You? A Saint?

Pineda Presbyterian Church

January 15, 2017      The Second Sunday After Epiphany

I Corinthians 1: 1-19

“You? A Saint?”

Paul opens his first letter to the church at Corinth this way: “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” 

That “called to be saints” phrase caught my eye.  Pastors get asked strange questions every now and again.  One of the most frequent of the strange ones is: “Do I have to do anything to be saved?  Doesn’t God’s grace take care of that?  There are no rules, right?”  Another less frequently asked is: “What’s all this saints stuff?  Are we becoming Roman Catholic?” 

The first question is one that I view as specious.  If you are a Christian then dwelling on that question is like arguing whether an omnipotent God could construct something so big that even he couldn’t move it. It may sound like it’s based in some form of logic, but it completely misses the truth of Christianity.  The most direct answer is “Read scripture!”

The second question is a culturally sensitized question rooted in religious prejudice and again ignorance of scripture.  Paul calls all of us “saints.”  In this instance he precedes that claim with the notion of sanctification.  Sometimes you need a dictionary to read Paul.  Preferably a Greek dictionary!

When Paul says: “to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints,” he is simply stating a fact emphatically. “Sanctified” and “Saints” are from the same Greek root.  To Paul all Christians participate in a life marked by sanctification led by the Holy Spirit and therefore for purposes of shorthand can be called saints. 

You are saints.

We could spend a whole lot of years talking about salvation, justification, and sanctification. Theologians have spent their entire lives doing just that.  Here’s the short version:  We are saved by the actions of God through Jesus; we are justified, that is vindicated in the eyes of God because of the actions of God through Jesus; sanctification means that we have been made holy or grow into holiness because of the actions of God through Jesus. 

To be justified actually means that we have been judged by God and found appropriate to enter God’s kingdom.  Remember, John and Jesus kept saying “Repent for the Kingdom of God is near.”  Like the prodigal son we have been forgiven even before we return home.  All that we have to do is repent, turn around, and return to the kingdom for which God created us.  That loving father is the revelation of our God.

Why did Jesus come to be among people?  The simplest language – not the simplest answer – is that he came because we had strayed so far from God and what God had intended for us that only God could bring us back … could save us … could restore us to those creatures who had been created in the image of God. We were lost in sin, even more so when we tried to work our own way out of it with no dependence on God or acknowledgement of God’s nature.  Some religious leaders did try to work their own way out of it but their efforts were doomed BECAUSE they had lost the image of God; they no longer knew who God was. 

One of the things that we overlook when we say “Jesus came to save us” is that Jesus showed us – literally demonstrated to us – the nature of God.  We forgot and still forget who God is.  If you still don’t quite understand who God is then read Matthew 5-7; read Matthew 25.  This is why Jesus came. 

When you become a Christian, Christ lives in you.  As Paul puts it we become a new creation.  Christ alone is holy, that is, set apart for the work of God.  When Christ resides in us then we share His holiness, and we too become holy … sanctified … saints!  And because we don’t become perfect, Jesus promised us that we would have a helper, the Holy Spirit, to give us the strength and the wisdom to pursue our new-found knowledge of God.

We have become a new creation.  For a Christian, life is about lovingly pursuing that image of God revealed in the life of Jesus.  That’s what it means to be saved. 

No, it’s not about following a set of rules.  That’s not the source of our salvation.  We have been saved.  We have become new creatures through the grace and mercy of a just God.  It’s not about following rules or not following rules.  That’s a specious and irrelevant issue.  It’s about how we live as new creatures. 

We don’t become perfect.  We aren’t going to get it right every day.  That’s why every day we turn back to God in repentance, knowing that we will be received as God’s own children, and ask for the Spirit’s guidance so that we can live as new creatures in the presence of our Creator. 

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has an exchange with some religious leaders who thought they knew how to achieve their own salvation, who didn’t understand who their God was or how to worship God.

“So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’ He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’ Then he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!’” [Mark 7:5-9]

You hold to human tradition.  You only want to keep your tradition.  There’s no place for God in that. 

Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   Dr. King knew who God is.  He was far from perfect, but he knew who God is.  Dr. King recognized to his own personal harm that pronouncing the Gospel meant that you had to let go of human tradition. It meant that God’s demand for justice and forgiveness and love for one another was more important than human tradition that denied justice to a significant portion of our population.  We can’t all lead national movements to extend God’s commands for justice among ourselves although we can support those who do.

As new creatures striving to live in God’s new creation, we can take seriously God’s commands for justice and love and forgiveness in the ways in which we treat one another, the ways in which our Church treats people.  Christianity in this nation is still plagued with plain old gender discrimination.  The human tradition still wants to insist that women don’t belong in positions of public leadership or even in the pulpit.  The human tradition still wants to insist that people who come through our doors on Sunday morning be neatly dressed and preferably speaking English.  The human tradition still wants our comfort with the prevailing social order to take precedence over God’s commands.  The human tradition says it’s still okay to spread rumors, speak unkindly to one another and bully one another.

That’s what Paul was writing to the church at Corinth about.  He wasn’t asking them to take on the world or even the pagan nature of the Roman Empire.  He was asking them to be less divisive, less quarrelsome, kinder and more loving in all their relationships and in all their transactions with one another. 

All that stuff about love in First Corinthians wasn’t some abstract romantic poetry to be selected by preachers world-wide to be read at weddings.  It has nothing to do with weddings.  It has to do with the Christ’s own example that love be the overarching measure and motivation for every human transaction.

But Paul starts the letter by calling them “saints.”  Perhaps they have stumbled a bit, but through the grace of God they have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, they are “saints.”  They just need a course correction and the Holy Spirit will lead them through it.  They know God revealed in Jesus, God’s anointed Son, and so they know that they are forgiven. 

We have learned who God is and we know that we are forgiven and welcome to return to God’s kingdom every day.  Remember who your God is and you won’t ever have to ask about rules and what you can do for your salvation.  You are saved.  You are a new creature in God’s new creation.  You have been sanctified through the grace of God and the love of Jesus Christ.  YOU ARE A SAINT.  You don’t need rules, you just need to look at the life of the first citizen of the new creation and you will know exactly what to do.  You need to know who your God is.

Thanks be to God.