Scripture: Isaiah 62: 1-4, 12; John 15:12-15
My thoughts for the sermon this morning were stimulated at first by the Halloween Party that’ll be happening tonight…more accurately by the occasion of Halloween itself…more accurately still by the slightly more religious occasion of All Saints Day, which is Tuesday, and All Souls Day, which is Wednesday. That was early in the week, before Rosa Parks died. When she died, a whole bunch of additional thoughts came to me, some of which I came to see as being related to the thoughts I was already playing with in connection to All Saints and All Souls Day. I’ll get back to Rosa Parks and what she has to do with All Saints and All Souls Days in my mind. Let me begin where I began with some thought about saints and souls…and sinners.
There’s a hymn that I’m sure is familiar to some of you: “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God”. This is the last verse of that hymn. “They lived not only in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still. The world is filled with the joyous saints who love to do God’s will. You can meet them in school, on the road, or at sea, in a church, in a train, in a shop, or at tea; for the saints of God are just folk like you, and I mean to be one too.” The point of the hymn of course is to broaden the way we think about saints so that it’s not a term that’s reserved for a few exceptional, almost more than human people, but to think instead that this is a term that could apply to anyone sincerely trying to lead a good and faithful life. I may not be a saint now but it’s not out of reach, so I could mean to be one too. Paul, Biblical Apostle Paul, who I confess I don’t quote approvingly very often, which is why I feel it’s necessary to explain who I’m talking about, called all Christian believers “saints”. I don’t think of Paul as having a great sense of humor, so I’m assuming he meant it. So I was thinking about the term saints as a name we call ourselves, and who it applies to and who it doesn’t and whether it’s a good name or not. I’m actually, frankly, not so sure that I want to be a saint, that I “mean to be one too.”
That made me think of the opposite term, sinners—saints and sinners somehow go together in my mind, being sort of mirror-images of each other—and how that too, much more actually it seems to me than saints, is a name we Christians call ourselves. I say “we” loosely because I don’t think we at Sojourners are too intent on drumming in to each other our mutual sinfulness, but I also don’t think one could deny that a long and large part of the Christian tradition has thought of sinfulness as being one of the primary and essential characteristics of being human. We are sinful by birth, by choice, by nature, by habit, by just about any way you can think of, so says a large body of Christian teaching. Reinhold Neibuhr, an acclaimed theologian of the 20th century, an acclaimed UCC theologian by the way, said that original sin is the only Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable. He was half-joking of course, but half serious too. And so I started thinking about “sinners” as a name we call ourselves too, and whether it’s a good name. We worry a lot here at Sojourners—I think we do, I hope we do—about how we refer to God, the language we use, the names we call God. It matters in various important ways whether we use names that are exclusively masculine, whether the names we use for God imply that God is angry, judgmental, forgiving, controlling, loving, all of the above, or none of the above. I’m not preaching about God this morning, directly, so I don’t want to go there. But it did occur to me that it is also important, and maybe in some ways more important, to pay attention to what names we call ourselves. There’s a lot at stake in that too.
And in that regard the first thought that came to my mind was the rather straightforward idea that good names are better for us than bad names. That is, good self-images are better for us than bad self-images. I happened to be reading something recently that referred to the novel “The Cider House Rules”, where the setting is an orphanage for boys and young men and every night a young man reads to them, after which the doctor who runs the place steps in to say a kind of benediction, ritualistically ending the evening with the words, “Goodnight, you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England.” Those were the names they deserved, not the ones they might likely create for themselves: abandoned, unwanted, forsaken. If every one of us had a self-image that was fundamentally positive, we would have happier people and a healthier society. Children who are taught, either in words or by the way they are treated, that they are stupid or worthless or unloveable will tend to grow up acting in ways that are not good for themselves or the people around them. As adults our ability to act in loving ways can be compromised by ongoing struggles with negative self-images. It is better for us in both our personal lives and our public life when we are able to build up one another in love as opposed to honing our skills at pointing out where other people are wrong, thoughtless, uncaring, or in some other way deficient.
These were the kinds of thoughts I was having as I began to think about the sermon. It seemed like sort of a simple thought and not a terribly controversial one that having good names to call ourselves, and calling other people good names, works a lot better than calling each other and ourselves bad names. A positive self-image almost always works out better than negative one. Of course saying that doesn’t make it happen, and making it happen sometimes requires skilled intervention and always requires effort on our parts. This is not a therapy group and I am not a therapist and so it was not my intention to comment on this from a therapeutic angle. But I was and am prepared to call attention to the way religion may feed negative and destructive self-images, for instance by defining human beings as somehow sinful at their core. That seems to me a bad name that we call ourselves. It’s one thing to recognize that we are frail, imperfect creatures, subject to failures of insight, failures of nerve, failures of attentiveness, failures of caring, all sorts of failures, a very long list of failures. It is another thing to define ourselves, at our very core, in terms of being a “sinner”. There are other names that would be better for us, and incidentally more Biblical: daughter, son, friend, Jesus said, “my delight is in her” Isaiah said, beloved.
As for “saint” I’m still not so sure about it, not so sure that it’s a good name. It has the connotation of being “holier than thou”, which you could say is a kind of definition of what a saint is, though to be fair saints in my limited understanding have never been likely to think of themselves that way. But still, being a saint means being separated from the rest of humanity somehow, which is why All Souls Day has always had a better ring to it to me. Being a soul, being a human being, is also something that in my understanding we need to aspire to, but it has more of a communal feel to it, certainly less exclusive, something we do together, aspire to be fully human as opposed to saintly.
And then I was also thinking that having good self-images is not quite the point either. Feeling good about ourselves is not the point. Doing justly, loving mercy, walking humbly with God. That’s the point. We can call ourselves good names and work on positive self-images in ways that do little more than flatter ourselves, make us proud or self-satisfied. It’s quite possible for people to have positive self-images that are a little too well developed.
I think that’s about where I was in my thinking when the news came to me on the radio one morning that Rosa Parks had died. A person who has risen over the years to the status of sainthood as far as the civil rights movement in this country is concerned, certainly a person identified with that movement, a person whose actions represent conscience and courage, a person whose body will lie in state in the capitol, the first woman to be recognized in this way. The death of Rosa Parks was certainly a newsworthy event, and an event of personal significance for me, though I have no direct connection to her. But she changed my life. I was 13 in 1955. What she did made me think about things and do things that I never would have done otherwise. What she did changed the lives of millions of people for the better. What she did changed the life of the nation.
But she didn’t do it alone. She wasn’t the first person, not even the first person in Montgomery, Alabama, to get arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus. The people who did it prior to December 1, 1955 are people whose names I do not know, and neither do you. And among the people who carried out the Montgomery bus boycott are some people who everyone has heard of, and some people you can find if you look them up, and a whole lot of people whose names are not recorded. To say nothing of all the acts of conscience and courage done before and after on behalf of racial justice, mostly by people who were not saintly, are not celebrated, and will not be recorded in history books. And I am pretty sure that Rosa Parks did not keep her seat in order to stand up for her saintliness or the saintliness of the black people of Montgomery but in order to stand up for her and their humanity.
All of which is to say that I think of myself as remembering her and honoring her passing more in the spirit of “all souls” than “all saints”. She was in many ways a pivotal figure, but in other ways she didn’t start anything or end anything. And of course her death raises, or ought to raise, questions about race that continue to haunt us. It would be a shame, literally a shame, if speaking her name in all the positive ways it will be spoken becomes just a way of minimizing all that there is left to do, as though we can be so proud and satisfied with what Rosa Parks set in motion.
The names we give ourselves in this regard cannot be allowed to be too flattering. Positive self-images may generally speaking be a good thing. In this arena they may not be quite right and certainly are not enough. With regard to racial justice we are none of us saints. It will not do to call ourselves “Not Prejudiced”. It is not helpful to call ourselves “Well-meaning People”. It is not good to call ourselves, “Sojourners—we have racial justice as our leading concern.” We need some other ways to think about ourselves, some other names to call ourselves that will move us forward in some way.
I’m not sure what to propose, but I will mention—as we continue to confront ourselves on this issue—I will mention one line that has stayed with me over the last few days from among the several things I have read about Rosa Parks. There was an interview done with her in 1956 while the bus boycott was still going on. In the course of the interview, referring to how she felt when she was in the process of crossing the line into dangerous territory, being arrested and taken off to jail, she said simply, “I was not afraid.” What I hear in that statement is not a boast that she was a woman of such great courage, but rather that she just knew that this was what she had to do and where she had to be. And it struck me that this is a name it might be helpful to have and to try to live into, that as we take the next steps toward racial justice, whatever they may be as individuals, whatever they might be for us at Sojourners, that we would do well to have that as one of the names we call ourselves: “Not Afraid.” With regard to the long journey toward justice, whatever the next steps are that we need to take, may we call ourselves “Not Afraid.” Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 30, 2005