Revelation 7:9-17 and Psalm 34:1-10, 22 | 1 John 3:1-3 | Matthew 5:1-12
“Patient and brave and true.” Thus ends the first line of the old children’s hymn written by Lesbia Scott a hundred years ago, found in the Episcopal, United Methodist, and Presbyterian hymnals, as well as many other collections. Patience, bravery, and veracity, the hymn says, are the attributes of a saint. (One wonders what virtues we would assign to sainthood today, but that is a discussion for another time.)
As commonplace a term as it is, the word “saint” appears little if at all in the Gospels – once, in the 27th Chapter of Matthew according to the NRSV and KJV, and not at all in other translations. “Saint” carries so many meanings that it may qualify as what W. B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept.” Few Christians would dispute that there are such things as saints, but there is wide disagreement over what the essence of sainthood is. “Saint” can refer to anyone from a person officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church to all persons in heaven to all Christians living and dead, with many waypoints in between. The Anglican Communion, of which my Episcopal Church is a part, does not canonize saints, although it does recognize those canonized prior to the English church’s split with Rome, but it does commemorate persons identified as “heroes of the Christian Church:” martyrs from generations past, Anglican and Protestant theologians such as Calvin, Luther, and Hooker, social activists (Sojourner Truth, Oscar Romero, William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King Jr.) and even artists and writers (Thomas Tallis, John Bunyan, John Donne, Christina Rossetti, and Evelyn Underhill.)
There were efforts to remove Scott’s hymn from the 1982 Episcopal hymnal because of its “lack of theological profundity” — i.e. too middlebrow — but popular protest carried the day, and the hymn remains. While a bit underweight to be the vehicle for true theology, that line “patient, brave and true” makes me think of the doctrine of “divine simplicity,” one of the few principles of classical theology that I remember. Divine simplicity holds, among other things, that God’s attributes are all one, which we might call “Godness.” God is not just and also merciful, because God’s justice is, in a way we can’t understand, identical to God’s mercy. The doctrine of divine simplicity has been attacked for centuries, and yet it captures something about the otherness of God without abandoning the notion of a personal God.
Regardless of the viability of the divine simplicity doctrine, human virtues necessarily work in tandem with each other and become liabilities if they don’t. We all know people that have an excess of one virtue to the exclusion of others, and they are usually insufferable – think about the conniving snake Uriah Heep’s “umbleness,” or Detective Javert’s relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean in the name of “justice.” Whether or not patience, bravery, and “truth” (which we might understand as some combination of faithfulness, sincerity, and veracity) coalesce into a single virtue — “saintliness” — they certainly complement each other. Patience without bravery spills over into procrastination. Bravery without patience risks foolhardiness. Without some patience leavening truth – telling might spill over into hectoring, and without the bravery to speak out truth – telling risks becoming just another form of gossip.
The Beatitudes are the customary Gospel reading for All Saints’ Day. But why? Many of us hear in the Beatitudes the paradoxical nature of dedication to a godly life: God’s foolishness, which is wiser than human wisdom. Some of them – being poor in spirit, for one – seem more like liabilities than virtues. Perhaps. Certainly, more than anyone in history Jesus understood the deep truths found in paradox. And this year, All Saints Day follows two weeks with gospel readings that show Jesus in full dialectical mode: the “render unto Caesar” pericope two weeks ago, and then the “how can the Messiah be the son of David” conundrum last week.
But it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the qualities Jesus extols in the Beatitudes are also one unified virtue, peaceableness, which is similar to but not exactly the same as pacifist. It means being a peacemaker. To promote legitimate peace, one must both hunger and thirst for righteousness (else acquiescence in injustice be mistaken for peace) and be merciful (lest the violence of the world be shifted to different targets.) One must be meek, yet willing to face persecution. And one must both mourn for what has been damaged by the world’s violence and rejoice and be glad for the coming of God’s kingdom.
To put it another way, saints are above all authentic (in Kierkegaard’s sense rather than Sartre’s) — not simply true to themselves, but true in relation to others, to truth itself, and ultimately to God. And this happens, paradoxically, not by taking on virtues so much as by confronting our frailties. Many of us have what we might call delayed virtue, serving only to remind us, in retrospect, of where we have fallen short: we regret our impatience, our timidity, our half-hearted truth telling. Shedding those habits may be what it means to become pure at heart. When we become pure in heart, our actions come from a deeper place, what Thomas Keating calls our “true selves,” the divine presence buried deep beneath our ordinary awareness and even our “spiritual” awareness.
We could do worse than “patient, brave and true” to describe some of those everyday saints. William Wilberforce worked in Parliament for 20 years before seeing passage of the Slave Trade Act. Dr. King survived at least two assassination attempts, numerous assaults, and repeated jailings without giving up on non-violent resistance. John Bunyan was jailed for his faith, Bonhoeffer executed for his, and Romero assassinated for his. All of them spoke truth to power. Were any of them perfect? Of course not. But that combination of patience, bravery, and veracity sustained them in their persecution. All of them sought to be the makers of a “just and lasting peace,” to borrow a phrase from another everyday saint, Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address.
We don’t expect our elected officials to be saints. Nevertheless, in this election season, we could do worse than expecting patience, bravery, and veracity from them. Is it patient to file lawsuits to upend the results of elections before all the votes are even cast? Is it brave to hide behind dark PAC money to spread slanders about your opponent in vile ads that you don’t even have to formally approve? Is it truthful to find the estranged mother of your opponent, whose husband was charged with raping your opponent when she was twelve years old, and put her on television to call your opponent a liar? Is any of that peace-making? Is any of it authentic, except, perhaps, authentically hideous?
Wherever it ends, the path to sainthood starts with simple human decency: patience, bravery, and truthfulness. We have the right to expect those asking for our vote to be decent human beings. Hold that thought in mind on Election Day. But that’s the easy part. The hard part, as the Beatitudes remind us, is accepting what comes with being peacemakers ourselves.