So why not be a saint?
We’re mostly strangers to the notion of saints and uncomfortable with the language, but the term “saints” is a robustly biblical word, one of the most common biblical descriptors for God’s people in general.
But what does it really mean? Popularly understood, a saint is a stained-glass spiritual superhero, someone who has lived an unparalleled life of virtue and holiness. Or worse, a judgmental church lady of pious perfectionism. The Bible points us in more helpful directions.
Think of the biblical saints, the characters that populate our stories of faith – boozy Noah; shifty-eyed con artist Jacob; Moses, a man on the lam from the law; Rahab, the pagan lady of the evening; David, the royal peeping-tom who tries to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes to cover up his crimes.
It doesn’t get any better when we look at the New Testament – disciples bickering of their status; turncoat Peter; skeptical Thomas; and Saul, the persecuting pit-bull who had his first taste of Christian blood at Stephen’s stoning. Sometime later, this Saul – now Paul – writes to the contentious Corinthian church, addressing a community that is at the same time engaged in divisive litigation and illicit sex, a church more often concerned with a spiritual high than with the simple call to help the poor and hungry among them.
Yet in all these people, whose lives are quite regularly interrupted by vice and moral defect, there is another power at work. The bible calls them “saints.”
Why? Being a saint has more to do with what God is doing than with what we do or fail to do. We can call these biblical characters “saints” because, although disfigured by sin, they are animated, to varying degrees, by a holy work of God, a virtuoso display of God’s grace.
This is the genius of saints: a grace at work that is available to all, even in the midst of the fallenness and foibles of our own lives. As poet Margaret Avison writes, “The best must be, on earth only the worst in course of being transfigured.” (“A Basis” in NOT YET but STILL)
By holding up the hope that we are saints (its a given identity), the Bible provides a lens through which we can begin to see one another more clearly. Recovering our identity as saints trains us to see in others more of God than of the sin that smudges our lives and trips us up.
Saints, then, are witnesses to grace, calling our attention to the gospel in the ordinary conditions of human living. They are, as author Kathleen Norris notes, “Christian theology torn from the page and brought to life.” (The Cloister Walk).
Maybe they're more like characters from the stories of Flannery O’Connor, who suggested that for people to hear the truth she had to create exaggerated characters. As G.K. Chesterton noted, “a Saint is one who exaggerates what the world neglects.”
The surrounding culture offers up a pantheon of celebrities and politicians who give polished performances in how to live badly. In this “bad as you want to be” world, we could use a few saints to show us how to be as holy, gracious, and human as Christ calls us to be. Might today's true rebel be a saint?
We need saints. They are gifts from God to the church, teaching us how a holy life works, showing us the exuberance of a gospel life. The heartening biblical truth is that God has placed us in a long and large historical community of believers, the “communion of the saints.” It is a bloodline of sorts, a family tree filled with a fantastic collection of wild and wooly characters, all animated by grace.
So why not be a saint? Why not learn to live into the messy glory of a human fully alive?