Thank You, Saints

Fran shared a treasured recipe for Oatmeal Carmelita Bars. Morris taught me how not to drive a motorized wheelchair down a hallway. Jan upholstered a rocking chair before my first child was born. Dorothy gently suggested I needed a different sweater to go with my clergy shirt. Glen invited me to decorate wooden Christmas ornaments with him at a nursing home. Marilyn gave me voice lessons. And Jackie taught me never to guess a woman’s age based on her hair color.

After my seminary coursework was completed and I moved through internship and my first call, the lessons I learned were taught by the saints. Saints, as we remember them yearly in the church the first week of November, are not perfect people but human people. Saints are the broken and lovely sinners whom Christ redeems. And saints can be excellent teachers. If you close your eyes sometime and recall the saints who have shaped your life for the better, the reel might surprise you. One by one, you will recall moments when God provided comfort, levity, wisdom, or strength through someone who showed up in your life. The Spirit stirred up a conversation or set you in a particular place at a particular time, and there you were: the recipient of a holy moment.

Thank you, saints, for the holy moments.

I could not have been prepared for the level of trust people granted me in my mid- to late-20’s as I practiced being their pastor, but I can only assume such relationships are built when trust is mutual. I needed them as much as they may have needed me. I needed them to teach me the church is broken and lovely saints, and perhaps I could be one of them, too. I was made better by their food and wisdom, their forgiveness and invitations. In return, I offered the assurance that all we need has already been given to us in the unbreakable promise of Christ’s mercy.

It is helpful for me to reminisce back to these early saints and holy moments. In the 17 short years I’ve been a pastor, the church has dramatically changed. Even if these early saints are still around (a couple of them may be) they, too, would be part of a Christian church disrupted by a pandemic, in which mutual trust between leaders and parishioners has been tested. We (churches) have not made it this far into a pandemic unscathed, I think. We are still a wobbly bunch, forming our opinions and trying to discern what lines are being drawn.

We are still broken and lovely sinners, we who are church. We draw lines Christ has already erased. We confuse political opinions with religious ones. We share memes instead of recipes for Oatmeal Carmelita Bars. We too easily ignore how deeply we might influence one another’s lives for the better. Alas, one cannot be a saint without also being a sinner. And so, we wobble together, steadied only by that unbreakable and eternal promise of Christ’s mercy.