All Saints’ :: Daniel 7: 1–3, 15–18; Psalm 149; Ephesians 1: 11–23; Luke 6: 20–31
This is a homily by
Fr. Gene Tucker, given at St. John’s Church in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on
Sunday, November 6, 2016.
“The Love Languages of God and of the Saints”
(Homily text: Luke 6: 20–31)
For the first three years that we were
posted to the southern part of Illinois, I had the pleasure of meeting each
week with about five or six other clergy colleagues (not Episcopalians) for
breakfast and for a time of prayer, sharing and mutual support. An essential
part of our time together involved reading and discussing a book. One of our
members would suggest a book, which we would all read and consider.
This pattern was an especial blessing
for me, because it brought me into contact with material I might never have
read otherwise.
One such book was The Love
Languages of God: How to Feel and Reflect Divine Love, by Gary Chapman.[1]
Chapman outlines five ways that we know
and experience God’s love. Chapman says we know divine love by:
- Words
of Affirmation
- The
gift of quality time
- Gifts
given and received
- Acts
of service
- Physical touch
It seems to me that love cannot be known
without some act or action that conveys the power of love, for love demands
movement from the lover to the loved. This is true of the love which flows from
God to human beings, or between one human being and another. Consider, for
example, a situation in which a spouse continually says to their partner, “I
love you,” but who does not act as though that verbal profession has any connection
to reality. In such a case, there’s no expression by way of concrete and
observable acts or actions that would cause the partner to believe that the spouse
really does love.
The same is true of God.
Without some way to see and experience God’s
love in action, we humans might be left with an empty notion that God really
does love and does care for us.
We see God’s love most concretely in the
sending of His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to take up our humanity to the
full. God’s love, made known in Christ, is seen most clearly (it seems to me)
in the Lord’s suffering and death on Good Friday and His subsequent
resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. Here, in this sequence of events, we see
the depths (quite literally) to which the Lord Jesus was willing to go do
redeem us, and the demonstration of God’s overwhelming power to conquer the sin
that binds us and which separates us from God.
The Lord’s continuing presence with us,
whenever two or three are gathered together in His name (as we read in Matthew
18: 20), or when we read the pages of sacred Scripture, through which the Lord
speaks to us, or whenever we receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, is God’s
continuing gift to us. Taking a look at Chapman’s list, here we experience
God’s love in the words of affirmation we hear, in the quality time we spend
with God, time that God also spends with us, and in the acts of service that
God has done for us, and which we know from Holy Scripture and in our
continuing, daily lives.
The saints of God are also avenues of
God’s love.
When we consider the matter of saints
and sainthood, we ought to define these terms just a bit. A common conception –
but a mistaken one – is that a saint is a person who lived a long time ago, and
whose work in God’s name was especially noteworthy. (I call such saints saints
with a capital “S”.) It’s all well and good to honor the great saints who have
been especially powerful agents of God’s love in times past. We could name, St.
Peter,[2] St.
Paul,[3] St.
Ignatius of Antioch,[4] or St.
Augustine of Hippo[5]
as examples. Or perhaps St. Teresa of Avila,[6] as
another example.
But saints encompass a far wider circle
that the notable and remembered ones, those saints with a capital “S”. Saints
are – in a most elementary and basic definition of the term – the “holy” ones
of God (remember that the word “saint” comes to us from the Latin word for
“holy”). So saints are those who have come to faith in the Lord, and who have
passed through the waters of baptism.
So if I were to ask those of you who are
present here this morning to raise your hand if you know yourself to be a
saint, I would expect every one present who’s been baptized to acknowledge their
sainthood. (Yes, I know we might be somewhat reluctant to “toot our own horn”
where sainthood is concerned. But that reluctance aside, it’s also good to
affirm that each one of us is a member of God’s family, persons who seek God’s
face and who seek to be the lens through which God’s love can be seen.)
Saints are – by definition –
counter-cultural creations. If we look at the traits that Jesus outlines in our
gospel this morning, which presents us with Luke’s version of the Beatitudes,
we see that God’s people operate by a different set of values. Consider just
one admonition that the Lord puts before us this morning. He says: “But I say
to you that listen, love your enemies, do good to those that hate you, bless
those who curse you, prayer for those who abuse you.”
I don’t know about you, but I sense
within myself a strong desire to do just the opposite of what the Lord calls
His saints to do to those who cause me grief. I want to do what the world
encourages us to do: Get a bigger stick
when trouble comes around. Are you like
that? Maybe so.
And yet, we who are saints are called to
be different. We are called to be the
lens through which God’s light is refracted clearly into the world. Turning
this image around the other way, we are called to be the lens through which the
world can see God clearly.
That is our calling. That is the call to sainthood.
Can you see saintly traits in yourself,
however faint they may be from time-to-time? Can you see saintly traits in
other Christians you know? How about
telling that other believer about the saintly ways you see God at work in their
lives. They’ll benefit from knowing the good and godly things you see in them.
AMEN.
[1] This book was published by Northfield
Publishing, Chicago, in 2002.
[2] St. Peter has a primacy among the original
Apostles.
[3] St. Paul was God’s means by which the Good
News was given to all people.
[4] St. Ignatius of Antioch was Bishop of
Caesarea, who wrote letters to Christians as he made his way to Rome, where he
was martyred in the year 115 AD.
[5] St. Augustine (died 431 AD) was Bishop of
the north Africa city of Hippo. He is, perhaps, the foremost theologian of the
western Church.
[6] St. Teresa of Avila, a 16th century mystic, offers us a glimpse into the mysteries of God.
