November 2, 2014 (All Saints’ Sunday) – Matthew 23:1-12
Matthew 23:1-12
Modern Day Saints
All Saints Day [Lectionary 31] – November 2, 2014
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
In his escalating struggle with the religious leadership of his day,
Jesus now comes out and says quite plainly: They do not practice what they teach.
They teach, they admonish, they criticize,
they dress the part of the important holy religious leader.
But they don’t practice what they teach.
They are fake religious leaders who are full of their own piety.
Like those people who want to be Texans but aren’t, they are all hat and no cattle.
They are all robes titles, all fringes and phylacteries,
but they have forgotten the heart of God.
(Kathryn Matthews at http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/november-2-2014.html)
They are hypocrites.
Their actions speak louder than their words.
As the old saying has it,
“If you want to know what a person really believes, watch his feet, not his mouth.”
We are people of the incarnation, and ultimately what is important about what we believe
is what we do with our bodies to serve our neighbours in need.
One of the things we believe is that we are all, well, hypocrites.
None of us lives perfectly what we believe.
We believe that God is love and that we were made in that loving God’s image.
We believe that Jesus was the perfect image or likeness of that God and that
Jesus came to restore that image in us.
But how imperfectly it often seems restored!
There is a good reason we often have
confession and forgiveness at the beginning of our services.
It’s because our actions often fall short of what we say we believe.
We all know this.
But it doesn’t make what we believe any less important.
The saints are often those who fall far short of what God intended them to be.
The saints are often those whose actions fall far short of what they say they believe.
But that doesn’t make what they believe any less important.
Nor does it invalidate the good that they do.
I went to the movies last week.
And I saw a film I really enjoyed, Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent.
The Vincent of the title is Vincent McKenna of Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn,
played by Bill Murray.
Vincent is an awful person.
He drinks. He gambles. He has sex with a prostitute.
He’s rude and he’s vulgar.
Needing some cash, he agrees to babysit his new next door neighbour’s 10 year old son Oliver
for $12 an hour, an apparently completely mercenary arrangement.
And from many different perspectives, the arrangement is a disaster.
Vincent beats up one of the kids bullying Oliver and teaches him how to fight.
He takes him to the bar and at the race track teaches him about the trifecta.
And he introduces Oliver to his “Lady of the Night.”
But then we begin to see Vincent through Oliver’s eyes.
Oliver is placed at a Catholic School and in Religion Class is given an assignment on
Modern Day Saints.
The students are to write about a saint among us who displays
commitment to the people around them.
As Oliver observes Vincent he sees someone who not only gambles,
but who gambles in order to make enough money to
keep someone he loves in a decent nursing home.
As Oliver observes Vincent he sees someone who not only drinks but
a veteran of the Viet Nam War who risked his life to safe others.
As Oliver observes Vincent he sees someone who is not only a client of a Lady of the Night but
who also cares deeply about this woman who is about to have a child.
As Oliver observes Vincent he sees someone who is still deeply committed to a wife with
Alzhiemer’s whom he visits regularly and sweetly and
whose laundry he insists on doing himself.
And as he reflects on his own experience, Oliver comes to see Vincent as someone who
has cared for him in his own very imperfect but committed way.
Oliver watches not just Vincent’s mouth, but his feet.
When it comes time to report on Modern Day Saints, Oliver recounts the ways in which
St. Vincent of Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn has had a positive impact on those around him
whose welfare he is committed to.
Vincent is an unlikely candidate for sainthood.
But then – aren’t we all?
We are all saint and sinner at the same time, says Luther,
and truer words were probably never spoken.
We are all deeply flawed and deeply broken,
imperfect by virtue of the poor decisions we make and
broken by the sin of the world visited upon us.
And yet the promise of All Saints Day is that
we can still be instruments of Divine commitment and compassion.
The promise of All Saints Day is that we can still be Christ incarnate to our neighbour in need.
The promise of All Saints Day is that we can still be Jesus
offering a cup of cold water to those who thirst.
Indeed, knowing we are broken and imperfect is maybe a
great help in our commitment to our neighbour.
Unlike the religious leaders Jesus addresses, Vincent knows he is broken, knows he is imperfect.
His biggest problem is with those who think they are not broken.
But with the broken – the prostitute, the child, the sick – he can be sympathetic.
He knows what it’s like to be broken. He’s been there.
He is able to turn his awful imperfection into something resembling compassion and goodness.
Summing up the theme of the movie well, one viewer says that Being good, loved, and saintly are within the grasp of the most common among us, implying that imperfection is a constant of being human and maybe a bigger credential than piety when that sinfulness is transformed into good deeds. (User Review at IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2170593/reviews?ref_=tt_urv)
The people we remember today, the people we lit candles for,
and whose light still shines before us: these people were not perfect,
and we make them perfect in our memories at our peril.
We must remember them in their imperfection.
We must forgive them those imperfections, but then we must see them as those
imperfect ones who were still able to bear the light of Christ to us.
Their brokenness was no barrier to bearing light.
It may just have helped them.
They were saints and sinners at the same time. That is true.
And that is why their example is so important:
they were sinners who managed to be saintly and
demonstrate their commitment to us in some way.
That is their example to us: they were saints and sinners at the same time: and so are we.
And we honour them best when we acknowledge their dual nature – as well as our own.
Along with them, and by the grace of God, may our sinfulness be transformed into good deeds.
May our brokenness allow the light to shine through.
And may our actions speak louder than our words.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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