Keeping Up With The Saints -- By: John W. Carlton
Journal: Faith and Mission
Volume: FM 01:1 (Fall 1983)
Article: Keeping Up With The Saints
Author: John W. Carlton
FM 1:1 (Fall 1983) p. 75
Keeping Up With The Saints
Professor of Preaching,
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Out of a multitude of sermons diligently heard, and not a few hewn in hope for any and all occasions, I have often wondered: why do we Baptists stand mute on All Saints Day? Have we no living versions of sanctity among our own or, if failing there, at least a vision of “the communion of saints” within the larger Christian family?
The Catholic tradition has its calendar of saints, but the churches of the Reformation have never made much of that. It is sometimes maintained that Protestantism recognizes no saints in that special sense, not because it does not honor sanctity but because it has rediscovered the meaning of sainthood in the New Testament. Can it also be that, easily content with Christian mediocrity, we are tempted to say, “The saints are not in my class. I’ll be content to pass up the honors course and just make the grade”?
The word “saint” is not an easy and natural part of our Christian vocabulary. Our uneasiness with the word is attributable to several common distortions in our understanding of the term: (1) It is associated in many minds with perfection or a spiritual elite, and this hardly comports with our daily inner struggle with the downward pull of evil, the unsuccessful moral warfare described by the Apostle Paul: “I desire to do what is right, but wrong is all that I can manage” (Rom. 7:21). We experience this reality of a divided self to the extent that we are reluctant to present a more imposing image to the world. (2) The word conjures up the image of a sanctimonious person of grave demeanor or austerity, the kind of juiceless soul described by George A. Gordon when he said, “I think I never met a saint in my life with whom I cared to spend an hour.” Jesus both encountered and condemned a stale and stodgy piety. William Law, actually a truly saintly man who wrote A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, was once described as one who “lived joyfully with exceeding gravity.” A London newspaper once advertised: “A domestic servant wanted, a Christian, cheerful if possible.” Such descriptions call to mind the person of prim and forbidding rectitude or one of dour, reluctant piety in whom there is no lilt in the heart and no festivals in life. (3) The word “saint” is sometimes associated in our minds with the sentimental do-gooder who goes about busily dispensing goodness with a kind of self-conscious virtue. C. S. Lewis satirized such an individual in The Screwtape Letters: “She lived for others; you could tell the others by their hunted look.” Obviously this is the opposite of the “disinterested sanctity” described ...
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