First of all, I want to declare, I want to affirm to you, that when I chose the title of the sermon for this morning, “Saints,” I was not aware of the fact that at one o’clock today, the Buccaneers were playing New Orleans. If I had been focused on that rather than the Word, I would have gone with a different title. But I was where the preacher should be, and that is focused on the text. The title refers to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, not to a particular team that I am pulling for today.

 

Even though, and I probably shouldn’t out her this way, but even though the parish she last served was in New Orleans, I want to assure you that the stole that Nicole Partin has on today, which has a fleur de leis on one side of it, is lifting that up as a sign of the Trinity and not as a sign of a particular team that she is supporting in the contest this afternoon, either.

 

We are focusing on the doctrine of the Communion of the Saints. What do you believe about saints? Who are saints to you?

 

I don’t know about you, Chuck, but for me growing up in the southern branch of the Presbyterian Church, I wonder if it was the same for you growing up in the northern branch of the Presbyterian Church. I wonder if we had the same puritanical influences at work in both of us there. I sort of suspect we did. The one thing that I was taught, and knew in some deep-seated way growing up in the church about saints was that I was part of a tradition that didn’t believe in them. What I knew about saints was that Presbyterians didn’t parlay with them. That was something our Catholic brothers and sisters did. It was one of the ways we sort of defined ourselves over and against them. They looked at saints, and we didn’t. Wasn’t it Calvin who busted more than one of them out of a stained glass window as he thought perhaps the community was focused too much in that direction.

 

Over the years, I have come to realize that the difficulty with that position is that the Scripture is full of them. If you go to a concordance, and you can get at them online as well as I can, go to biblegateway.com, and type in the word “saints” and look at the number of hits you get in the Bible. The problem with that old Presbyterian position is that the Scripture is full of the word “saints”. And while old southern Presbyterians may not have parlayed with them, the Gospel does.

 

In the New Testament, particularly in the epistles, the apostles’ letters to the early churches, when it speaks of the saints, often it does it in greetings. The apostle writes “…to the saints at Ephesus.” Or “I greet the saints at Corinth…” When it speaks of saints, it is not speaking of some one who by the meritorious life they lived has lived a much more righteous and better way into heaven. No. The Scripture uses the word in a way that has its roots in the sense of holiness, meaning the holiness that comes from God. When the apostle says, “I am greeting the saints in the church,” he means he is greeting all of those who, in the Christian community, are trying to follow Jesus. All of those who come under the cloak of God’s holiness because they are drawing close to Jesus. He means the person who is seated next to you in the pew on the right and on the left. Everybody who is trying to follow Jesus, in the New Testament sense, is a part of the communion of the saints.

 

So that is why, despite sometimes our Protestant rebellion against it, for the last two thousand years, pretty much in the Presbyterian churches and Catholic churches alike, we have stood and said on Sunday mornings, “I believe in the communion of the saints.” It is a fairly deep doctrine in the heart of our Christian tradition, across denominational boundaries. We believe in those people around us whom God always sends, who are helping us to see what Jesus looks like, who are helping us to follow Jesus.

 

As I read Catholic theologians today, I see how much closer they are to what Protestant theologians are trying to say than I ever once thought. It looks to me like modern Catholic theologians speak of saints as people who, not because of the meritorious nature of their lives, but who simply as an act of God’s grace, in some way make God’s grace more evident to others around them. Sometimes in spite of their personal conduct. It simply is an action of God’s grace when, in someone’s life, we see Jesus more clearly. Not because of who we are, but because of what God has chosen in God’s generosity, to reveal to us.

 

You are a part of the communion of the saints.

 

I want to lift up to you two saints that have blessed me in my Christian journey. One is Emma Morris. She was my wife’s grandmother. She lived out her entire life very close to the Seffner Presbyterian Church, where she was baptized, where she was married, where indeed, we held her funeral service. She wasn’t a world traveler, but she lived a very faithful life. In part, she sought to demonstrate her faithfulness through sweeping. She was a ferocious sweeper. She may not have believed that cleanliness was next to godliness, but she certainly thought it was a step in the right direction. So she sought to get us all a little bit closer by sweeping us close to heaven. She would start with the porch and sweep her way out the front door, and when she got to the end of the walk, she would sweep the street a little bit, too. She believed in that kind of works righteousness. We were blessed by her Christian character.

 

She also was a worrier. She worried about all of her family. I remember her holding her hands together and rubbing them as she would worry. Particularly, she worried about her grandchildren, and her granddaughter, whom I was dating at the time. Maybe she had good reason to worry about her because of that. Worrying about whether or not she was going to get home on time, and worrying where she was when she wasn’t home when she thought she should be home.

 

I remember talking to her once and saying, “Granny Morris, why do you worry like that? Nothing you ever worry about ever happens.”

 

She said to me, “See?”

 

Then she said to me, “You know, I do worry. But I try to turn my worries into prayers. When I find myself worrying, which is often, then I think that is a goad from the Spirit, a push from the Lord, encouraging me to pray about that. So I take my worries and I try to turn each one, when I become aware of it, into a prayer. And lifting my worries up before the Lord are things I think the Lord must want me to be praying about.”

 

She was a window into what Jesus looked like to me at that moment, as she was many other moments as well. She was a human being. She was a means of God’s grace in my life. Now she is with what, in the vocabulary of the church, we call the Church Triumphant. She is no longer with the Church Militant.

 

I am thinking this morning about Banks Bolin, who was an officer in the First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, when I served there. He had been a general in the Army, and he retired to the Piedmont of North Carolina. When he did, since he no longer had troops to command, he took on the task of commanding the pastor. He became very knowledgeable about the constitution of the Presbyterian Church, the Book of Order. He mastered the rule book. He was always finding some place in the book of rules where I had overstepped my bounds. Or where I hadn’t crossed the “t” or dotted and “i”. Again and again, he would show up in my office early Monday morning to pin me with some place where, over the weekend, I had stepped out of Presbyterian doctrine.

 

“Pastor,” he said to me one Sunday, “I noticed you called a congregational meeting yesterday to hear the report of the Officer Nominating Committee.”

 

“That’s right,” I said, “Banks, but they told me they were ready to make their report.” He said, “It looks to me like the Book of Order says the Session calls the congregational meeting, not the pastor.”

 

He was absolutely right every time.

 

I remember one particular weekend in the middle of December, when it got very cold and it rained. Instead of turning to snow, it rained. The parking lot of the church iced over. Looking out my window that Saturday night, I thought, You know, it’s not going to be safe out there tomorrow. And hearing on the radio about other churches that were closing, I thought Who makes the decision here as to when we’re not going to have services? I thought to myself, I know who will know, and I called General Bolin. He did know.

 

I said, “Banks, who decides when we ought to call off services tomorrow?” He said to me, “You’re the pastor of the church. You do!” I said to him, “I’m the only Floridian in this congregation. I’m the only person who has never been through an ice storm before, and I have the responsibility of deciding when it’s not safe to go outside?”

 

He said, “If I was commanding, I’d make the decision. But the rules say you have to make the decision.” I said to him, “What would you do if you were commanding?” He said, “I’d call it off right now.”

 

So there I said, in the kitchen, “By the authority invested in me as the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, I declare that there will not be church tomorrow due to the ice storm.”

 

He said, “I’ll take it from there.” And indeed he did.

 

He died last month, God bless him. And now I am sure that the Lord is putting him to good work commanding troops and pastors gone on to glory in the Church Triumphant. And in a way that I may not have expected, the memory of him is a means of God’s grace in my life.

 

And I saw something of Jesus in him. I believe in the communion of the saints, and the fellowship of believers. I think the communion of saints helps us to know that we are not alone, and that is an important thing to remember this morning. Because we are not a people, a fellowship, that focuses on any one human personality. We are not a community, the church is not a community that is drawn around the object of charisma.

 

Rather, we only have one personality we focus on in the church, and that is that personality there. And there is health in that. There is wisdom in that. Because none of us has the ability to live in such a way that we are free from sin. Indeed, we all stand in need of God’s forgiveness.

 

Part of what we affirm when we say, “I believe in the communion of the saints” is that we are in this thing together, and God’s wisdom is in that. We need the gifts of the other, and the talents of the other. The accountability of the other. The word spoken one to another.

 

No one should begin to think of themselves as the head of the Church, because only Christ is the head of the Church. I believe in the communion of the saints. And I also hear in the communion of the saints the encouraging word from the Lord that God always has someone who God can bring to help you. To advise you. To comfort you. To pray for you. At times in ways beyond your seeing, from areas where you are least expecting it. Sometimes you only learn of it long after the moment itself has past.

 

I believe in the communion of the saints. But a part of what we affirm, in ways beyond our understanding when we stand every Sunday and say this in the Apostles’ Creed, is that we believe the body of believers is united, even beyond death, in the love of Jesus Christ in that communion. We believe in the Church Militant and Triumphant, gathered together around God. And that is why on Sunday mornings sometimes when we stand and recite the Creed, I hear not only your voices, but the voices of others standing and saying this with you.

 

If you listen, you can hear them, too. The voices of reformers standing in Geneva. In Scotland. Or in Germany, saying in their own churches there, “I believe in the communion of the saints.” The voices of monks gathering in the Dark Ages, holding onto the Scripture and copying it out by hand, saying in Latin, “I believe in the Communion of Saints.”

 

The voices of Christians in other countries, saying in Creole or in African or in Chinese, even when the church was so repressed there in Asia and China, standing and saying, sometimes in secret places and now sometimes in public, “I believe in the communion of the saints.”

 

The voices of people whom we have loved, some of whom have stood in this very room and said with us, “I believe in the communion of the saints.” And now, we say it together, gathered around God.

 

It is good for us to affirm this doctrine on one Sunday. It is good for us to remember that we are not alone, that God is always bringing someone close to us. That we are gathered in a fellowship of believers together.

 

It is good for us to remember this as we try and run the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter.

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2006