Modern Saints
a sermon given by the Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn
on Sunday, January 20, 2008
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
First Reading: selections from John 1:35-46
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”
Second Reading: Self Portrait by David Whyte
It doesn't interest me if there is one God
Or many gods.
I want to know if you belong -- or feel abandoned;
If you know despair
Or can see it in others.
I want to know
If you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need to change you;
If you can look back with firm eyes
Saying "this is where I stand."
I want to know if you know how to melt
Into that fierce heat of living
Falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing
To live day by day
With the consequence of love
And the bitter unwanted passion
Of your sure defeat.
I have been told
In that fierce embrace
Even the gods
Speak of God.
This weekend, our nation will honor Martin Luther King Jr, a man whose firm eyes said “this is where I stand,” a man who lived day by day with the consequence of love. Like Moses he was not able to walk into the promised land with his followers. His life, cut short at the age of 39, was one of passion, faith, and commitment. He was only 26 when he accepted leadership of the bus boycott begun by Rosa Parks. He is an inspiration to many Americans and people of other nations who are working for civil rights, peace and justice. He made famous the concept of the “beloved community.”
Martin Luther King, and other inspirational people like Dorothy Day, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa, are thought of with such reverence that their lives take on an unearthly glow. Their gifts of love, often given with extreme self-sacrifice, lead these people to be dubbed modern day “saints.” I’m not talking about the official canonization process of the Catholic church, what I am referring to is the more informal way you or I might say, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint for our time.” We put them on a pedestal, see them as gods among men. But dubbing someone a saint sets them apart, and in doing so we turn the saint’s life work into a divine mission that only someone special, someone supernatural, could take on. In calling someone a saint—whether they are a larger than life figure like King or your very own grandmother—I think we can have the tendency to let ourselves off the hook. “She is a such a saint; but I am not. I could never do what he did, what she did. I couldn’t even try.” It is too hard to emulate these “saints.” Their perfection seems so impossible to achieve, so exhausting to even contemplate. Instead of being inspired to action from the life of King or Day, we give up before we begin.
This is exactly why Dorothy Day said her famous words, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Dorothy Day was a Catholic woman who dedicated her life to the poor. Day chose to live in poverty, because she couldn’t bare the thought of having one penny spent on a luxury for herself, when it could be spent in helping the poor. As one journalist pointed out:
She didn't want recycling food from dumpsters, sleeping on a stinky prison cell floor, and getting to mass every afternoon to be dismissed as being only for special people. She had no time for halos without hard work. She practiced the Pauline understanding that all people of God are called to be saints - not just those with a Vatican imprimatur.1
In her writings, Dorothy Day made clear again and again that she believed everyone could make the same choices she did. She didn’t consider herself special or remarkable. She ascribed to the “little way,”2 the belief that every action, every small action, can change the world. Day knew that some people see poverty in the world as a depth of suffering so terrible that one person’s small actions cannot make a dent—the excuse to do nothing, hidden in the cry “But what could I do?” For Day, even the smallest good that the seemingly most powerless person could do was worth doing, and it mattered.
The poet’s words could be her own:
I want to know if you are willing
To live day by day
With the consequence of love
Some scholars have looked at the lives of these modern day saints like King and Day and tried to bring them back down to earth. The more we see them as human, like us, the more we might feel we could attain the kind of courage and passion they had. Even great leaders have flaws. By remembering the sucesses and the failures, the moral triumphs and the mistakes, we remind ourselves that our everyday behavior can be more like King’s or like Day’s. They weren’t perfect, and neither are we, but we can still keep trying to live with courage, faith, and integrity.
Dorothy Day was possibly her own harshest critic, noting in her journal the times when she had not practiced what she preached. While she saw the ideal community as “unjudging” and radically loving, she acknowledged that sometimes she had failures of love. In her essay “Politics and Principles” she describes how she and some companions were sent to jail for protesting the war. While in jail, Day and her friends were accosted by an inmate named Jackie. Jackie’s rough behavior led Day to quickly demand she and her friends be put in a different cell. Later, Day wrote “I found it hard to excuse myself for my own immediate harsh reaction. It is all very well to hate the sin and love the sinner in theory, but it is hard to do in practice.”3 It is this kind of story that makes me relate to Day as a real person. She tried to love everyone, she tried to be totally non-judgmental, but sometimes, she just couldn’t do it. She made mistakes and then kept trying to do better.
Martin Luther King Jr. was also not a perfect man. I remember one MLK service I attended at a very proper Unitarian church. The minister was extolling the virtues of King, which of course are very many. He was a leader and a prophet and a…then the church doors banged open and a man stumbled in and shouted “he was a fornicator!” Everyone sat in shocked silence as the ushers bundled the man away. And the fact is that King’s integrity is compromised when we acknowledge his documented marital infidelities. For all of King’s powerful role in fighting for justice, he was not a saint. He was a follower of Jesus, but he was not Jesus himself. He was imperfect, fallible, a man and not a god. In taking King from his pedestal, we remind ourselves that we too, though imperfect in our own ways, have the power to make a stand, to fight for what we believe in even when the world seems against us.
In the reading from John, Jesus said, “Come and see. Follow me.” Followers of Jesus especially have a hard act to follow. Here at First Parish we gather “in the spirit of Jesus,” and we leave our worship together with a vow “to be faithful to the vision of Jesus.” As Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “To focus on Jesus as an exemplar is to never run out of redemptive things to be or do.” And when we think of Jesus, like when we think of Martin Luther King, Jr., I think we have a tendency to put on our rose-colored glasses. Jesus spoke of love. He spoke of acceptance. He spoke of faith, compassion, and forgiveness. This is the soft-focus, saintly Jesus. But Jesus was more complicated than that. In reading the New Testament, we see Jesus not as a flawed or imperfect person, but he does have deep complexities of character that are often ignored in favor of a simpler image. Rev. Taylor writes:
Jesus is terrible at meeting people’s expectations of him. He engages the sorts of people he should ignore and ignores the sorts of people he should engage. He accepts the wrong dinner invitations. He is rude to respected religious leaders. He scolds his own disciples, while he praises the faith of a Roman soldier. All in all, this is not a man you want teaching the first grade Sunday school class (although he is crazy about children). He is impossible to to manage. He will not stay in role. Every time his handlers think they have him handled, he vanishes from their midst.
Jesus the troublemaker is still asking us to “Come and see.” From the distance of the years, he asks us:
I want to know if you belong -- or feel abandoned;
If you know despair
Or can see it in others.
I want to know
If you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need to change you;
If you can look back with firm eyes
Saying "this is where I stand."
Day and King were both followers of Jesus. Rev. Taylor points out that followers of Jesus “might reasonably take Peter, Mary, Thomas or Martha as our exemplars instead of Jesus himself. Following means taking a position slightly behind the leader, after all. To be a follower is to be someone other than the one you follow. And yet most followers I know are stubbornly fixed on being like Jesus. Even those who admit no hope of succeeding still measure their failure by his example. He is the gold standard for what it means to be fully human, in full union with the Divine.”
Dorothy Day spoke of the “little way,” the way every person could make a difference with even their smallest actions. You and I may not be the next King. We are certainly not the next Jesus. But as Day reminds us, we can still try, in our little way every day and in every action, to be the change we wish to see in the world. When we fail, like King and Day, we can acknowledge our imperfections and keep trying.
When looking at these two modern day saints, and the man Jesus who was their inspiration, they all share one important characteristic. They did not despair. Despite the suffering, the setbacks, the never-ending work, they held hope close to their chest. In the words of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, words that Martin Luther King Jr. made famous, “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King said to his followers before his death that he might never see the fruit of their long journey, and tragedy proved him right. But living the means to that possibly never-seen end was enough to keep the flame of hope alight in his heart, and in all our hearts.
Annie Dillard wrote:
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in that holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready – failed, grown exhausted, weak. But there is no one but us. There never has been…
There is only us.
And like King we can stand up and say with firm eyes, “this is where I stand.”
Like King we can promise “we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Like King, we can “dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”4
I have been told
In that fierce embrace
Even the gods
Speak of God.
Amen.
____________________________________
- Rose Marie Berger, for Sojourners magazine, July/August 2000.
- St. Therese of Liseux’s writings
- Ibid. 291
- King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
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