"Clothing of the Saints" from the series, "A Season of Saints" - Sermon, November 5, 2017
Community
UMC, Quincy
“A
Season of Saints: Clothing of the Saints”
Pastor
Andrew Davis
November
5, 2017
Revelation
7: 9-17
Today is one of my favorite
Sundays of the Christian year, and not necessarily because we got that extra
hour of sleep last night when we set our clocks back by an hour. Today is All Saints Sunday, where we
celebrate the saints who have gone on before us, those who are among us today,
and those who are yet to be born as we think closely about how thin the veil
really is between life and death. I also
say this in the wake of another loss within our church, as Bonnie Norton moved
on to the company of saints this past Thursday after a battle with leukemia.
While we adjust to the time
change this morning, we embark on a new adventure, as we journey into the
season of saints to finish out this current Christian year before we move into
the season of Advent, which are the four weeks before Christmas. Throughout this series, “Season of Saints,” we
will be talking of clothing of the saints, stories of the saints, thanksgiving
of the saints in conjunction with consecrating our pledges (which you’ll hear
about shortly form Pastor Ray), and the Shepherd-King of the saints, Jesus
Christ. As we go through this series,
“we move in a sense from the outside inward, from what we wear, to the stories
we can tell, to the thanksgiving flowing from our inmost being, to Christ as
our Shepherd-King at the center of it all.”[i]
While
preparing our message for this morning during the week, I read how one the
retired professors at Wesley Theological Seminary, Dr. Lawrence Hull Stookey,
who himself joined the company of saints last year,
tells the story of a friend of his who explained to a Protestant
class about the meaning of All Saints Day. A student abruptly stood up and
replied, “Protestants don’t have saints!” The professor, in a moment of quick
wit, ran to his office to grab a phonebook, and he asked the student to read
the names of all the churches in the area. The student read, “St. James Baptist
Church, St. John’s Lutheran Church, John Knox Presbyterian Church,” until he
gave up and said, “I get it … I’m wrong!”
It became obvious to that student, and to the whole class, that we
all have saints -- those who are deceased, and those who are living and walking
among us, and if we think with Paul, perhaps even we ourselves are saints. The
word saint is
not limited to the “greats” of history, for Paul and other writers in the New
Testament use the term synonymously with Christian and, at times, believer. No matter how you
define it, the word saint has
broad implications, and that is perhaps the best way to describe this week’s
New Testament passage from Revelation 7.[ii]
Indeed, we do have many saints among us, both living and
those who have gone onto the great company of saints, much like we see in the
imagery of our reading from Revelation with everyone dressed in white standing
around the throne, singing songs of glory, honor, and praise before the lamb, a
very joyful scene. It’s a far cry from
what we usually associate the Book of Revelation with, as there can be some
very disturbing images when we read through the entire Book of Revelation. Unlike the occasionally disturbing imagery we
might associate the book of Revelation, this particular scene shows a great
multitude that comes together from ALL over the world, a great diversity
represented here. Taylor Burton-Edwards
at Discipleship Ministries in Nashville explains that
God has drawn every one of these whom we have known and loved and
seeks to draw us all into the innermost circle of God’s throne, into the Holy
of Holies in God’s heavenly temple. God
has made of the despised, the suffering, and those who stand with them priests
forever. And as they are drawn around
God, God dwells among them. For those
who knew hunger and thirst and merciless labor under scorching heat, all of
that is no more. Jesus is their
shepherd, leading them evermore to pasture and life-giving streams. And in their sorrow for all the grief they
have witnessed, felt, and may still feel, God wipes away every tear from their
eye.[iii]
These are the same people
who have gone through this life here on earth, complete with its ups and downs,
its sufferings, its joys, and its sorrows.
While imagining what this sight that the narrator in Revelation, John is
seeing, “we are given a
stunning view of a massive throng of people from everywhere, a multitude no one
can begin to number, people from every nation, tribe, ethnicity, and language.
They wave palm branches and cry out together, rejoicing in Christ’s victory
over sin and death. And they are all robed in white.”[iv]
As we remember those in our church who are now part
of that multitude, Zigie, Barbara, Gerri, Londa, and Bonnie, we remember the
love we all had for them, the love they had for us, and what they meant to us
here in this congregation. I can
see each of them a part of that same throng of people from everywhere, all
gathered around the throne of the Lamb of God, having exchanged the clothes
they wore in this life to the new pure, white garments of their new life that
is filled with JOY!!!
Each of these saints in this multitude
have
plunged their garments into everything [Jesus] stood for in his life and
everything about him that led him to a bloody death [on the cross], and so have
made [their garments] dazzingly bright.
They do not simply ‘wear Jesus on their sleeves,’ as we say of those who
seem to want to make a show of their religiosity. This is no show. This is who they are. They wear him on their entire bodies. They are his, and they let the whole world
know it even through their clothing.[v]
Zigie,
Barbara, Gerri, Londa, and Bonnie did just that: they wore Jesus on their entire
bodies through each of their gentle, loving actions, filled with laughter,
helping others, standing up for causes they believed in, beautifying our
church, or laying a foundation of faith in their children. I also remember saints in my own family who have
gone on this past year: one of my best
friends Steve who brightened many customers’ and co-workers days at Raley’s; my
Uncle Gary who served as a firefighter for many years in the Sacramento area; or
my great-Aunt Marge who was compassionate and saw joy and hope in everything
through wearing Jesus on her entire body.
Even in our own lives, we have saints,
some we may not even stop to think is a saint.
In her second book, Accidental
Saints, Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber says that
It
has been my experience that what makes us the saints of God is not our ability
to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners. The title ‘Saint’ is always conferred, never
earned. Or as the good Saint Paul puts
it [in Philippians 2: 13], ‘For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you
both to will and to work for his good pleasure.’ I have come to realize that all the saints I’ve known have been
accidental ones – people who inadvertently stumbled into redemption like they
were looking for something else at the time, people who have just a wee bit of
a drinking problem and manage to get sober and help others to do the same,
people who are kind as they are hostile.[vi]
Nadia
is someone who encounters many people who are accidental saints and I consider
her one as well. If you saw a picture of
her, you would wonder if she is a pastor or not save for the collar based on
her appearance, although sometimes looks can really be deceiving, yet she still
wears Jesus on her entire body, even with all the tattoos. And she is someone who changed her life
around from being a drug addict and alcoholic to becoming a Lutheran pastor and
helping others know God and follow Christ, especially those who you would least
expect to see in church today, much less that great multitude we see in
Revelation. Sometimes, we have people in
our lives who become saints through their ordinary actions despite how they may
appear on the surface.
As
we come to the communion table shortly and join in Holy Communion with the
saints among us and lift up the saints in our own lives,
We
can speak of what they have done.
Probably all of us know some saints, people who have entered into the
great sufferings of others and have plunged their lives so fully into Jesus
that they became clothed with him. We
can name some of them now, people we know who are walking the way of Jesus
among us, as well as those who are walking among us no more. It does us good to remember them.[vii]
As
we sing “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” we know we have many saints in
different ways, as I know I look forward to the day when I get to join that
multitude, or continue walking along the living saints of today. I mean to be one too. Do you?
Let us sing together from page ___ of The United Methodist Hymnal, “I
Sing a Song of the Saints of God.”
(After Song)
In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, Let the Church Say AMEN!!
[i]
Ministries, Discipleship. 2017. "Twenty-Second Sunday
After Pentecost 2017 — Preaching Notes - Umcdiscipleship.Org". Umcdiscipleship.Org.
Accessed November 2 2017.
https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/twenty-second-sunday-after-pentecost-2017-preaching-notes.
[ii] "Commentary On Revelation 7:9-17 By Eric Mathis". 2017. Workingpreacher.Org.
Accessed November 2 2017. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2182.
[iii]
Ministries, Discipleship, 2017.
[iv] Ministries, Discipleship. 2017.
[v]
Ibid.
[vi]
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints:
Finding God in All the Wrong People (New York: Convergent Books, 2015), 7
[vii]
Ministries, Discipleship, 2017.
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