“What on Earth are Good Protestants to do with Saints?”

by David A. deSilva

David A. deSilva (Ph.D., Emory University) is Trustees’ Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Greek at ATS. This is a sermon preached in the Seminary Chapel on October 31, 2011, “All Hallows’ Eve”, and retains its oral format.

Protestant Christians, I have observed, tend to be uncomfortable when it comes to “saints.” “Saints” belong to our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers, or to our Anglican and Episcopalian sisters and brothers who like to think they’re Protestant but really aren’t. Their churches are named after saints. Their churches are adorned with images of saints. Their liturgies speak of living worshipers joining their prayers with the prayers of “all the saints” who have gone before, who make intercession for us who still struggle in faith on this nearer side of death. This, in turn, only increases Protestant discomfort around “saints,” since, despite Jesus’ prayers for unity in his Church, there are still some pretty strong boundary issues between many Protestants and Catholics

Besides, as my Protestant brothers and sisters often object to singling out certain persons as saints, aren’t we all saints? Don’t the New Testament Scriptures consistently speak of all the redeemed together as God’s saints (e.g., Rom 1:7; 15:26; 16:15; 2 Cor 1:1; Eph 1:1, 15; 5:3;)? Doesn’t the practice of singling out certain people as “saints” more especially worthy of remembrance and attention violate the democratic ideal of the people of God? Perhaps, but let’s face it: Christ shines through some saints far more clearly and brightly than others. In this life in which we are constantly searching for reliable models of what Christ looks like when he takes on flesh afresh in his servants—of what it looks like when it is no longer a particular person who is living, but Christ is living through that person (Gal 2:19–20)—identifying those people through whom Christ shines through most brightly is of great value. Sacred places, the places to which people are drawn and whither they gather in the hope of encountering the divine, have been called “thin places” between earth and heaven. In a similar way, saints are “thin places.” More exactly, they are “thin vessels,” extra fine china through which the glow of the treasure of Christ radiates so strongly that it illumines our path as we continue forward (2 Cor 4:7).

I think it’s also very important that such saints be dead. While we live, it is always possible for the light of Christ shining within us to be shrouded by some failure in the face of temptation, to be all but extinguished by some suddenly manifested sin or act that all at once calls into question the integrity of our witness. How dangerous it is to allow oneself to be inspired by a mortal who, tomorrow, can become a witness to worldliness, the power of sin, the play-acting of hypocrisy. But those “whom the faithful seal of death has perfected” (4 Macc 7:15), who have lived and died in the faith and with the radiance of Christ undiminished in their lives, who show us that the race can be run well to the end—these can light our way reliably rather than suddenly leaving us in the dark and liable to stumble ourselves.

So what would I suggest that good Protestants do with saints? Nothing more, really, than the author of Hebrews did with his saints. What he did—in that chapter we all know as “the faith chapter,” Hebrews 11—was to decorate the walls of the audience’s minds with poster after poster of their saints, the exemplary figures of the Jewish Scriptures who had received God’s promises and kept walking toward them, even if they tripped up a bit here and there, without allowing anything to turn them aside from obedient faith. If he had had a video projector and multiple screens, he would have flashed up pictures of Noah, Abraham, Moses, the great prophets, the Maccabean martyrs, and all the other familiar saints who showed what faith looks like in action—how it thinks, how it weighs decisions, how it assesses temporal situations, how it prioritizes, what it considers, how it behaves. If we are to be people of faith, he tells his hearers, we need to become more like those who lived as people of faith, so here’s what they looked like and what we need to learn to embody the same virtue and arrive at the same goal God intends for them and for us.

So far, so good, but at precisely this point the author of Hebrews betrays good, Protestant sentiments and begins to push past our comfort zone. For him, the saints are not just a matter of historical record, moral examples from a book. They’re connected still to us, awaiting the consummation of their hope along with us: “All of these, though given a positive testimony by means of their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God made a better provision for us, so that they would not arrive at their final goal without us” (11:39–40). And they’re out there right now, watching us:

Therefore, since we indeed have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us put aside every burden and the sin that hampers our movements: let us run with endurance the race that has been set out in front us, looking off to Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter.[1] For the sake of the joy set out in front of him, he endured a cross, despising shame, and has sat down at the right hand of God’s throne. (Heb 12:1–2)

The author puts us down on the field of a stadium, and the stands are filled with the saints who have gone before. We do not compete in our wrestling match against sin, or in the race toward our heavenly prize (which, it often seems, we might most like to running hurdles!), in front of crowds of flaccid spectators, but in front of crowds of successful, retired athletes, Olympic winners, every one of them. We are accustomed to thinking of “witnesses” (12:1) as people who testify to something, in religious settings to the value of God’s promises and therefore of walking in line with faith. Indeed, the heroes of faith celebrated in Hebrews 11 do bear this testimony. But here the author of Hebrews has arrayed them as “witnesses” of how well we are engaging the same challenges and the same pursuit that they have completed engaging.

We can look into the stands and be inspired in our race as we remember the victories won by this or that particular person, who ran the race well to the end and received the victor’s crown. We can also feel their eyes looking upon us, watching to see how well we will do running our race, if and how we will finish, and so forth. People standing here have spoken about it being a daunting thing to preach in a chapel filled with professors of Bible and preaching and the like. That’s nothing compared to the image of living life as a Christian that the author of Hebrews draws for us.

The confessors watch us when we fail to testify to God’s goodness and Jesus’ deliverance. 

The martyrs watch us when we are reluctant even to suffer inconvenience for the sake of walking obediently before God. 

The apostles watch us as we water down their word and adulterate their vision for the church to adapt to the expectations of our audiences, enculturated into the world as we and they are. 

Mother Teresa and Francis of Assisi watch us as we turn away from a poor person. 

Augustine watches us as we fail to search our minds and hearts for the ways in which our desires have led us astray from God. 

Prisca, Jarena Lee, Theresa of Avila, and others watch us as we despise the gifts of women for ministry. 

John Wesley and Martin Luther King, Jr. watch us as we fail to make social justice and social holiness an integral part of our ministry and the work of our communities of faith.J. Alan Miller watches us as we fail to rely on prayer and on God’s Spirit for the health and viability of our seminary. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer watches us as we peddle the cheap grace that makes salvation another commodity rather than a demand for a life of radical obedience. 

And so on.

The author of Hebrews wants us to feel some shame in this regard. Those who have run successfully the race of faith are watching us, how well we run. Shouldn’t we have more regard for running so as to be applauded by them than by those who have not yet triumphed over this present, evil age? Shouldn’t we be more concerned to live up to their expectations and example, than to the expectations of those around us, many of whom remain blinded in their hearts? This is one of the central features of the author’s climactic example of faith-in-action, Jesus. If Jesus was to arrive at the honor set before him, an honor to be enjoyed forever in God’s court of opinion, it was necessary for him to despise shame with respect to another court of opinion, that court that regarded him worthy of execution as a criminal and subjected him to the greatest degradation possible on account of his obedience to God’s call.

But I also like to think of these saints as cheering us on—by their words and examples, by their hearts that, in life, fervently wished for other disciples to run as well, if not better, than they themselves had done, and perhaps now so wish beyond death for us as well. We are connected to these saints. The Body of Christ spans time just as surely as it spans place. It is not cut in two by death, over which Christ has surely triumphed.

Christ’s work is not restricted to the pages of the Gospel or the New Testament as a whole. For a little less than 2,000 years, Christ has continued working, and the testimony to this work is to be read in the lives and seen in the demeanor and practices of the saints. The saints are witnesses that transformation can in fact happen, and are examples drawn in flesh and blood of how to recognize transformation and how to seek transformation.

Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, a day that the Church has set aside in its liturgical calendar to remember those who have gone before, who worship our God and his Anointed now on another shore. I would invite you to spend some time engaging in an act of remembrance on this day, and perhaps it will prove a practice sufficiently valuable to spill over into other days as well.

1. Ask God to bring to your mind one saint who has had a positive formative influence on your life.
2. What was it that you learned from him or her about discipleship? What glimpses of Christian maturity—of a more complete formation in Christ and Christ-centered practice—did this saint give you? Where does imitating this saint help you imitate Christ more closely?
3. Given this saint’s example and instruction, which reflect his or her passionate devotion to Jesus that he or she would wish to see replicated in others, you might perhaps imagine what this saint’s prayer for you would be. What did she find in Jesus and in discipleship that she’d want you to find? What life lessons of his would he most want you to take to heart?
4. Pray to God over these things, and thank God for the testimony and example of this older sister or brother in Christ.

Notes

1. Many English translations render this phrase as “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (e.g., NRSV, ESV, NLT). The verse is then interpreted as concerned with Jesus’ involvement in bringing our own faith to completeness in some way. This is simply wrong. There is no basis in the Greek text for adding the word “our.” Jesus is presented as the climactic example of the virtue of faith, the person who went further in faith than anyone else (the “pioneer” of faith) and the one in whom the virtue of faith appears in its fullest perfection (the “perfecter” of faith). The CEB and NIV 2011 have represented this verse correctly.