Sunday, November 2, 2014

Creedal Christians and the Communion of Saints

All Saints’ Sunday, Cycle A Proper, All Saints, November 2, 2014
Revelation 7:9-17 Psalm 34:1-10
1 John 3:1-3    Matthew 5:1-12


  I cannot help on All Saints' Sunday but to muse about my own relationship with the saints.   One of the "proverbial" babies thrown out with the bath water for many churches of the Reformation was the veneration and the intercessory efficacy of the saints.  And Anglicanism has had its own varying views, parties and pieties regarding the saints.  The hyper-Calvinists of the Oliver Cromwell time when the Rump Parliament made him Lord Protectorate during the King-less Interregnum take over took down all of the saints' statutes in wood, gold and silver.  Cromwell supposedly wanted to use the silver for currency and he is reported to have said, "Melt down the saints and put them into circulation."  And this has been the metaphor for many a reformer's sermon.  "Melt down the saints and put them into circulation.”  A way of saying get Christians out of the church buildings and work to evangelize the world.
  The strident anti-papists wanted to rid the church of everything which they regarded to be tinged with the so-called post-biblical papal developments, innovations which did not have the clear validation with a Bible verse.  Anything not specified in a certain way in the Bible had to be discarded.
  And so while living in the Bible Belt of the 1950's in America we lived in times of truly closed communions; Baptists and Roman Catholics co-existed but each thought the others were going to end up in the bad place in the afterlife but we still played football, baseball and basketball together because sports was much more unifying than our religious communities.  And isn't that the irony; folks are more unified about sports, food and commercial products than they are in how they practice their faith in Christ.  And how Christian was that?  Is that?
  As a Baptist boy I was a little intrigued that my Catholic friends had those chess figurine saints riding on the dash boards of their cars with the Blessed Virgin Mary in the center and St. Joseph or St. Christopher riding shot gun to the BVM.
  And we thought in those days it was really sissy for men and boys to wear necklace jewelry and yet my Cath'lic boy friends got to wear St. Christopher medals around their necks.  Their moms and grandmothers forced them to do so for saintly protection because if you had 6 or 8 siblings God knows that boys running wild in the neighborhood needed St. Christopher and a host of angels watching over to keep them safe.  And mom had too many babies at home to be on the lookout.
  Both sides had lots of wrong preconceived notions about each other.  We assumed the Catholic worshiped the saints and the statutes like idols because they would bow and genuflect in their church and kiss their St. Christopher medals.   And they were always praying to the Blessed Virgin and the saints and we just wondered, why don't you go straight to the big guy himself, Jesus? 
  Apparently, one had to be really holy or a priest to go directly to Jesus in prayer.  And Jesus couldn't be bothered about all of the trivial things of one's life.  It seems as though Jesus had spent two thousand years learning to delegate certain needs out to specialized saints who became like Santa's elves.  If you lose something, pray to St. Anthony to help you find it.  If you want safety in travel and protection you pray to St. Christopher, who sure enough got de-canonized when scholars proved that he did not exist.  Shock: What happened to all of those prayers to St. Christopher?  Suddenly null and void?  Good Lord deliver us!  And many just ignored the pronouncement and continued to pray to St. Christopher.
  What did many Protestants end up throwing out when they become so stridently anti-papist?  It is one thing to throw out indulgences but it is quite another thing to lose the freedom to think about a fuller meaning and application of a belief in the resurrection.
  Many Protestant churches ceased to be creedal churches and became confessional churches.  Creedal Churches continue to say, “I believe in the Communion of saints.”  And the reason that we confess this is because we actually faithfully visualize outcomes of the resurrection of Christ for the lives of the faithful departed.
  If we believe in the real and true continued existence of people who have died, then do we practice a faith to continue to give those people the courtesy of treating them as still being alive in a different and more profound way?  It is almost like many of the Protestant Reformers suddenly said, "It is just too macabre to think about dead people to adopt any communicative way of interacting with them.  You have to be a little nuts to interact with dead people, so let's just forget about them."  And any remembrance of those who had died began to be treated as though such venerations took away devotion to Christ because one was giving allegiance and prayer time to the faithful departed.  You see how such people painted themselves into a very sad corner: "I believe in the resurrection but I can't really treat my loved ones as still being actually alive in the resurrected life."
  One of the causes of the resistance to the veneration of the saints by the medieval Roman Catholic Church was due to the commercial success of the saints.  Every age and place and time has its P.T. Barnum’s who know how to do some serious fund raising.  A shrine, some relics, statutes, medals and the report of miraculous cures happening can do wonders for fund raising.  And certainly churches of every sort have done shameless promotions to help the coffers.  And the commercialization of the saints and their relics and trinkets has not always been commendable, though if money has gotten to good causes, one could consider that money redeemed through proper use.
  I think that there are other good psychological and sociological reasons for the rise of the cult of the saints and their veneration.  If masculine pronoun was used exclusively for divinity, and women were subjugated and suffering and in their suffering they prayed more and called out to God more than the men who were in control, where does the feminine aspect life get validated?  It got validated in the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary becoming elevated to be the co-redemptrix of the world and she gradually grew in such popularity and seemed to get more hits on her prayer line than Jesus.  So you can see this feminine principle become validated in high places because when women are left powerless in actual social conditions, there is a natural spiritual and psychological correction which occurs which elevates the feminine to some spiritual and heavenly compensation.  In psychological terms the Collective Unconscious will find actual behavioral ways to balance the masculine and feminine aspects, the cosmic yin and yang.  The occurrence of holy women and the spread of their sanctity meant that women saints were included in the cult of saints.  This too was a manifestation of a correcting balance for the feminine aspect in the face of societies being under patriarchal control.  One might note that as women have received education and been empowered in roles in society, there has occurred the diminished devotion to the cult of saints.  The cult of saints existed to proclaim that justice existed in heaven among the holy even though it had not been attained on earth in actual practice between men and women.
  I do believe that the cult of saints became a buffer and mediating group of people who experienced a utopian state of justice in the heavenly world because the world of ordinary people was the world of a mediated existence through pope and priests and monarchs and lords of the manor.  The peasants and the serfs lived lives through the lives of the saints who attained the will of God in heaven because the conditions on earth were so founded upon the master and slave relationship.  You can see the validity of some of the criticism of Karl Marx's notion of religion as the opiate of people.  The rich get richer and the poor get religion; they get to live vicariously in the lives of the hero saints because their own lives were so pitiful.
   There is another sociological factor in the cult of the saints.  I think it has to do with regional identity.  With the Enlightenment and the rise of the national states and the use of vernacular languages, secular regional identities have taken over.  In earlier times, a saint could be a local patron of a parish church or area.  The saint was like a totem pole; a patron saint was part of the interior identity marker that each person in the region had.  So a saint represented a very significant religious, geographical and tribal interior marking in the life of each person.  If you want to understand our modern day parallel, just think about the completely irrational loyalty we have to professional and college sports teams.  People are marked deeply inside with this regional loyalty and identity and such a team totem holds people together for common goals.  This is how the regional and local saint used to function in the lives of people.  You can see how the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation and the rise of education, literacy and the national state began to diminish the local and regional identity effect of the local saints.  When an individual person is empowered through education to read and study the Bible in one’s own language and to pray in one’s language, the clergy and the paternalistic authorities lose their powers of mediation.  And the saints lost their prominence too when individuals understood themselves to be gracefully empowered to approach and receive the grace of Christ directly and in an unmediated way.
  So you may think in my musing about the saints, I have been comical or cynical or overly rational even as I mourn the loss of the prominence of spiritual heroes.  Today we spend more time venerating sports heroes who are going into sports halls of fame; we lionize motion picture heroes, popular music heroes and political heroes and the saints get short changed even though their lives witness to things much more valorous than the other hall of famers.
  Today, on All Saints' Sunday, mourn with me the loss of social status of the saints and their wondrous deeds.  Today, let us confess that we stand on the shoulders of some wonderful well-known saints and some very local saints in our lives who have kept this world from being much worse than it could be.
  And let us continue to be Creedal Christians today who give regard to the saints; We believe in the Communion of the Saints.  Why?  Because we believe in the resurrection of the dead, and if we believe in the resurrection why should we treat the departed as though they weren't alive?  Talk to them, ask for their help and pray to them and pray for them because in the wonderful Communion of Saints, we're still in this all together.     Amen.

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