Hagiography

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
November 3, 2019
The Feast of All Saints
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
Today is a day for hagiography.  You know, hagiography.  Ok, well, it is sort of like biography, telling the story of a life, but in specific, the lives of saints.  Hagiographers are those who write and tell of great good people through whom God’s light has shined brightly.  Today we transfer and celebrate the Feast of All Saints, it is a good time for some hagiographizing (I think I just made up that word).
 
We can all name some saints, I am sure:  St. Paul, he is a biggie and we read from his epistles most every week.  He was a former persecutor of Jews who was knocked off is high horse, literally, and blinded by a great light.  As his story goes, Jesus spoke directly to him and transformed him from professional persecutor to chief promoter of following Christ’s Way.  St. Francis, we remember, came from a rich Italian family and just when established forms of money and property ownership were being codified, he renounced all of it and formed a group of folks to live together, serve the poor, and as legend has it, even the animals recognized his pure goodness.  St. Nicholas, of course, is Nicholas of Myra, another rich man who gave it all away was rumored to have put money in the shoes of poor young women so they would have enough dowry to marry.  That story is just a legend as the real Nicholas was an imprisoned and persecuted bishop in the mid-300s, but he is remembered for personal generosity, and that spawned a tradition we carry forward as stocking stuffing.  In a cultural mash up, with help from the Dutch, an American poet, and Coca Cola, we get Santa Claus, the jolly elf we are already see in store blow ups and commercial advertisements for months to come.
 
Almost all of the old school saints got to be called saints just because people remembered them and told their stories long before the printing press.  The Church being the Church, felt the need to codify saint making around the 10th century.  All of a sudden, a saint had to become a saint through someone making application, verifying something miraculous that set the person apart, and then there was an investigation and hearing and the final saint making decision was reserved for the Pope’s final approval.  Then, over the years, the Church set aside specific days for remembering each saint until the calendar ran out of days, and then books of saints were compiled and the list grew and grew.
 
The more superstitious iterations of Church used to hold on to relics of saints believing that they held some sort of physical connection to holiness.  Thus, bodies were displayed, bones and organs were preserved and embedded into church architecture, and all kinds rites of prayers and remembrance were developed to honor their legacies.  This is where we get patron and matron saint of this and that:  Simon and Jude for lost causes, Anthony for lost items, Joseph if you want to sell your house, Fiocre for gardeners, Amand for bartenders… the list is long.  Catholic Online lists 1,776 of them.
 
Prayers to and through saints resides mostly in Roman Catholic Theology and when the Reformation came about, Protestants eschewed such practice as excessive and tending toward idol worship, believing that prayer to God in Christ is all sufficient and a more direct line anyway.  Even so, if you want to sell your house, you can purchase a little statue of Joseph online complete with directions as to where to bury him in your yard for luck.
 
The Episcopal Church, being both Catholic and Protestant takes a middle way with respect to saint making and honoring such people.  We do have a process and a way to lift up lives well lived for remembering.  We have a book called Lesser Feasts and Fasts with some great stories and prayers.  The official line is this: Christ makes it possible for us to be saints as we share his life. We are washed, sanctified, and justified "in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" (1 Cor 6:11).  On this Feast of All Saints, we dig into this, and recognize that all people, all of us, are saints in the making.  It is good to remember particular examples and thank God for them, but really, we are all a mixed bag of holiness and messiness and it is not a bad idea to affirm and celebrate when some of us get it right.
 
However well intended the saint making process is, the practice of hagiography, saint story telling is such a better idea.  Rob McSwain, a friend of mine who is a priest and professional theologian has just written a book called Human Holiness as Divine Evidence: The Hagiological Argument for the Existence of God.  That is a mouthful, but made more simple, he argues this:  The fact that people can do great and good things in God’s name shows us that God is real and present.  While we make much or sin and its ravages, and while most of the news we consume is about chicanery and misdeeds, we honor God as we tell the other side of the news and recognize God’s light shining, even through the cracks of our own brokenness.
 
God is breaking into the world in such moving and life-giving ways all of the time.  The fact that we have to process saint making shows that we can be a little slow in taking notice.  I have come to appreciate the last segment on NBC’s evening news broadcast because it is, generally positive.  They call that last report “For what it’s worth.”  I watch that news show precisely because that last word somehow helps redeem all of the mess that gets reported before it and give a little hope in humanity.
 
In that broadcast and others like it, I remember the young boy whose classmate had cancer and lost his hair to chemotherapy, so he and his buddies shaved their heads so he would not feel so weird.  I remember a woman named Osceola McCarty who took in washing for most of her life and managed to save $150,000 which she, in turn, gave to the University of Southern Mississippi to fund minority scholarships.  I remember 94-year-old Shirley Batchelder from Franklin, Tennessee who saved up all of her bingo winnings and bought five seconds of network television air time to say three words: “Love one another.”  And, she said it fast enough to be able to say it twice.  “Love one another.”
 
This past week I began listening to a new podcast about Dolly Parton.  The series is called Dolly Parton’s America and I commend it to your listening.  There I have come to know her genius, her generosity, and amazing capacity to forgive while succeeding in the cutthroat music industry.  Did you know that her song, “I will always love you,” has been a number one hit in each of the past three decades?  Did you also know that Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library provides free books, one a year, to children from birth to age five?  To date she has distributed more than 126 million books.  So, Dolly now goes on my list too and she centers herself on a deep faith to boot.
 
Mark Twain once said: “I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.”  This is an apt reflection for this day.  We may not be perfect, but we are being made perfect in the One who creates us, redeems, and makes us holy.  God’s great art is creation and created humanity has such capacity for beauty and love and creativity.  If we seek God, we might want to do some hagiography.  When we doubt God, we should do more hagiography.  In the end, we cannot prove that God exists, but we can tell stories, and that is more than enough to believe.  Amen.