Matthew 5: 1-12
“Saint.” What did you immediately think of when I said that word? I once was talking about saints to a group of children. I thought I did well, until I was talking to a child afterward and realized that he thought I was talking about the New Orleans Saints American football team.
I think we need to understand the word, “saint” from a new perspective. I do not mean understand in the sense of looking up the word in a dictionary, rather, more importantly; the word saint I have found is simply an introduction into a deeper meaning. A saint is not into thinking about how God acts, but about who God is.
Let me explain what I mean. A member of a church once complained to her pastor about the pastor’s constant focus on the theme of “drawing nigh unto God” or “getting close to God.” She confessed that, “I don't want to get too close to God. I just want to get over in a corner and sneak into heaven quietly. I don't want to be a saint. I just don't want to go to hell.” The pastor asked what she meant. “I can explain it easily. When I started the ninth grade I set my heart on finishing high school with straight C's. And I did. You see, if you fail you have to repeat, and of course I didn’t want that. But if you start making A's, people begin to expect things of you. It's exactly like that with God!” she continued. “If you're too bad you'll go to hell, and I don't want that. But if you're too good, he'll send you as a missionary to India, and I don't want that either.”
That true story is a part of a pattern of belief that reaches out to choke our lives as sincere, but in my mind, sincerely confused Christians. We often mistake “saint” as a grade or level, part of our holiness before God, something that can fold into “C” right now, with I am not sure if I want to be have an “A” grade. That thinking betrays a distorted understanding not of how God acts, what we normally associate with being a saint, but betrays our thinking of who God is.
That distinction is very important because when we begin to see past grade levels with a saint being at the top and hell being failure, we can then begin to understand who God through his son Jesus Christ. How is that possible?
According to Rev. Nora Tubbs Tisdale, Professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School, "on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland there are certain sites that the locals call ‘thin places.’” These places she says are not named “thin” because of anything in the environment like the feeling in the air or because the rocks are thinner. Rather, she says, they are called "thin" because it is believed that in these places the distance “between heaven and earth shrinks, and the veil between the two worlds is so ‘thin’ you can actually perceive something of heaven itself.”
She goes on to explain that the ancient tribes of Britain and Ireland, the Celts, would place stone markers at those places. Later in the conversion from pagan to Christian, those same places became the sites for churches and monasteries. However, the lingering feeling that these places are somehow thinly veiled windows into another plane or world some suggest can even be felt today. It is not so far away from what we see here in this land. It is, we can simply say, what drove the inhabitants of Japan to build a shrine on a particular rock or hill or on a particular mountain; we can call it superstition or possibly even something else, like a perceived “thin place.”
For example, in my growing up years, I never was in one place for more than three or four years. So, a dairy farm and home of my maternal grandparents and later uncle and now cousin, became in a sense, a physical presence that still resonates with me. It was the sense that I had on the island of Patmos off the coast off the coast of present day Turkey where John, tradition has it, dreamed dreams and saw visions and recorded them for a church suffering persecution and martyrdom, the book of Revelation. It is the feeling some have on the place where Jesus, tradition has, said our words today. There is even a church there called the “Church of the Beatitudes.” What is it that makes a place some how “thin,” a place where as Professor Tisdale puts it “time and space fade away.”
We could go on, but as we know that focus on the feelings we may have at particular locations, whether on a mountain or dairy farm, on a still lake or at a moss covered site in a forest, ultimately are simply physical locations, not God. God is not a rock or mountain, lake or forest or a building.
Rather God is a loving creator who came to us, in, with and through Jesus Christ. That means that those thin places where we connect with God are not a location, they are not a rock or mountain, rather we come to see God, in a person, Jesus Christ. Moreover, because of Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection; because of God’s grace and the work of the Holy Spirit we …. I am hesitant to use the metaphor but I think it is interesting … are then challenged to live being “thin.” In other words, saints, followers of Jesus Christ, children of God are thin windows of God’s grace!
Let us turn to today’s words in Matthew. It helps to remember that this particular section of Matthew’s Gospel is part of a larger context. In Chapter 4 we read about Jesus’ time in the desert before the beginning of his ministry. We read about the arrest of John the Baptist and then the call of Peter and Andrew, James and John. Jesus’ ministry was growing, his “fame,” Matthew tells us, was spreading because of his preaching, teaching, and healing.
Then, we have these first twelve verses of Chapter 5, only the beginning of a longer sermon. Later Jesus continues by offering his listeners the images of being the salt of the earth or the light of the world. In short, in this sermon, begun with these words, Jesus is saying that his life shows us what our lives should be like, how thin we are to be in a sense.
The way for us to be salt of the earth or light to the world, saints, to be those thin places for people, is to live the words deliberately, to take them seriously as a model for that "kingdom of God" kind of life. We are not to pick and choose which we want to live, which we think best fits us, only shooting for a C grade because we are afraid of failing but not quite wanting to be A level. They are all of one piece, and they are all important.
These first twelve verses are the beginning of an invitation. They are an invitation to examine our lives and see how we are doing in this life. As Christians we do not have to race off to some physical location and experience God’s presence. Rather, because of Jesus Christ, we can see who God is and respond, in what we say and do. We don’t have to build a marker or little shrine or place a rock on top of other rocks; rather God wants us to be “saints.” It is not that we are shooting for “A” grade or afraid of an “F,” it is allowing God’s work in, with and through us.
One of the great things about being a part of the people of God is that we have lots of help. We have the commandments. We have the Bible. We have the words and teaching and the example of Jesus’ life. We have the words, symbols and songs of our worship. We have baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We have our prayers. We have the universal Church --- fellow believers --- one another. All these things surround us and support us.
At the time of Jesus, people had to travel to Jerusalem or fully and closely follow the rules stressed in the Old Testament in order to attempt to understand who God is and follow God. In our time, many are searching for those places or those books, or that leader or that rule. Others place blame on others or seek a way to use violence so they can somehow be closer to God.
Instead let us trust in the words, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and open our selves to God’s Holy Spirit --- the same Spirit which allowed John on Patmos a glimpse into heaven itself. It is there, thin in Jesus Christ that we will find ourselves transported to a place where the boundaries between this world and the world fade away, and where we sense our unity not only with God, but with all who dwell with God in glory. So you see a saint is someone who is simply thin … as window, for God’s presence to shine through. Amen.
