“Searching For Saints”

Stephen K Nash

Mark 12:28-34

Saints have been in the news lately with the beatification by Pope John Paul II of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. You know it was a couple of years ago that people started clamoring for a new patron saint. There are patron saints for just about everyone: for pasta eaters, tax collectors, beggars and seekers of lost causes. A host of others. Well now, in answer to the prayers of many internet users, the Vatican may be giving the Internet it’s own patron saint. And contrary to Bob Puckett, who fervently thought it should be Al Gore, the leading candidate seems to be St. Isidor of Seville, who died 1400 years ago. The Spanish saint is credited with creating the world’s first database – a 20 volume encyclopedia – a bulky tome that compiled the world’s existing knowledge at the time, just jam-packed with useful data.

BBC News reported this awhile back in a piece captioned: “When the Saints Go Logging On.” The piece cited a spokesman for the Catholic Media Office, Tom Hallwood, who said: “There are patron saints of many things, so why not let the Internet have one? It’s a good idea and might be able to help us all when we’re about to crash.”

I’m sorry to report that St. Isador has yet to assist yours truly in filtering out all the spam e-mail that I get. Maybe Puck is right – maybe they should go with Gore.

So just who is a saint? Today’s passage from Mark drops a few hints.

Over the last several Sundays, Marty has led us on a journey with Jesus “on the way” to Jerusalem. Since his arrival in the Holy City, a series of disputes between Jesus and various religious leaders have followed one upon another. Chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, Herodians, Sadducees -- all the establishment powers-that-be -- seem to want to entrap Jesus and destroy the influence of his subversive wisdom and his rag-tag socio-spiritual movement.

So it comes as the first surprise in this text that a scribe approaches Jesus with admiration after hearing Jesus respond to the others. Today we would call the man a theologian. And this is the first time in Mark’s gospel that a scribe is pictured in a favorable light. He asks Jesus as one teacher to another to engage the question, “Which commandment is the greatest of all?” What’s the bottom line, the knot in the thread, the ultimate, the superlative, the greatest, the be all and end all, the most basic, most important reality. The essence on which all else depends. The sina qua non.

It’s the kind of question that should appeal to us. We are a people enamored by superlatives. We want to know who is the fastest, who is the strongest, who is the smartest. But sometimes (and it is not always obvious), what or whom should be honored as number one. Tell me – who is the best athlete of all time? What is the greatest novel ever written by an American? Who is the greatest violinist who ever lived? What is the best baseball team of all time? 96 Yankees? 75 Reds? Some other, perhaps earlier team? What is the greatest movie ever produced?

Some would say, “those kinds of questions just make no sense. They’re wonderful conversation starters. They’re sure to elicit strongly held opinions, but they are questions without answers.” If we were to ask who, in the last Olympic games, was the fastest man in the world at 400 meters, we could all agree. Michael Johnson. Olympic gold medal, world record. But if we were to ask, “what is the greatest piece of music ever written?” What would you say? Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony? St. Matthew’s Passion Chorale? Handel’s Messiah? Pink Floyd’s The Wall? Hank Williams’ Your Cheatin’ Heart? Who could say? Is there one piece of music that stands out above all the rest? Could we say this is the greatest?

“Which commandment is the greatest?”

Can there be any answer to that question? The rabbis counted and determined there were more than 600 commandments in the law of Israel, both positive and negative, some describing worship practice, some forming a ritual purity code, food laws, all defining Israel’s identity in that ancient near eastern culture, all defining the boundaries of that ancient community of faith. Of all those commandments, which one is the greatest?

There are Christians today who would bristle that all the precepts of the Bible are level – they are all equally important. But Jesus disagrees. There are some ethical imperatives of Scripture that are much more important than others, and there is one—there is one—that is most important of all.

And here we encounter the second surprise of this text, at least for those who might think that Jesus would break new ground by saying something entirely novel in the history of the world. But rather, he speaks out of his tradition. He begins with the Sh’ma, of Deuteronomy 6:4, the words pious Jews then and now repeat at day’s beginning and end. The prayer that was as familiar to a devout Jew as “Now I lay me down to sleep” is to a child of a religious home today. It was a part of the ceremony for people converting to Jewish faith, and the last prayer that a Jew whispers on her dying breath, and, less significantly, some of the very little Hebrew that I remember from my seminary studies:

Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Then Jesus quotes the words that follow the Sh’ma in Deuteronomy – the command to love God with heart, soul, and strength – and he adds another word, “mind.” Then Jesus quotes Leviticus 19:18, calling for love of neighbor in the same way that we love our selves. Jesus brings these two commands together as one in a way that links love and justice. The verses he quotes from Leviticus follow hard on the heels of prohibitions against exploitation, making love of neighbor about acting justly towards others, especially the poor and vulnerable.

And then this scribe responds to Jesus’ summary of the law with an extended “Amen!” Like a colleague engaged in energetic conversation, the scribe picks up the thread that Jesus is weaving. And he says, “Yes! I concur,” love is more important “than all of burnt offerings and sacrifices.” Just as Jesus echoed the tradition, the scribe echoes the prophet Amos:

I hate, I despise your festivals,

And take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings

I will not accept them;

And the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters,

And righteousness like an everflowing stream!

Jesus responds: You are not far from the kingdom of God. Even though this curious questioner is not a bona fide, official, one-of-the-twelve disciples, he’s able to grasp and accept the power and life and potentially world-changing truth of Jesus’ teaching. World-changing, that is, if it would ever be tried. G.K. Chesterton once said that Christianity has not failed, but true Christianity simply has not yet been tried.

Gerd Theissen, the German Scripture scholar, in one of his books notes the human absorption during the last 100 years with finding the missing link between our evolutionary ancestors and true humanity. Theissen said, “We can call off the search. We are the missing link. True humanity has not yet arrived. A saint is really a true human person. The true humanity revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.

Sounds to me like God is on a saint search – looking for people headed on the way with Jesus toward true humanity. The qualifications seem to be acknowledging that God is ultimate and God is love . . . therefore . . . love is ultimately at the heart of things – the deepest truth. The one reality that can transform the world of humanity into what it is intended to be.

A saint isn’t necessarily a scholarly superstar like Saint Isidore of Seville . . . instead, a saint is simply a person who lives out an intense devotion to God and neighbor.

Do you think you can spot them—saints that is? Not necessarily, at least not at first glance.

Back in the 1920’s a divorced female journalist worked for a series of leftist periodicals and lived a bohemian life in New York’s Greenwich Village. In 1927 she became a Catholic, and then led a quiet rebellion within the church to reach out to the poor, the needy and the desperate. She was a pacifist, something of an anarchist and a crusader for social justice—not your standard-issue saint.

And yet, her name has been processed since her death in 1980 in the great saint-making machine, even though she had said before her death that she wasn’t interested. No joke. This woman, Dorothy Day, lived one of the most highly regarded lives in the modern church, but said she never wanted to become a saint because she didn’t want to be dismissed that easily.

During the depression, Day set up a network of soup kitchens where people could come to eat and sleep, a place were people were treated as guests, not as clients, and her Catholic Worker Movement – as well as her following – soon spread nationwide. But Day resisted accolades and attempts to portray her work as anything but ordinary. She saw herself as a simple woman seeking to live in the gospel – a person who demonstrated nothing more than an intense devotion to both God and neighbor.

God went deep into the most desperate parts of a city and came up with Dorothy Day, a woman whom the archbishop of New York called, “a model for all in the third millennium.”

But what about those of us who feel about as far from sainthood as one can get. Those who feel a long way from the kingdom and not near to it . . . or at least on a significantly confusing detour? How did we lose our way, or how can we find our way back?

There is a old Hindu story, very much like a children’s fable, about a pregnant tigress who was very hungry when she came upon what seemed to be her last hope, a heard of goats. She made a big lunge to get a hold of one of the goats and failed. She fell to the ground with a mortal wound, but gave birth to a little tiger cub before she died.

The goats all came back and took the cub into their group and taught him to chew grass and make Baaa sounds and did their best to be inclusive. And he survived – not well – but he survived, until along one day a tiger came and so all the goats instinctively fled, but the little tiger just continued chewing grass and baaa-ing. Well this healthy tiger looked at him and found voice and said to him, “What are you doing, eating that junk . . .and making those stupid sounds. He grabbed the cub by the scruff of the neck and took him back to the den where there was a carcass which wasn’t completely eaten . . . The tiger pressed the cub’s face down into the bloody flesh and he ate it and felt the strength come into his body and looked up and gave the mighty roar of a tiger. And this Hindu story is called, “The Tiger’s Roar.” You ask, “Well what’s that all about?”

It’s about the conviction in Hinduism that all of us are inauthentic. We’re all like tiger cubs who are lost and living like goats and we need both a mentor for guidance and we need strength to enable us to be our true, authentic selves. Of course, in the Christian tradition, our mentor is Jesus. And this is a powerful story, in the Hindu faith, of what in the Christianity we call metanoia – repentance. A notion that does not simplistically mean being sorry for sin and resolving to do better. Metanoia, repentance, is a total transformation of consciousness that is needed. It’s what the prophets screamed for and what Jesus taught. The story of the Tiger’s Roar is very similar to the idea of original sin and new birth in our traditions.

That new way of seeing—that new consciousness—often comes about as an epiphany experience.

Dan Maguire of Marquette University tells about his brother’s experience in the Vietnam War. Joe was a chaplain in the Marine Corps. He had always been in favor of the war. Coming out of two highly authoritarian systems, the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church and the military establishment, he was gung ho about the military mission in Vietnam. Until one fateful day. It was the dry season and he was by the side of the road when he came across a little Vietnamese girl and saw a growth on her leg. Almost the size of half of a grapefruit, and sores on it. He learned later that it was bubonic plague. And the two of them standing there couldn’t get across the road because there were literally hundreds of millions of dollars in military firepower rumbling down the road in front of them and stirring up clouds of dust that were caking on the girl’s sore. Joe relates how it came upon him as if in a revelation: What in the world are we doing here that is more important than this leg? And in that moment one level of consciousness gave way to another level – a new way of seeing. And he became a dove – just like that.

Now Joe could not have changed from a Vietnam hawk to a Vietnam dove by arguments. “Well you know Joe, the French were here, and it’s a complicated civil war, and there are all kinds of, blah blah blah.” No arguments would have changed his position, because he saw them through a different lens. All that stuff came in later and filled in the pieces. But he needed that experience of a deep change of his heart and affections and values.

That’s the point where salvation begins – the sudden epiphany, or perhaps a gradual dawning of an awareness that a particular path is a death-dealing path and not a life-giving one, no matter how it was previously advertised or understood. And taking steps to move onto that new path no matter what others may do or no matter what the consequences.

That’s the meaning of “repentance.” It’s a new way of seeing that leads to a new way of being. It’s a new level of consciousness that is rooted in a conversion of our affections -- our really getting in touch with what is sacred -- that which is ultimately precious in life -- and living out of that sacred center of value.

There will be all kinds of intellectual ways we come to understand our new way of seeing. New ways in which we’ll describe it and arguments that we use to justify and explain it, but it all starts with a very deep-down gut experience, a faith experience, because it can’t be tested scientifically. Love eludes that kind of analysis. We aren’t smart enough to prove that the life of a person – any person – even a person we deem “unworthy” is precious beyond measure--even worth dying for. We can’t explain in rational terms why it is a noble thing and worthy of erecting monuments to when people give their lives, literally, for the sake of others. But once tasting and embracing that value, it is a knowledge that is as sure as any other knowledge.

The way back to the right path – the path of loving God and loving neighbor – always begins at the very same place: at the point where God reaches across the miles and missteps and a multitude of messy moral mistakes, at the point where Jesus wraps his arms around the shoulders of wayward, wandering souls and gently guides them back. Christ doesn’t discard people because they are moving down an imperfect path – as we’ve seen on the way with him to Jerusalem.

Nor does he disqualify people who have made a mess of their lives before finding the right road—Dorothy Day became quite a saint after having had an abortion, a divorce, and a child out of marriage.

God is on a search for saints, and it is not perfect people who are going to be found. There may be some rare persons who are born and grow with a seemingly unflawed ability to love God with the totality of heart, soul, mind and strength, 24/7/365. But for most of us, this passion and power come only after we discover that God has always loved us, and that infinite, eternal, perfect divine love precedes our own.

Fact is, most of us find God only after we have been found by God.

And all God asks is that we respond with that same level of passion . . . loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength . . . and showing a willingness to love our neighbors as ourselves.

If we do, we’ll be God’s holy ones, set apart for a sacred service.

And you can’t get more saintly than that.

And now, would respond to the gospel as you bow silently in prayer.