning. On All Saints Day the year before, 1516, Frederick the Wise's
collection of sacred relics had gone on display in Wittenberg. It was very much
a carnival. Roland Bainton has written the definitive work on the topic and has
preserved even the contents of Frederick's collection for the record: a thorn
from the crown Jesus wore, one tooth from St. Jerome, four pieces of St.
Chrysostom, four hairs of the Virgin Mary, seven pieces of her veil sprinkled
with the blood of Christ. The relics of Jesus included a piece of the swaddling

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cloth he wore at Bethlehem, a wisp of the straw, a piece of the bread of the

Last Supper, a chunk of the stone from which he ascended into heaven. One of

the oldest items was a twig from Moses’ burning bush. Five years later, in

1521, Frederick's collection contained 19,012 Holy Relics. The rub was, in

Luther's time, that it was believed that if a Christian was fortunate enough

to view all of them on All Saints Day and to make a generous contribution, he/

she was granted indulgences - reductions in time to be spent in Purgatory for

a maximum of 1,902,207 years and 270 days. (see Roland Bainton, Here I Stand, p. 53)

At the heart of Martin Luther's protest was the idea that the saints had
accumulated so much goodness during their lives, much of it was left over, in
storage as it were, available for distribution by the church, for a fee. In
fact, all Luther proposed to do initially was debate the whole system of indul-
gences. When his protest became a full-scale revolt and Reformation, therefore,
its adherents wanted little to do with anything remotely connected to the idea
of indulgences. The idea of saints wes deemphasized. In the process, Western
Christianity lost one of its more useful and, I think, important concepts.

Most of us came of age in the Christian Church without the foggiest notion of
what we were affirming when we said, in the Apostles’ Creed, that we believed
in the Communion of Saints.

Let's think about the idea for a minute. We value autonomy and individual
independence in our culture. Too much s0, some would say. We are never totally
autonomous - Christianly speaking, or for that matter, in any way whatever. We
are an amazingly complex amalgam of influences out of the past; visible and
invisible, conscious and unconscious. We bear within us, in genetic structure
a microcosm of a family at least, and the whole race at most. We are, for
better or worse, positively or negatively, deeply in debt to our past: to our
parents directly, but also to their parents, and their parents, and their
parents. Have you ever reacted instinctively to a stimulus, and been astonished
because the inflection in your voice and words you used sounded exactly like
your mother or father. We are never totally autonomous.

Lutheran historian Martin Marty was lecturing at a Roman Catholic University
after Vatican II: some students were cheering a blasphemously furious ex-priest
who was scorning Mother Church. Marty reports, “I asked them why the applause.
"You'll never understand,' said one, ‘what an identity crisis the Catholic
Church gave each one of us.' I wondered aloud if they knew how lucky they were

~ eyer to have belonged to anything that was potent enough to give them an identity

over which to have a crisis." (By Way of Response, p. 19)

Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote Zorba, the Greek, reflected in another book
on those who had gone before. He hears them say..."Finish our work! All day
and all night we come and go through your body...When you shake with fear, your
terror branches out into innumerable generations, and degrades innumerable souls
before and behind you. When you rise to a valorous deed, all of your race rises
with you and turns valorous..." (The Saviors of God, see E. Campbell's Notebook,
Spring, 1982)

The novelist caught the deeper reality which the church has always intended
in the idea of the Communion of Saints, namely, that we are not alone. We are
not using mystical language. Those who have gone before us, continue to
influence us - as we will influence those who come after us. Kazantzakis put it

ade

strongly..."Your first duty," he wrote, ",..is to feel within you all your
ancestors. Your second duty is to throw light on their onrush and continue
their work. Your third duty is to pass on to your son or daughter the great
mandate to surpass you.’ (ibid.)

The text this morning, from the Book of Hebrews, written particularly for
a people who needed to come to terms with their own past, reminds them, and us,
of those who had gone before: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses..."We are
surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,’ the writer exclaimed, And we are.
Surrounded by, influenced by and in the presence of a cloud of witnesses who
have given us each the gift of life, poured into us the raw material of our
personalities, given us whatever faith we have, the church, each other. How
sad that we Protestants can't celebrate our saints, recognize them, name them,
thank God for them.

To do so would mean looking deeply into our own inner-person. Psychology
has taught us to be comfortable with our own internal complexity. We have
become accustomed to thinking about our "shadow selves" which, we have been
told, are capable of all sorts of evil. Sigmund Freud taught the world about
libido and id, and suggested that beneath the surface we are all repressed
desire and murderous impulse. The Freudians gave the church's idea of original
sin a new lease on life. After Freud it became immanently respectable to reflect
academically on St. Paul's lament that the good he willed, he did not do, but the
evil he wished to avoid is exactly what he ended up doing.

The late Carlyle Marney, Southern Baptist theologian said one time that
the human personality is like a house. The Freudians have shown us that each
house has a cellar. In the cellar is the plumbing and the trash heap. It is
where we keep those shadowy persons, or personalities. As sons and daughters
of the Reformation we believe it is good to know about the cellar and who is in
there. The trouble, Marney used to say, is that it has become fashionable to
spend all our time there. We act as if the plumbing and trash heap are all
there is to us. Instead of repenting of our sin, someone noted, the "Me
Generation" wallows in it, celebrates it, and calls it "doing my own thing.”

The house metaphor is a good one. But there is more to the structure of
our personalities than the cellar. In fact, each of us has pretty fancy archi-
tecture if we emerge from the darkness of the cellar long enough to see it.
Each of us has kitchen, library, parlour, bedroom, and a gracious balcony on
the perimeter of the house. On that balcony are the people who are the strong
and good and healthy influences. They have names. They are our saints.

Who are they? They are different people for all of us, and helpful
exercise is to identify them. In his autobiography Frederick Buechner writes:
"On All Saints Day, it is not just the saints of the church that we should
remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones
and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and crackpots
of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and
mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom
we were helped to whatever little we may ever hope to have of some kind of
seedy sainthood of our own." (The Sacred Journey, p. 74)

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An appropriate way to observe All Saints Day, LI propose, is to walk out
inte the garden and look up at the structure of your personality. Look at
the balcony which is there. Identify the people who are there: your parents,
grandparents, teachers, aunts, athletic coach, friends... Name them. Wave to

them. They are your saints, and to be in touch with them, to know them and to ba r
be open to their continuing influence is the Dest meaning I know for the AYN ed
Communion of Saints. _- \ Nad
yay
This church has a multitude of saints. They are on the balcony for us }

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everytime we are here together. One of them died recently, Dr. J. Harry Cotton, Au vt
pastor of the church from 1928 until 1940. We will observe Dr. Cotton's life ;

and winistry in a Memorial Service this afternoon. This morning I am reminded ° Rd
of the cccasion several years ago when he was here to preach at the funeral of b oo
his friend Katherine Hislop. Dr. Cotton said, "If I have any clarity in o

Christian doctrine it isn’t from reading theology, but from knowing Christian
people like Katherine."

We are not atone. In the natural sequence of things each of us stakes out
an individual identity by declaring our independence from the past. It is a
necessary part of becoming a person if we are to be more than mere physiological
and psychological extensions of our parents. But we never fully succeed in
separating ourselves totally. We can't and shouldn't. We are not alone. We
are influenced by others. We are made to be bigger and better and healthier
and stronger by the love and expectations and support of our Communion of
particular saints.

In faith, we are sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and
Rebekah, of Peter and Mary and Andrew and Martha, of St. Augustine and Martin
Luther, and John Calvin. We are sons and daughters of Samuel Palmer and Harry
Cotton and all the saints who loved this church.

Qur deepest faith is that they are safe in God's care. We are, the writer
of Hebrews maintained, "surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses." Fach of us
has a number of saints. Each of us as surrounded by a could of very particular
witnesses. Reflect on that fact this day. Identify them. Lock up and wave at
them, Give God thanks for each of them. Amen.