Dear people of God,
All Saint’s Sunday is coming up on Nov. 2nd and I am reflecting on what it means that we are both saint and sinner. In 2008, Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber founded a congregation in Denver called House of all Sinners and Saints. The name of the congregation worked so well, I think, because she put sinner before saint. I think it is our human nature to do so. We can readily identify ourselves as sinners. We can easily name our flaws and our failures, and we hold a check list of our imperfections close. That knowledge then compels us to run toward the saint we hope to be. Perhaps we are trying to outrun the sinner in us, and run directly into our sainthood. To balance the scales at least 50/50 — or perhaps to store up more and more saintly behaviors to compensate for the failure list.
I wonder if it works that way. Perhaps we are not a certain percentage saint and hopefully a smaller percentage sinner. Perhaps we are not a sinner one day, or one season, and a saint the next. — It may be that both sinner and saint are so woven together, so enmeshed in us, that they cannot be untangled. It may be that we have to give up our striving, and rest in the reality that this is the truth of us. We are Sainers. (Yes, I made that word up.) We are sinner and saint so woven together that we cannot separate ourselves. We cannot outrun ourselves. And that truth is both heartening and destroying. Destroying because we cannot undo the past. We cannot polish up the tarnished pieces, and cover the wear of the years. We cannot outrun ourselves. It is sad to be sure, and it is equally freeing. The same truth that saddens, is also life-giving — because we can stop running. Stop the endless, breathless pursuit of our own desire to make ourselves into a better version of who we are, than the one God made in the first place. It might be time, O Sainers of God, to stop running. To sit on a bench, and recognize the wholeness of it all. The wholeness God intended in each of us.
I write this letter to you having learned today, that I ruptured a disc in my lower back. Which does indeed explain the pain of the last week. I am now sitting still on my bed, with a heating pad on my back, and contemplating both my weakness and strength. I have decided to call it wength. (Yes, I made that word up too.) I am physically weak at the moment, and yet that is not my internal condition. There is a fortitude of spirit that comes pain. It is possible for two things to be true at the same time.
You and I are both failed and accomplished. We are bruised and healed. We have fallen short and caused hurt, and we have risen mightily to heal others. It is not a percentage, it is not a scale — it is the truth of us. The scripture says, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.” What a work of artistic genius you are. Blessed All Saints Day dear friends, in all your tattered and beautiful complexity. You are the very one God wanted.
One on the journey,
Pastor Laura