All Saints Day - Part 2

This Sunday, Christian churches all over the world will be observing the oldest high holy day of them all: All Saints Day.

All Saints Sunday is the church's Memorial Day, a time to remember and give thanks to God for those who have died in the faith.

   All Saints Day is a day on which we remember special people,
people who now dwell with God.
people whom the scriptures and the church call saints.

Now, to be sure, there is much modern confusion about the meaning of the word "saint."
This confusion is due, in large part, to movies and the news reports and all the hoopla about the Roman Catholic "canonization of saints" – and all the rigamarole that is entailed in deciding who is and who is not a saint – as well as to a resurgence of interest in books about "the lives of the saints" or painted pictures of the saints such as icons.

Today there seems to be a renewed interest in the folks the Roman Catholic Church has named saints.
And our news media will even get caught up in the church’s deliberations to qualify a particular person to be known hereafter as a saint.

But, we have a pretty romanticized idea of what a saint is and was.
I have studied some of these people the church has identified as saints and have discovered that every single one of them are people too – they all put their britches on one leg at time (that is if they wore britches at all.)
 
The reality is that in real life, the saints were a pretty motley lot.
In the early years, men thought they were called to spend time in the Syrian desert.
Some stood in the desert and prayed for years on end without sitting down.

Others thought they were to live on top of pillars – as far away as possible from being sullied by being of this earth.  These guys spent their days on top of a pillar preaching and writing epistles.
And people came for miles to see them and to hear what they had to say.
 
One of these desert hermits in particular we know as St. Simeon – known as the holy fool.
It turns out that Simeon’s career started out quite normally.
It was the usual story:
living 29 years in an isolated cave next to the Dead Sea eating only lentils –
first struggling against temptation and then advancing to an alarming degree of holiness.
But, his pious career took an unexpected turn when he left his cave one day and to the city of Emesa in Syria.
 
There at the city gate, he found a dead dog on the trash pile.
 
For some reason, he felt called to tie that dead dog to a rope around his waist and drag it through the streets of the town.
Well, that was thought to be just as strange and cruel in those days as we might think.
 
Simeon took to eccentric and scandalous behavior to mock the idiocy of the world and to conceal his identity.
 
We are told that during church services, he would sit up front, eat peanuts, and throw the hulls at the preacher.
 
In the circus, he would wrap his arms around the dancing girls and would go skipping and dancing across the arena.
 
In the streets he thought it great fun to stick out his leg or a stick and trip people as they walked by.
 
He developed a theatrical limp and dragged himself around on his rear end.
 
In the bath house, he ran naked into the crowded women’s section – a no-no by the way.
 
On solemn fasting days he would feast riotously – consuming vast amounts of beans – and amuse himself by passing gas during prayers.
 
Everyone considered Simeon a mad man – an unholy scandal.

Sometime after his death, the secret life of Simeon came to light. 
People started to talk about his acts of kindness –
and about the strange and powerful miracles that seem to happen when he was around.

All the folks that are recognized by the church as saints have very human stories.

But, in reality, a saint is simply a human being, living or dead, that God has chosen, and upon whom God has lavished grace.

The Saints of Christ Presbyterian Church in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, heard these words as part of a sermon in 2006.