The Faculty of Heaven
Driving down an ordinary country road past ordinary little farm houses, your eyes adjust to something so extraordinary, that those same eyes almost disbelieve. There, shimmering in the morning mist, is a church, so supernaturally beautiful that it appears to be descending to earth.
It there outside the little town of Chartres in France, At first sight, you catch your breath and say something dumb like “Now that’s what I call a church,” but what you mean of course is, That’s the church as it is looks in the Book of Revelation—“descending from heaven, adorned as a bride.” Triumphant, beautiful, transcendent.
Many of you who grew up where tow gravel roads cross in a corn field may remember that little church sitting on one of those corners not shimmer in the morning mist. It is capped off not by a majestic tower but a peeling steeple and walls partially hidden by the tall corn that could use a fresh color.
These two churches are a parable of All Saints Day. Yet they are not two churches but two dimensions of one church—The church above that lives by sight, and the church below that struggles by faith. In the church above—there is no suffering, mourning or grief. No disease, no addiction, violence, no heart monitors or infusion bags. In the church below—well, you know. These two sibling congregations almost never meet except on All Saints Day, the day the church sets aside to remember the suffering and to imagine the glory.
We know these Saints because we’ve lived in their presence. A presence that gave way to the goodness of God and whose ways of loving were so condensed and focused, that we said that’s enough, I have seen a bit of God here.. Your entire education in sainthood may have to come to you through the prism of one “for instance.”
A grandmother who prayed you through a difficult childhood (grandmothers are good at that); or the spouse who believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself; or perhaps the college chaplain who brought you to Christ just when you were sure you had outgrown God; or perhaps it was the parents who sacrificed everything in order to give you opportunities they never had.
The funny thing is—these people don’t know they are saints. Some of them are like the Whiskey Priest in Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory. He’s a priest who keeps a mistress, drinks too much, and is afraid, but he continues to do his duty and to bring Eucharist to poor villagers despite government persecution. Just before his execution the Whisky Priest worries that he is going to God empty-handed; the poor man doesn’t even know he’s a saint.
And of course the people who know they are saints, aren’t! Sainthood never really caught on among most Protestants. We said the veneration of the saints might detract from salvation through Christ alone, but the real reason today has more to do with radical arrogance than radical faith. The fact is, we don’t want anybody to form or shape us in anything. That work is so important that we choose to do it for ourselves.
Today we’re more likely to admire those who have reinvented themselves. Yesterday, you were an insurance executive; today you’re a holistic healer. Yesterday, you were a disgraced politician; today you’re Dancing with the Stars. You will be successful in proportion to the chutzpah with which you thumb your nose at your former identity.
And when you stop and think about it, that’s what many of the saints did too—they made .180-degree detours from one life into another. But instead of re-inventing themselves they seem to have been reinvented by God.
In the 4th century Martin of Tours was a soldier in the Roman army. One day he saw a beggar at the gate of Amiens and he impulsively cut his his cappa, his cloak, in two, and covered the man with it. He proceeded to devote the rest of his life to being a capalein, a chaplain, to those in need. In the 20th century Dietrich Bonheoffer was a wealthy, rising star in the Berlin firmament when he was arrested for his opposition to Hitler. Writing to friend from the Tegel concentration camp he said, in effect, ‘Don’t feel sorry for me; I’m no victim. I have discovered true freedom.’ In the 19th century Therese of Lisieux was a French teenager, who became convinced that God’s love is found in what she called “the little way” of everyday acts of kindness and mercy toward others.
When she got around to writing her autobiography at the ripe old age of 23 she had already dived into this pond named God so deeply that she neglects to tell her readers that she was dying of TB. The saints are God’s faculty. They teach us how to forgive. They teach us how to say no to power. They teach us how to forget our own problems and to serve others.
But most of all, the saints teach us how to die. As you know, the church doesn’t observe the birthdays of the saints and martyrs but their death-days. The story of any saint always begins with a rollicking good death. It’s as if the church is asking, ‘What is it about this life and this set of commitments that make this death so precious in God’s sight?’ When a man named Polycarp of Smyrna was burned at the stake for his faith in the Second Century the elders of his church were there taking notes. It’s from them that we learn he could have skipped his own funeral by saying two little words, “Kurios Caesar, Lord Caesar.” The church has lived off his refusal for almost two millennia.
When Dietrich Bonheoffer was finally summoned from his cell to be hanged there was someone there to record his final witness—to tell us how he refused to go to God in his prison clothes and threw them off, how he knelt on the concrete floor, how he said to the prison doctor, “For me this is the end but also the beginning of life.” It was his last lecture.
There are Saints who also quietly incorporate the routines and the indignities of dying into their walk with Jesus and thereby turn their walk into a witness. And what would we do without them? Just imagine a world with only victims and no witnesses. Some years ago there was a movie with a little boy in it whose signature line was, “I see dead people.” And that freaked everybody out. For death is the ultimate taboo; it is the unmentionable subject in polite conversation. Better not to talk about it, because you might say the wrong thing. Those who grieve are often stunned by the silence that surrounds their loss.
For our culture teaches: Death is a private matter between you and your hospice nurse. Grief is a private matter between you and your therapist. Even hope is a private matter between you and your priest. Despair is a private matter between you and your own broken heart. Faith is a private matter. Shh. But look up! Look up and see starship church descending, and look around and see the brothers and sisters contending to be faithful, and you realize we don’t have to be so lonely. We are not alone.
