Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10,13-14
Revelation 7:2-4,9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Psalm 149
I've just picked up a form from the courthouse that allows me to change my name. Just in case I ever feel like having an identity crisis. What you do is fill out the form, pay the money, and hey presto! you're someone else. That's how its supposed to work, anyway.
Thinking about All Saints' Day, I thought I'd pick out a name that is more well behaved and holy. Or perhaps I can find a name that is taller, slimmer and younger. Then all I'd have to do is change me, to match it. ... I don't know what you're all smiling about. People change their names all the time. Think of the confusion it must have caused in the Bible. Think of the correspondence that must have gone back and forth.
To Jacob, for instance, from the in-laws:
| Dear Jacob, What's this I hear about you changing your name to Israel? As if it's not already bad enough you spend your life moving around the desert. How can we send birthday cards on time? The Post Office won't know if you're a person, or an address... |
| Dear Simon, Take an old woman's advice: why should you suddenly want to be what you're not? What's wrong with being Simon? You're a fisherman, and a good one. So catch fish for the rest of your life. Settle down, pay off your net, raise a family. What else should you do? Maybe it's not as exciting as traipsing around the country with a miraculous rabbi. Maybe you won't catch as many people that way, but catching fish pays better, I promise you. So it's boring. Life is boring. I clean house, you catch fish. The day after I die, the house will be filthy again, and the day after you die, someone else will haul in your nets, instead of you. But what else can we do with our lives? And don't tell me your rabbi says there's more to life than eating fish and doing the laundry. What does he know? Does Jesus think he can make you into something you're not, just by changing your name? Can he make you into a different person, as well? I'll be visiting in a week. I expect to find you much as usual. Your loving aunt, Naomi |
The saints: I grew up singing that song of the saints of God, wholeheartedly announcing, "and I mean to be one too." But it still seems as if I need to be someone else to get there. Maybe a new name would help. Plenty of saints got new names – monks and nuns often get a new name at their monastic profession. Some get a new name at confirmation.
Actually, we all get a kind of ‘new' name when we are named at baptism. The name all the baptized share is "Christian.' And that name makes you one of the saints. Not perfect -- God knows, the saints were not that – most of them made more than their fair share of mistakes. But as a modern song reminds us, "The saints are just the sinners who fall down and get up" (Bob Carlisle, "We Fall Down").
Jesus does indeed make Simon Peter into a different person. Peter still was far from perfect, yet at the same time he was made holy, a saint.
It happens to us, too: Our baptism takes our ordinary, messy lives and sets them apart – makes our lives holy. That's a miracle. And even when we take one of those saintly falls, if we turn back to God, God's forgiveness sets us on our feet again. That too is a miracle.
But saints, even imperfect ones, are supposed to WORK miracles ... and not many of us manage to do that. The stories of our lives seem pretty ordinary. How long since you worked a saintly miracle?
It seems that the best we can do is to remember the miracles of the REAL saints, as in our first reading, "Let us now praise famous men." Men like the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov:
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When the saintly rabbi saw misfortune threatening the Jews
it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate.
There he would light a fire,
say a special prayer,
and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezeritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sassov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place, and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient, and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhin to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient, God made man because he loves stories. (Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest) |
We were created to be storytellers. We tell the stories. The stories of the Bible and the stories of the saints. But we suspect that some of the stories of the saints are not "true" stories.
For years I wore a St. Christopher medal. I was so disappointed when he was "uncanonized" because there were no historical facts to back up his story. But in spite of that adolescent disenchantment, I still have the medal. I knew the story was true. Maybe there was never a doglike giant ferryman in third-century Samos, but there were many simple, loving people who had carried Christ safely through danger. And I knew I wanted those people with me. They are all "Christophers" because it means "Christ carrier." The real story was bigger than any third-century giant. The real story is about a Mystery and a Truth that can't be captured in historical fact.
The stories we tell about the saints may not be historical fact, but they are true. They show us that an ordinary human, like us, can be godly. The stories of the saints are stories about God.
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There is a whimsical legend, in which God,
angered by inaccurate reporting and editorial guesses about who he is and what he is about,
hired the human person as a scribe and began to dictate his story.
(It is well known that although God positively-overflows in speech,
God has neither the patience nor time to write.)
So for forty days and forty nights God spoke and for forty days and forty nights the scribe scribed. Finally, the last word having been spoken, the exhausted God sat down (the whole time of dictation God had paced). The scribe finished the last word and stood up with the outrage of someone who has been plagiarized, ‘But this is my story!' (John Shea, Stories of God: An Unauthorized Biography, out of print) |
It is your story. God is telling God's story not only in the lives of the saints, but in your life. Tell your story, the story that has your ordinary name on it. Tell your story, and Christians with ears to hear will hear God's story there: in the beauty and the pain, in the mistakes and the forgiveness, in every moment, whether spiritually profound or boringly ordinary, and in the miracle that God loves you through it all, no matter how the story plays itself out.
Blessed are you who live God's story,
for you will be called saints.
Blessed are those who tell the story,
for they will be miracle workers who know God's love.