by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given November 11, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

Welcome to this house of worship,

to this community of faith, this community of love.

May you find inspiration here for the journey

and be reminded that others walk with you

including those who have gone before,

and those who will come after

and know that you are not alone.

Come, now, and let us worship here together. 

A few days ago, in preparing for this sermon, I decided I would type in the name of Mother Teresa into an Internet search engine and see what came up. She is, after all, one of the first people we think of when it comes to modern-day saints. She died four years ago and seems to be on the fast track to becoming officially canonized of the Roman Catholic Church.

The first site that came up was Mother-Teresa.com (I’m not making this up), and I quickly came to learn that even Mother Teresa has her share of critics. At the site, the first thing you see, in big letters, is "Mother Teresa, saint or sinner." You are presented with a number of views on both sides of the argument. Her detractors cast her as a selfish entrepreneur who had a great ability to get into the news. She is portrayed as a person who was willing to deal with just about anyone, no matter where the money came from, to get what she wanted. Her supporters list all the things we know about: her selfless service to the poorest of the poor, her humility, the list of the many people she has helped.

Once you have come to your own conclusions, at the bottom of the site, you are given an opportunity to register your vote whether you think Mother Teresa is a saint or a sinner. Turns out that 88 percent of respondents think that indeed, she is a saint, and just eleven percent of respondents think she is a sinner.

It is not even easy to be a saint these days.

Saints have always fascinated me. There is an aura that surrounds them, something mysterious they embody, some spirit that seems out of reach to the rest of us. In the Roman Catholic Church, a saint is a person who is judged by the church to have overcome sin and attained eternal union with God. A person can come to sainthood through martyrdom, dying for the faith; through spreading the good news to many people (St. Patrick fits into this category); and through doing good works for the church. This is where Mother Teresa comes in.

A patron saint is the special advocate for a person, country or church, or for a particular occupation in life. Some are very well known, but many of them are pretty obscure. There are over 4,000 official saints. There’s Hubert, patron saint of rabies and hunting. Seems he loved to hunt. And that a thread from a stole given to him by the Virgin Mary was said to cure rabies. There’s Viviana, patron saint of hangovers. Apparently she herself was fond of the drink, or so the legend has it, and now she watches over alcoholics.

I have to say that while I’m fascinated with saints, I have to confess that I also have my share of doubts. At least on the official level where it seems politics has at least as much of a role to play in becoming a saint as virtue. Believing in saints is, in fact, somewhat contrary to my belief as a Unitarian Universalist. We profess, after all, that we each come to our own conclusions about things we believe and we don’t need intermediaries to get us in touch with the divine. We can do that ourselves.

Unitarians and Universalists come out of the Protestant tradition, which historically has not looked too favorably upon saints. There was a reaction to what many saw in the Catholic tradition as idol worship. In our tradition, it has been important for individuals to be able to have a direct relationship with God, that there was no need for someone to intercede on their behalf.

And yet there is something we can gain from people we might call saints. There is something we can gain from these people who have gone before us. Those who have done much and who have created a path that we walk upon. And they were people just like us, who struggled with all kinds of issues. The great liberal catholic theologian Erasmus got to the heart of this when he wrote, in 1503 that "The true way to worship the saint is to imitate their virtues."

This might be a good starting place for approaching sainthood. We see some people who were models and exemplars, people who have lived with great integrity, people who set an example for us to follow. As Unitarian Universalists we have plenty of people we can look to.

One who died defending the Unitarian faith was Francis David, who lived from around 1510 to 1579. He was court preacher, and then bishop, of Transylvania under King John Sigismund, the first and only Unitarian king. David preached a simple and persuasive message: God is one. David was instrumental in encouraging the then-28-year-old King John to pass the Edict of Religious Toleration in 1568, which ensured that no one would be persecuted for his or her religion, nor compelled to worship in a way they did not wish to. David later persuaded the king to establish legal equality among the four chief religions of the land: Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Unitarian.

This was a remarkable achievement, but it didn’t last long. A short time after the decree, King John died, and his successors were not very friendly towards the Unitarians and their evolving ideas. They banned religious innovation, much to David's dismay, for he believed that religion had to grow and change with the knowledge and ideas of the people. David continued to preach his message and was declared a heretic. He was arrested and thrown into prison, where he died in 1579, after spending his lifetime in defense of his faith.

From our Universalist tradition, we can look to Olympia Brown, who, in 1863 was the first woman ever to be ordained to ministry by a denominational body. This made history, but she is better remembered for her work in the Women's Suffrage Movement alongside women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Brown began working for suffrage around 1866, and eventually resigned her Universalist pulpit to devote all her time to it. But it wasn't until 54 years later, when she was 85 years old, that Olympia Brown cast her first ballot.

In our century, another Unitarian Universalist saint emerged in the person of Rev. James Reeb, a minister who died in the service of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called ministers to Selma to walk with marchers to take a stand for the voting rights of black citizens in the South. James Reeb was one of the Unitarian Universalist ministers there. As he was driving through a white section of town, he was pulled from his car and beaten. He died the next day. Reeb's death became a trigger that spurred President Johnson a week later to ask Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.

These people, like others we could call saints, each did things in their lives that were pretty amazing. They did things that many of us can only imagine doing. But it is also important to note that they, too, had their shortcomings. Francis David was a rather headstrong person who offended many with his refusal to compromise or follow the law. Olympia Brown became irascible and combative with her sister suffragists in her later years. And James Reeb, in pursuing and dying for his ideals, left his wife alone with four young children to raise.

Seeing them in their fullness is important. Seeing them as people with challenges just like us is important. One of the things that happens over time is that we just come to look at their virtues, and in the process, fail to recognize all of who they were.

And that gets to some of the dilemma with saints. Truth is, they were all human beings exactly like the rest of us, people who had to struggle to do the right thing sometimes but people who were not naturally always good. These stories have been pared down to the good stuff they did by centuries of telling and retelling, but if you asked their spouses whether they were perfect, I suspect I know what the answer would be. Ambrose Beirce wrote that a saint is dead sinner, revised and edited.

I’ve noticed a tendency to want to do this at memorial services. We have an inclination to just look at all that is good, and to not pay so much attention to where a person struggled. That is fine, for it is a time to honor the person who has died. But it is also important for us to be aware of the whole of a person. The ways they were challenged in life and how we, too, have our challenges. It is important that we see ourselves in their lives, in their struggles and in their good they do.

It is important to note that we not only tend to create dead saints, but live ones as well. In certain people we want to see goodness and perfection. This can happen with just about anyone we look up to, for example. There are those people who we see as particularly kind or good and we want to see even more kindness and goodness in them.

But there is the all-to-human tendency to put saints—living and dead—on a pedestal. In them, we can come to see perfection. They are not so much people we look up to, but we see ourselves in their shadow. We don’t want to see their failures as much as their good qualities. And in doing this, we might start to leave ourselves out of the scenario. Instead of seeing it inside of us, we put it onto them. And this is when we can get into trouble, because eventually we will see their faults as well as their virtues. It will happen to people we admire, including ministers.

In our lives we need examples of people who lead the way. People who in their time did things that we can only image having the courage to do ourselves. We can’t know how we would respond to any given situation. We can image it, but until we are there, we just don’t know. But I’m left wondering whether I would have the courage to take a stand the way they did. Would I give my life for religious freedom? Would I risk my life and reputation for the civil rights of others? I don’t know what I would do in some of those situations. But their examples give me courage.

Few religions have saints, but we might want to look to Bodhisattvas in Buddhism. Bodhisattvas are kind of like saints, but they are also different in some ways. Unlike a saint, who goes to heaven to be with God, a Bodhisattva is someone whose very essence is perfected wisdom and who is about to attain nirvana—the highest destiny of the human spirit. But they voluntarily renounce this great gift and instead, return to the world in order to help others.

Maybe it is the helping part that we particularly need. There certainly is a need for saints who are there to inspire us and show us by their example. In these past few weeks in our country and in our world, we have faced a great deal of uncertainty. We have been faced with the need to make sense of what is happening. We are in what feels like a new world, and we are left searching for hope.

I had a parent tell me that she didn’t know what to do when her preschooler came home and asked about anthrax.

Another parent told the story of her child, who was too young to remember the Gulf War of ten years ago, called her the day the bombing began last month and asked her what all of this meant. What it meant that we were bombing another country.

We are left trying to make sense of all that is happening. It seems that the world we are living in is a new world. One where we don’t know quite as many answers as we used to know. When we are facing this time that has a lot of unknowns, we want to find solace in knowing that others have found the way. It seems that at times like this, the help of a good old-fashioned saint might really help us out.

Since the terrorist attacks in September, there have been lots of stories. Rudolph Guiliani has not been called a saint as far as I know, but his standing among the people has risen dramatically in these days. It is because he has been a strong leader. He has held up an image of New York at present and in the future that people want to look to. He has provided stability and presence.

There have been other stories. The wife of an executive from the trading firm that lost so many people is making it her mission to attend as many funerals for those employees lost as she is able. Sometimes she attends three or four a day. That is her way of honoring the dead.

There have been the stories of firefighters and chaplains, or police officers and airline passengers, rising to the occasion when they were needed.

And I read a story last week that touched me deeply. A group of New Yorkers are volunteering to keep watch over the dead being found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. They are fulfilling an ancient Jewish tradition of sitting shmira. It is intended to make sure that the dead are not left alone until they are buried. It is an orthodox ritual and is usually performed by one Jew, usually a man, for another Jew. But these are not normal times and so what has evolved is a group of people who keep an around-the-clock vigil within sight of trucks carrying body parts near the devastation.

During the week, the vigil is kept up by volunteers from an orthodox synagogue some distance from the World Trade Centers. Since they are not allowed to use the subway or cabs during the sabbath, they need someone else to do it. A group of college women whose dorms are within a few blocks of the site, have volunteered to do it over the weekends since the attacks. They take shifts from Friday evening until sundown on Saturday. They dress up and sit in a tent outside of the Medical Examiner’s office. They pass the time by reciting and singing from the Book of Psalms.

The young women have become very important to the people working the site. When one of they did not arrive on time, a burly state trooper called to make sure her alarm had gone off.

And as they have inspired the others working at the site, they have also found purpose in the midst of the loss and chaos of the times. They first did the service with a fear of what would be. In the end it has been something very healing. They say the presence of the souls is very much there with them.

In our lives, we don’t know what will be asked of us. In these times we are living in, we are called again and again to recognize how we are interdependent. How we are very much in need of the inspiration and example of others.

It is no wonder that in such times we look for stories of people who set an example. People who help us find goodness in what is happening. And we need to see in them what we could also be doing ourselves. In ways we are broken, we need them to help us see ourselves in a new light.

Each one of us brings our brokenness to all we do. We bring our fears, we bring our pettiness, we bring those parts of ourselves that need to be healed. And that is where it can be helpful to imagine those who are with us, those who might help us to find the way.

And it is important to be able to imagine what we want and need in the world. Sometimes we need to almost invent people who can give us what it is we need.

A story.

Writer Kathleen Norris tells the story of being in a classroom of fifth graders one day. She was serving as poet in residence and was ostensibly there to help students with similes and metaphors.

She gives the students an assignment to work on similies and as they are doing this, she looks down at a boy’s paper and sees the words, "My Very First Dad." The boy took the assignment a lot further than she expected. He wrote:

I remember him

like God in my heart,

I remember him in my heart

like the clouds over head,

and strawberry ice cream and bananas

when I was a little kid.

But the most I remember

is his love,

as big as Texas

when I was born.

When Norris later heard more of the boy’s story from his teacher, she learned that the boy had never known his father, who skipped out of town the day the boy was born. But the boy was doing what he needed to do. This was a very important person in his life, even if he never knew him. And it was important for the boy to find a place for him.

His writing revealed to his teacher, his mother and his step-father, something very important that was going on in his psyche. In his own way he was finding meaning and wholeness with the help of a saint he needed to create.

It seems that in our lives we do what we need to do to move forward and find healing and wholeness. As a minister, I’m always amazed when I see how people deal with incredible difficulty. How we struggle with the burdens we carry. How very complex this life can be. But also how we seem to have a capacity for being with that struggle.

The world is full of mystery and wonder. It is full of terror and joy. And we are left trying to make sense of it all. I really do believe there are saints all around us. Those who can help us find the way. Those people who, by examples good and bad, help us to find meaning and purpose. In them we see ourselves. In them we see what we the people we want to be.

PRAYER

God of the generations, grant us peace in our day. We give thanks for those who have gone before us. We give thanks for their example for the lessons they learned that have guided us. Help us to find meaning and hope in their stories. May we see in their lives—their fears and struggles, their courage and wisdom—an image of what our lives might be. We give thanks for all that we have been given.

BENEDICTION

Be in the world, good people. Bring your beauty, bring your kindness, bring your love, bring your hope. Go this day in love and in peace. Amen.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.