The Saints, Failure, and Star Wars: A Sermon for the Sunday in the Octave of All Saints'

Revelation 21.1-6a
Psalm 149
Colossians 1.9-14
Luke 6.20-36

St. Thomas's Anglican Church

Toronto, ON

+In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Permit me, if you will, a chance to have a mild indulgence. I am a big Star Wars fan, and I would like to share with you one of my favourite moments in the series:

It is an early scene from the recent Star Wars film, The Last Jedi. Rey, the audience surrogate and protagonist, after a long journey she meets Luke Skywalker, the Luke Skywalker, the Jedi Master who saved the galaxy, defeated the evil Emperor, and saved his father from darkness. She stands before this person, more myth than man, and she extends and gives Luke his old lightsaber. The audience waits, will Luke venture forth once again to save the galaxy from evil? Will this legend continue to build new legends? It is so exciting to be in the presence of such a legend.

And after that moment that seems like an eternity, he casually tosses the lightsaber away. Instead of the legend, Rey discovers a bitter and regretful old man who unbeknownst to her has done seemingly unforgivable things and may have helped to create the evil that the galaxy is facing.

My friends, what does this have to do with the saints, and what does this have to do with the annual celebration of All Saints? After all, these are fictional characters, and Star Wars is just a film series and franchise owned by Disney to make lots and lots of money. Nevertheless, I introduce this to help frame how we might want to think about the Saints, the people who they are, the lives they lived, and the legends about them that can help us understand the role they can play for those of us who are Christian and how we conceptualise these seemingly legendary figures in our minds.

Consider this my friends, there are some who hated this scene and hated this movie. A reason for this is that they expected a legend and found a person, and that was disappointing. And I think we often approach the saints in similar ways. We hold them up as exemplars of faith, workers of miracles, great martyrs who stood resolute in the face of oppression, wise teachers of the mysteries of God, and these near perfect beings that appear as more legend than human.

We memorialise them in art, in film, in music, and in our churches in stained glass windows, icons, statues, and reredos. In the midst of our Mass, even though we are drawn up before the throne of God to worship alongside them, we cannot conceive of them to be like us both because they are super-human, and because we are just ordinary-human. After all, they have the title of saint, and we do not.

And yet, how many of us have read the stories of the saints? How many of us have scratched even somewhat deeper to consider the history, context, or consequences, both good and evil, of the saints, and what that means for us? For many saints, underneath the legends and iconography there is a human being who lives, breathes, and works just as we do, a human being who has doubts, regrets, fears, and pains just as we do. Even though we sometimes treat them like gods, they are not. We like the aesthetics of the saints, but we don’t often think about that, nor do we consider the consequences of their actions following their lives and the actions done in their names.

Whether we our considering the whole shared canon of saints or holy peoples, or the individual saints of Roman Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, or the Protestant churches, when we look to the Kalendars of saints, ancient, medieval, and modern, we can find a number of skeletons in the closets. How do we think about S. Augustine of Hippo, S. John Chrysostom, or Martin Luther and their writings about Judaism in the aftermath of the Holocaust? How do we consider Junipero Serra, the founder of the California missions, the Jesuit Martyrs of Canada, or the first Canadian bishop, Charles Inglis in the light of colonialism and continued oppression of indigenous peoples here and throughout the world? How do we honour the witness of the martyrs of Uganda when such saints are being used to legitimise the dehumanisation of LGBTQ+ peoples in the Anglican Communion? Why do some call Charles I of England and Nicholas II of Russia saints and martyrs despite the violence, and war they brought to the world?

If those of us who are Christian believe that those we call saints are present before God and praying to God on our behalf, how do we reconcile their successes and failures as they stand before God, just as we ourselves will be judged for our own successes and failures.

These are hard and difficult questions to ask. And when we first hear them, we might recoil, and say “how dare you! How dare you even mention these things and besmirch the saints!” while clutching onto these stories as if they are Sacred Texts! But again, how many of us have read the stories, because many of them are not page turners. But when we look into those stories, we see people who have heard the message of Jesus and tried their best to live it out to the best of their ability, to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecuted them, who turned the other cheek when struck, who gave their shirt and coat to those who asked, and served the needs of others ahead of their own needs. It is their humanity that gives us hope that we too can live out the message of Jesus to the best of our ability.

The stories, the hagiographies, the legends, they all point to a reality that we can aspire to, work towards, and build, they teach us, just as Jesus teaches us, how to live our lives in faith, hope, charity, and love towards one another. We ask for the saints to pray for us, to petition God to give us the strength we otherwise would not always have to do unto others as others would have done unto us. They give us hope for the truth of Christ’s redemption, there is no sin that is so great that cannot be forgiven by God.

When we look the stories, hagiographies, legends, lives, and consequences of the saints, we must also look at when there was failure. The saints are not gods or demigods, they are human, and like us they made mistakes, sometimes grave ones, ones that do not materialise until later in their lives or well beyond them, and that have repercussions for generations. But as we learn from the saints and pass on their stories and the teachings of the church, we must, going back to a line from Star Wars, pass on their and our own “weaknesses, follies, and failure also. Yes, failure most of all, [because failure is the greatest teacher of all].”

Those that have held to the faith, those whom we consider to be the Communion of Saints, pray for us to be “filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that we may lead lives worthy of the Lord…as we bear fruit in every good work.” And just as they pray for us, we pray for those who have died and gone before us into that communion to be pardoned of their sins and perfected into the fullness and likeness of God. And the church, united in heaven and here on earth, we honour the triumphs of the saints, we mourn the failures of the church, we teach all that we have learned good and bad to those who come after us, and we remember those who came before. And together, we worship the true and living God until God makes all things new and lives among us, wiping away every tear, and bringing sorrow and death to an end.

Amen.

The Humanity of the Villains: A Sermon for the Feast of S. Matthew

Proverbs 3:1-6
Psalm 119:33-40
2 Timothy 3:14-17
Matthew 9:9-13

St. Thomas's Anglican Church
Toronto, ON

+In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

One of the themes that is a constant throughout the Gospels is that Jesus chooses to associate himself with unsavoury figures. Not only that, he brings people like them, like Matthew into his inner circle, and makes them integral to his ministry. It is something that is repeated so often that the significance of it is diminished because it is so common. Yes, Jesus interacted with tax collectors and sinners, so what? We hear it and then we move on. Yet when Jesus reaches out to these people and reaches out to embrace the common humanity that they share with each other, we see people being transformed and their humanity being restored. The divine person of Christ who shares our humanity reaches out like a physician to heal the person.

There are plenty of stories of figures who have been transformed by the power of Christ into a new person. We revere people like S. Dismas, the good thief crucified next to Jesus, S. Paul, S. Francis of Assisi, and of course S. Matthew. But consider that these people have a particular honorific attached to them, and when we write their names in a sartorial function, we put an S-T next to their name denoting an almost larger than life status to them because of their saintly status. We cannot possibly be like them, and indeed though we as Christians may celebrate the lives of transformed sinners, we fall into an old habit that seemingly denies the possibility of such an occurrence.

We are enculturated to see people as being defined of varying degrees of impurity and of being marked in some way by who they are and what they do. Though this is certainly a very old thing that we do, it seems that our contemporary society and culture hypercharges this practice. There always has to be the “bad guy”, there always has to be the villain. The villains of our stories and of our lives are always evil, born defective, defined by their evil actions, and will always be considered evil. The criminal is always a criminal, the sinner is always a sinner, and the tax collector is always a tax collector.

And if there is a villain, then there always needs to be a hero! The hero is always good, always right, and even when they do make a mistake, it’s okay because they are good because they were born good and righteous, and they do not carry the epitaph of sinner for they are righteous. When we consider the ways our identities are cultivated by the media, advertising, consumerism, and in the very cultural air we breathe, so long as we have not been marked as a sinner in society, we are the heroes of our own stories. We are perpetually good and correct. In the most perverse way, this model of society makes us the most “Saintly” or “Christ-like” because we are always good just as a saint or Christ are good!

Maybe we need to hear more closely the words Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Jesus came for the sake of those we have labeled as the villains and those rejected by society because he sees in them the humanity that we forget that they have.

Why is a tax collector such a reviled person in the Gospels? They are one of the few visible faces of the otherwise faceless Roman Empire that were contracted to collect the taxes, fees, duties, and customs from the people of the empire. They are part of the mechanism that ensures that the empire kept running, and a visible image seen by the oppressor of conquered and colonised people. Matthew, and other tax collectors, are then the ever-present reminder to the Jewish peoples living in Judea and Galilee that they are a conquered and colonised people. And the job of the tax collector meant extracting the wealth and value of the labour of the person they collected money from.

If we want to transpose this onto our own lives, then a good analogue might be the manager or supervisor at work who has the job of ensuring the value of your labour is extracted for the sake of a faceless and invisible corporate or government entity. And you cannot do anything about the faceless and invisible entity, but you can be mad at the person who is doing this to you, and so you are vindicated, you are the hero and they are the villain

Consider though that the tax collector makes their livelihood from the money that is collected in taxes. The very nature of their job forces them to inevitably take more from people than what is owed to the state because they too need to survive. In this arrangement, the tax collector can easily be incentivised to take a little more here or there, justifying it because there might be some need in their lives, and little by little, the shaving off the bit at the top to survive becomes defrauding and extorsion, and there is nothing to be done. Everyday people cannot stop paying taxes because the tax collector has the backing of soldiers to ensure taxes get paid, and the empire does not care so long as it gets what it needs to administer itself. Sure, the tax collector could stop collecting taxes, but there are few alternatives for them, and they still need this thing called money to survive. There are always reasons to people’s actions, and those actions do not define who they are!

Now let me be clear, this does excuse the hurtful or destructive actions the people do whether that be the defrauding done by an ancient tax collector, or the harm done to us by another person. Nor does this mean we just turn over and accept the harm done to us. We don’t wave our hands and go “oh well”. Jesus calls on them to stop and repent of their wrong doing and to follow him. But if we truly want to understand why Jesus called Matthew to be his disciple, and why he associated himself with tax collectors and sinners was because he saw within them the thing that people blinded by their own righteousness could not—their humanity. Jesus sees that, and offers a new way of being for the tax collector by following him and abandoning their wrong doing

And that is what makes Jesus’ actions so baffling, even today, because Jesus sees the reality that even those branded with the epitaphs of tax collector and sinner, that the victimiser can also be the victim, and that even the most heinous can be redeemed and restored because that person is a person and if we dare call ourselves Christian, then that means we have to believe that empathy, compassion, and love have the power to transform anyone no matter how callous, distant, or even evil because that was what Jesus did. He lived with them, worked with them, and offered a chance for them to abandon those actions which distanced themselves from others while protecting them from those who could not see past the actions of their past.

It is hard work, and it is the labour we choose to adopt if we call ourselves Christian, but when Jesus says that he will draw the whole world to himself, that means the whole world! Everyone shares in the same humanity that Christ brought onto himself, and therefore are granted the same promises of his divinity. This means there is hope, even for those like us who think of ourselves as righteous and the heroes of our own story.

Amen

Tearing Down Idols with S. Bartholomew: A Sermon for the Feast of S. Bartholomew the Apostle

Deuteronomy 18:15-18
Psalm 91
1 Corinthians 4:9-15
Luke 22:24-30

St. Thomas's Anglican Church
Toronto, ON

+In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew by Lo Spagnoletto

The Church remembers and celebrates the lives of the Jesus’ disciples and apostles, highlighting what they learned from him, and in the broader hagiographies, the lives and ministries they led following the Ascension of Jesus. But it must be said that some apostles are known and remembered better than others. Apostles and disciples like Ss. Peter, James the son of Zebedee, John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas have extensive stories and legends about them in Rome, Spain and Portugal, Ephesus, France and India. But Bartholomew, whom we commemorate today, does not have as many legends or stories about him as other apostles. He only appears in the Synoptic Gospels, and he is not even named in the Gospel reading for the day. What we see are the disciples, which presumable would include Bartholomew, quarreling at the Last Supper about who was the greatest among them, and Jesus educating them on what it means to be the greatest—which is to be one who is like the youngest in a group, and the one who serves that group, namely to follow the example of Jesus by assuming the role of the one with the least status in a group and serving the needs of others.

Perhaps this lesson in some way shaped Bartholomew and the other disciples in their later lives, as in the few stories and legends that tell us of his later life, Bartholomew goes on to serve others by disrupting and bringing an end to what could be called an organised crime ring run by the Demon Astaruth/Astarte who was plaguing the people of a city in “India”.

This legend is in many ways fantastic and unusual. Eusebius and other ancient sources in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Armenian accounts say that Bartholomew went to India, but some of those sources admit that India could be anywhere from eastern Ethiopia and the Arabian Peninsula, to southern Iran, and to the actual Indian subcontinent. According to medieval legends, the demon Bartholomew drives out from the region is a demon based on the Phoenician goddess Astoreth, who would not have been worshipped as a god by anyone in this ancient zone of “India”. But when we look beyond the geographical anomalies and anachronisms, we see the transformation of a society liberated from a dangerous and exploitative relationship with a demon, where demons are rendered impotent and kings are humbled.

For this, Bartholomew was executed by another king by being crucified, skinned alive, and finally beheaded.

In a far-off city, a demon by the name of Astaruth tormented the people with “troubles, infirmities, damage, violence, and much affliction.” The demon would relent from these evils for a time when offered sacrifices, and people were willing to do so not knowing that the demon was the cause of their harms. What other choice did they have: illness and war will take a toll on people, and they came to believe the demon was actually helping them, and so they worshipped him like a god. It can be inferred from the legend that as time went on, it took more and more sacrifices and wealth from people to get the same help from the demon as they became enthralled to Astaruth. Thus, in this parasitic relationship, only the powerful and elite could gain aid from Astaruth, while those without that could only suffer further from the demon because they could not afford sacrifices to him.

Bartholomew came to reside in the temple of Astaruth, and by doing so, God bound the demon so that Astaruth could no longer harm the people of this city. Bartholomew then proceeded to heal those who had been afflicted by the demon, particularly the poor living near and around the temple. The king of the city learned of the apostle, asked Bartholomew to heal his daughter, and she was healed. The king, having lived under Astaruth’s parasitic relationship, attempts to pay for Bartholomew’s help by giving him gold and finery, only for Bartholomew to vanish into thin air. That night, Bartholomew approached the king in secret to explain to him why he healed the king’s daughter, and why he did not expect payment. Then he proceeded to teach him the Christian faith, who God and Christ are, and who the demon in their midst was.

The next day, Bartholomew exposes the demon before the people of the city in Astaruth’s temple and makes him reveal how he was exploiting and harming the people of the city. Together, the people of the city and the king take down the idol of Astaruth and other idols in the temple, and Bartholomew through the power of Jesus drives the demon out from the city into the wilderness to never be heard from again. The temple is rededicated as a church in a miraculous scene where angels come down from Heaven to give God’s blessing on the church, the people are healed of their infirmities and illnesses caused by the demon, they were baptised, and the king abandoned his thrown and crown to live a life of simplicity like that of the Apostle Bartholomew by serving the poor and those in need throughout the city.

In our Gospel, Jesus warns of the dangers of unjust and exploitative hierarchies and relationships and tells us how to avoid them and undo them. He says that “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors.” In relationships of benefactors and clients, and in lord and servant, there is the high potential of exploitation because antagonisms emerge in which the benefactor, in order to satisfy their own needs or desires, must take more from their client than they give. Such is the case in this far off city, antagonisms exist between the demon, the king, and the people. The demon, who created this whole scenario, demands more from the people than he is willing to give. In turn, the king, to help his own daughter, will likely have to demand from the people more than he can give to them so that he can pay off the demon. And as a result, there are people who are in great need, that are tormented by the demon, but are unable to pay the demon for the relief that the demon himself is causing.

Even when Bartholomew cures the king’s daughter, the king goes off to pay Bartholomew for his services because that is what is expected! He never considered the possibility of selfless service to another person. He lived in a society of deeply hierarchical relationships where things like kindness, generosity, service, and loyalty are bought and sold on an open market, not freely given.

What Jesus passes this along to his disciples, and what his disciples embody wherever they went, is that true leadership is one that comes from below, one that actively seeks to serve the needs of others in a spirit of generosity, where one gives fully of themselves to those in need, not because they themselves expect a return or compensation for that service, but because it the right thing to do. It is in this generosity that the kingdom of God is made manifest because in this model of servitude towards others, we are liberated from systems of antagonism, so we can truly embrace others because we no longer need to take from those below us to give to those above us in hopes we get a little back in return. The teachings of Christ allow us to break free from those antagonisms and join with others, where divisions like benefactor and client, lord and servant, no longer exist, and people unite and drive out evil by the power of God. It is in serving others that we ourselves are served, and it is in serving others that we are set free.

For as little as there is written about Bartholomew the Apostle, there is still much we can learn from his life and his ministry, and we too can hopefully work together to tear down the idols that divide us from each other so that we may truly come to love and serve one another in a spirit of compassion and generosity.

Amen.