For All the Saints
Luke 19:1-10

November 4, 2001

You want saints? No problem. There are lots of them available, as one would hope for humanity's sake there would be. What we all want, though, is a real saint and there are people who believe they can guarantee real saintliness.

For several centuries a Jesuit order known as the Society of the Bollandistes has existed for one primary task: to study the lives of the saints and determine as scientifically as possible which lives, which saints, are authentic and what details in their stories are historical and which are fabricated.

There are many saints tales which have been invented and exaggerated in order to benefit a particular community or institution. There may well have been an historical figure upon whom the legends were based. Birth and death dates are corroborated, places where he lived and worked are known positively, significant events in his/her life are provable from other sources. Yet often miracle stories creep in that sound implausible. Other stories about the saint don't agree on details or major events. The problem with being a saint is that we can seldom say for sure that he was a real person or that she did the marvelous things attributed to her.

To be a saint is to possess power, power to save, power to alter human events - and even to alter divine actions and attitudes. In order to be canonized today as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, there must be attestable evidence of a number of miracles performed among people who have prayed for help from that candidate saint.

How can you and I become a saint? Zacchaeus is a type of saint seldom mentioned in such conversations - and never canonized by anybody - but I believe he fits our situations more realistically than the spectacular saints of yore.

Jesus is entering Jericho, that most ancient of cities, one of the lowest cities elevation-wise on earth, the gateway to Jerusalem. Apparently, there are crowds here too to see Jesus and his company, but the evangelist is interested in another man, the chief tax-collector Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus would also have been the person chiefly hated by the populace and its leaders. There was no good word for Zacchaeus.

Here came this teacher who had eaten and socialized with tax-collectors in other towns and enjoyed their company, word like that travels quickly. Zacchaeus was oddly struck with hope and a nearly frantic desire to encounter God, facing the fact that he could not relate to men and women.

He was short and was not able to see over the crowds, but that has never been convincing to me. Lots of people are short and cannot see, even taller people are not able to penetrate through a large enough crowd. If anything, Zacchaeus had earned a grudging dignity from the people; he threw it all away to climb up into that sycamore tree in order to see Jesus. Jesus saw him and called out his name, no hiding now.

Climbing up into that tree has been interpreted as Zacchaeus' figurative way of getting higher and closer to God. A few centuries later a saint Simeon living in modern-day Turkey did exactly that. At first he entered a monastery, but after a few years was thrown out because he practiced too severe a physical discipline, attempting to stifle his natural appetites for comfort. He kept trying to escape the corrupting influence of people - we claim that's why we move to small towns from the city - but was frustrated until he came up with an original idea. He built a tall pillar with a medium-sized platform on top and just sat there and prayed. Now people really came to see him, as a phenomenon, a freak, or just a curiosity. He raised the height of the pillar twice more and eventually it reached close to 60 feet high with a six-foot square platform. He prayed standing still, sometimes on one foot because two was too easy, and regularly he would do strenuous genuflections that would rival most modern athletes.

Simeon Stylites - named so after stylos, the Greek name for pillar - did not escape the crowds for they flocked under his perch every day. He would counsel many, heal more, and it is well documented that bishops and emperors and generals sought out his advice and mediation in times of conflict and controversy. This saint possessed power few since have approached.

There are many accounts of this Simeon, many of them rather fanciful, but the outline of what I have said has been generally accepted as factual. The base of his pillar still survives in Turkey. He spent nearly 40 years on top of that pillar exposed to the elements and died in 459 about the age of 70.

Simeon saw in his own way a lot more from his sycamore tree than did Zacchaeus. There were an amazing number of imitators in the next few centuries, but today most of us prefer the gentler, humbler method of Zacchaeus.

Like us, Zacchaeus did not aspire to be a saint. If being a saint in one's lifetime infers a sense of notoriety and fame and therefore power, then Zacchaeus had gone about to make himself into a fool. His dignity did not matter and he did not allow anything to get in the way of his relationship with God. When Jesus calls him down, he was not embarrassed, but overjoyed that he was actually talking to a person imbued with God. Jesus wanted to eat at his house that day, his house. Zacchaeus decided right then to change his life - I bet he was thinking about it before this - and committed himself to giving away half of his wealth to the poor, along with repaying four-fold the amount he had defrauded from people. That's the hardest part of becoming a saint - changing your life where it really counts.

How do you become a saint? It helps to eat with saints. The liturgy used here for the sacrament of holy communion is derived from a service intended primarily for home communions and refers directly to this incident of Zacchaeus in the tree. "Come down, Zacchaeus," Jesus shouts up at him, "for I must stay at your house today."

You are invited to eat with a saint today around the table in this house. Jesus will be there as well. But eating and talking and rubbing elbows with a saint rubs off on you. That is the way it has happened ever since in the church: one person hands down the love of God to another person. In the same way one saint passes a piece of bread to another saint.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan