November 3, 2005
Beatniks
All Saints Sunday Mt 5.1-12
Maybe every once in a while we might add an Old Testament prophet to the roster of the calendar saints. Somehow, it’s always filled with Christians and never with any Jeremiahs or Micahs or Hoseas. And then, come this time of year, we add that beat up ragtag list Jesus blessed in his Beatitudes, however much they needed it and whatever they professed or were at the time.
Then, trouble is, we tend to make “the saints” into pale, household pets just to be around as dashboard bobble heads at the worst or to bless this and that as our “patrons” at the most. We even name our churches for them in the apostrophic possession (aka St Mark’s et al). You ever hear of a church named for a prophet? Sons of the Prophets, the country western band, maybe, but the Church of Isaiah?
Trouble further is that most of them were hardly anybody you’d ever build a shrine to or invite home to dinner more than once or want your daughter to go out with. Even John who lost his head over Jesus more or less and whom many think was the last of them, still gets confused as a founder of the Baptist Church.
It’s of a pity, because it’s been too long since we’ve had one and they are just the kind of people we need around so badly these days. I doubt if you’d find one taking faith-based government money or saying the blessing at presidential prayer breakfasts or looking the other way when prisoners were being tortured. Rather would they be telling Enron like they told old King David to stop stealing sheep and taking tax cut subsidies from the federal till and running off with corporate welfare.
They for sure wouldn’t be all that preoccupied with our sex lives or with whether creation was by fiat or evolution or whether there was much intelligent design showing up in fiddler crabs. They’d be out and about for justice and mercy and beating AK-47s into plowshares.
If we can’t pick up the ministry of the prophets and stop hiding behind the saints — if that’s what we seem to be doing — there’s not much to say for us. The prophets were also pretty durable customers. They suffered and accomplished a lot and they all had built-in you-know-what detectors, a service we might offer to our society more often than we do.
And you know, they didn’t have Jesus like the saints did and like we do. All they could do was to point to him or a reasonable facsimile of whom they never were all that sure. Now, however it seems, I haven’t got anything against the saints. They sure lived a better and more productive life than either I or most of my friends and colleagues have have. No offense.
On the other hand, a lot of offense. Come to think about it, I hope that later on, Jesus added the skeptical to his blessed list. These are not comfortable times, and we skeptics need all the help we can get.