Sermon: Qualified for Sainthood

The Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)
July 15, 2007

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Qualified for Sainthood

Deuteronomy 30:4, 6, 8-14
Colossians 1:1-14

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

You remember that feeling you get at the beginning of a new school year?  Sorry, kids, I know it’s cruel to make you think of school in July, but stay with me.  You know that wonderful smell of newly sharpened pencils and clean white notebooks?  You remember the hope you get at the beginning of the year, especially in high school or college when you’d have a long reading list, that surely this time, I’ll stay on top of my work?  This time, I’ll stay organized!  This time, I’ll write those papers right away, and not wait until the night before they’re due.  How long does that last?  I’ll tell you, it’s no different in seminary.  I fell for that idea every semester when I was studying to be a pastor, at Pacific School of Religion in California.  Each time I’d start a new class I’d think, “This time I’ll keep up with ALL my reading, do it right away, and not fall behind.  How hard could it be?”  Turns out, it’s VERY hard, right?  Some of us can’t keep a new resolution an hour, much less keep it up for a week, or a month, much less a lifetime.

The Bible has always described humanity’s struggle with this problem – the soul yearns for perfection, but somehow we always manage to miss the mark.  But the Good News in both these texts is that the Lord comes AFTER us to save us, to gather us up and circumcise our hearts.  Wow!  That’s some strange surgery.  But hear what God is saying: “I will do the heart surgery you need to make you more loving.”  We sing, “Lord, I want to be more loving, in my heart.”  “All right,” says God.  “I can do that.”  In Deuteronomy we first hear this promise of transformation: the LORD will gather us close and change us, make us more holy.  Deuteronomy says God does this work on people “so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.”

In other words, religion is not all about learning how to be good and doing good deeds together, like working on Brookfield’s Habitat for Humanity house.  Religion is also about the heart’s joyful response to the gift of grace.  Worship celebrates our acceptance into the company of the saints. Colossians says we have been “delivered … from the dominion of darkness and transferred …to the kingdom of [the] Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” It’s like an academic transfer from the worst school in the state into the best one in the nation – all in spite of our woeful lack of either ability or self-discipline. How did we fool anyone into believing we are qualified?  But this is the Good News: God doesn’t sanctify the qualified; God qualifies the saints. God doesn’t confer sainthood on those who have worked hard to qualify themselves for the job.  God qualifies for sainthood miserable failures just like us.  Jesus comes and rescues us, delivering us, broken, into the arms of a loving God, who offers to heal us.

You should just see your faces.  You all look so depressed.  This is GOOD News I’m preaching!  You noticed the title of this sermon?  “Qualified for Sainthood”?  I was joking with the staff this week about that title, because it made me miss the big sign we had at my old church in California.  Each week, we’d put up a new sermon title, along with the name of the preacher.  And some titles, like this one, looked great up in lights: “You are Precious,” Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia, or “A Prophet for Our Time,” Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia, or my favorite, a Christmas sermon, “God’s Gift to the World,” Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia.  But, you see, the gospel tells us we could put ALL of our names up in lights outside the church, not just Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia, “Qualified for Sainthood”!  See why that’s Good News?  So it’s a little daunting, I guess.

                 I was talking to one young mom the other day who said she kept wanting to bring her preschoolers to church, because she knew it would be “good for them.”  They had been baptized here, but they never came to worship because she was waiting for them to get old enough to behave.  Right!  What age is that exactly?   I STILL enjoy misbehaving sometimes, don’t you?  I wanted to tell her about one glorious Easter morning when my toddler – who shall remain nameless – but he or she was sitting on the front row in full view of everyone, digging through the mayor of Berkeley’s purse as I was trying to lead worship. I was staring as hard as I could at my husband, trying my best to telepathically get the message to him, “Look down!  Look down at your child before she, or he, starts drawing on the pew with the mayor’s lipstick!” I told this story in the first service, by the way, and after church my husband said to me, “Yeah, I remember that.  You were looking at me so intently, I remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, she REALLY loves me. She just can’t keep her eyes off of me!’”

                 The truth is, Colossians was written, as were many of the epistles, to a community a lot like ours, full of people like that young mom who found it hard to believe that faith in Christ alone was sufficient for salvation.  False teachers were claiming that there were other lessons to be learned, outside the church, which would help a seeker qualify for a higher spiritual plane.  Does this sound a little like every PBS self-help guru or every infomercial where you learn to organize your home in 50 easy steps or lose 25 pounds in just one week?  People today, with all our self-improvement books and classes, are not too very different from the people of Colossae, who received this letter from Paul (or a disciple of Paul – some scholars dispute that he was the author). 

               Colossae was a Greek colonial town about 120 miles inland and upriver from Ephesus, a seaport just across the Agean from Athens, in western Turkey. It was pretty far off the route of Paul’s missionary journeys, so probably he had never been there, and didn’t know the people in the church.  Also, Colossae was destroyed in an earthquake about 60 AD, which helps date the letter during Paul’s last years, while he was imprisoned and facing the end of his life. The important thing is, his distance makes his love and compassion for them all the more impressive.  We can just imagine Paul writing, in chains and under house arrest in Rome to a church he’d never seen, as we hear the tremendous outpouring of love for people he was confident to call “saints.” 

Paul is overflowing with praise for them – or at least he has confidence in the power of their Redeemer to bring them back. As he begins this epistle, he writes, “To the SAINTS and faithful brethren in Christ at Colossae. Grace to you and peace from God our Father.”  This is a standard greeting for Paul, but it’s not an accident, or mere flattery, that he calls these strangers “saints.”  Although he doesn’t know them by name, he knows that by virtue of their faith – their confession of Jesus Christ as Lord, a confession we share in the church today – he can say with confidence that they are “qualified…to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”  When you think about this, it’s pretty irresponsible of him.  It’s as if he’s vouching for the reputation of people he’s never met.  The free gift of God’s grace is truly so amazing, it’s literally unbelievable for some people, but it’s what inspires us to praise God in worship each Sunday.

I want to close with a story about my former professor Doug Adams, who I added to our prayer list recently as he’s entered the final days of his life.  Doug was my faculty and thesis advisor, as well as our worship professor.  He’s the one who taught me to love Paul, which wasn’t easy to do given a few things Paul wrote about women and preaching.  But he helped me understand grace and why it’s so important.  I ran into the President of our seminary at General Synod last month, and when I asked about Doug, he said that when the students returned in the fall they’d have a memorial service for him – and at the end we’d all throw brown bags in the air.  I know that doesn’t make any sense for you, but you see, he taught us all about God’s grace by using a brown paper lunch bag. 

First he’d hand out the bags to the class – and he wouldn’t do it the way you’d think, by passing them down each pew (we met in the chapel).  Instead he’d walk out to the middle of the aisle and throw them up into the air like confetti.  That wacky joy was all a part of the lesson.  He’d have us list on one side of the bag all the great things about ourselves – things we’d put on a resume.  Then we’d flip the bag over and on the back side write all the bad things about ourselves – everything we’d hope somebody would never find out on a job interview.  Then we’d blow the bags up and he’d explain that none of those things matter to God – that God’s grace means that God loves us no matter what – God doesn’t consider either our resume or our rap sheet. And then we’d pop them all at once – in loud celebration of that amazing gift of grace.   It helped us remember why we would-be preachers went to seminary in the first place: to learn to spread the Good News of God’s unconditional love.

See, the other thing you need to know about Doug was that he believed every worship service should be a joyful celebration of God’s grace.  The Eucharist, which is often translated as “great thanksgiving, was VERY important to him. Doug, as a member of my church in Orinda, never missed a communion Sunday. And it was Doug who taught me the agape Lord’s Supper, the informal home worship we used during our Winter Privilege stewardship meetings. That’s what makes it doubly sad that the cancer took away both his voice to preach the Good News and his ability to swallow food and drink.  Several of us, however, have been receiving brief but almost daily e-mails from him lately. 

When asked by a mutual friend, a retired theology professor, if he’d be willing to make a final statement of faith “for the record,” this is what he wrote:  “THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. That is the heart of Christian worship: Eucharist. I believe far too little thanks is expressed (in our culture, in our seminaries, in our worship.) So THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU!  REMEMBER AND GIVE THANKS FOR ALL GOD HAS DONE AND IS DOING AND WILL DO THROUGH … THE BODY OF CHRIST, and through other expressions of God also. Amen.

 “Also I often pray ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me a sinner.’ I believe that we are saved by grace through faithfulness; but it is God’s grace and Jesus Christ’s faithfulness. I am faithless much of the time; so, I thank God and Christ and the Holy Spirit that I am saved by them and am welcomed into their company through communion which makes me a part of the body and blood of Christ. How I close my best piece of scholarship … on Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son is how I close my theology: God forgives us no matter what we have done. God forgives us no matter what we are doing. God forgives us no matter what we will do. Thanks be to God. Amen.”

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, God, for this Good News.  Amen.