Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Recognizing Today's Saints "
Date: November 5, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Psalm 24

In Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, there is a poor whiskey priest who has gone through life hiding from the cross, wishing it on others, admiring their courage and heroic discipleship at arm’s length.  We would be wise to heed that priest’s words uttered on the last morning of his life. “‘What an impossible fellow I am,’ he thought, ‘and how useless.  I have done nothing for anybody.  I might just as well have never lived.’”  And then Greene says of the priest, “He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all.  It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint.  It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.  He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place.  He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.”

I read that over the summer, and made myself notes in two places to save it for use today.  The notion of that fictional priest, to think he had never accomplished anything of note in his life, reminded me of a somewhat related situation.

A minister here in Southern California I knew just a little, for he had served in San Diego and Lompoc, died last year.  His adult son is a friend of my daughter Amy’s from church camp.  As the time for his father Ed’s memorial service approached, Mark was distressed to think his father might not have left much of a legacy.  Amy told me this, and while I knew Ed and Mark only in passing, I was compelled to write to Mark.  I told him I was certain his father, as well as his late mother, who had also been a United Church of Christ minister, had probably influenced far more people—in ways large and small—than either father or son were aware.

By way of example, I cite a visit back to my first church ten years ago on the bicentennial of that little town.  After the celebration worship service, a woman in the church, nearly old enough to be my parent, came up to me and said, “I’ll never forget what you did for me.”  Standing there in front of her, I tried not to appear too incredulous for, truth be told, I had no recollection of anything I had ever particularly done for her.  All I could remember was that 34 years ago, on my last night in town after serving as their summer intern, she and her husband invited me for dinner on the night the parsonage ran out of propane gas.  I was too embarrassed to ask her what I had ever done for her that she thought so highly of, yet had escaped my memory.

Just last week I received an e-mail from a man, now nearly forty, from my second church.  I had worked with him on his God and Country Scout Award 25 years ago.  He ran across my name on an Internet search, and thought I would not remember him, yet he quoted by title a sermon I preached in 1978, and said that I made a lasting impression on him.  He and his wife were now members of that same church, and he was working with some of his three sons on the same Scouting award.

It would be prudent for me to issue a disclaimer here that I do not cite these illustrations to imply that only ordained clergy are eligible for sainthood!  It just so happens these are the current examples that pop into my mind about how some act, some influence that any of us has had on someone else’s life—family member, neighbor, co-worker, student, friend—can be remembered in detail by that person long after we have forgotten it ourselves.

A few months ago, one of the last professors from my era in seminary died.  I had but two classes from him, but something he said to me in 1971 changed the course of my life.  As I chose a site to do my chaplaincy training, he encouraged me to leave the Bay Area and handed me a directory of all the available sites in the U.S.  Because I chose a hospital in Pennsylvania, this act determined my first call to ministry in New York and meeting my wife.  I wrote a letter to his wife and, presuming she knew none of this, wanted her to know what an influence her husband had had on my life and ministerial career.

When my mother died in June, of the one hundred sympathy cards I received, two in particular stand out.  They were from members of my mother’s church, who remembered when they first attended 30 and 40 years ago, my mother was one of the first to welcome them.  I encourage you to do the same:  welcome others, of course; but more to my point, when you send that sympathy card or say something to the family of a person who’s died, mention if you can some influence they had on your life.

Just as others remember something in particular that we may have done for them, on this All Saints’ Sunday we pause to remember those whom our hearts have personally known and loved, those who nourished and created us as human beings and those who helped us through rough times.  This is our immediate cloud of witnesses, beloved faces held in living memory.  None of us are perfect, ourselves or those we hold in sacred memory.  Our own errors and failings, as well as theirs, may have affected us in deep ways; their goodness, too, is intertwined with the fabric of our lives, leaving a deep imprint on the way we now vie for life in all its wholeness. 

As we remember those who have died in the past year, our grief may yet be fresh; but we dare to trust that Holy Wisdom has not allowed them to perish but has received them into the unimaginable realm of Eternal Life forever.  Entrusted to God’s mercy, these are our saints we recognize today.  A community that remembers in this way underscores the dignity and importance of every one of its members—both those living and present, and those who have gone before us who are now at rest with God.