Who Are The Saints? Matthew 5:1-12

I sing a song of the Saints of God – patient and brave and true” - the lyrics to a British children’s hymn that concludes, “for the saints of God are just folks like me, and I mean to be one too.”

Who are the saints? We wake up in the morning and perhaps peruse the daily news to find out what new horrors are spreading across the globe. Recently it was the Russia-Ukraine war which dominated the headlines, but which now shares space with the Israel-Hamas war. Horror stories abound, but mingled with them are stories of bravery and heroism. Here are a few stories from heroic situations closer to home.

In one memorable incident, two cops from Yonkers, New York, saved a little girl’s life after she became pinned under a car. Seconds before, the car slammed into the girl and her mom walking on the street, and crashed into a barber shop.

In another life-saving event, off-duty police officer helped a distressed baby start breathing again.

The officer and his family were driving home from the movies when his wife noticed that there was a woman on the side of the road holding her baby and crying.

“I immediately started to do some back blows and back thrusts [said the officer later]. After a couple of minutes, I was starting to freak out myself, to be honest. Once the baby cried, I knew the airway was clear at that time, and it was just a huge relief. I definitely don’t feel like a hero. I was just happy to be there at that time to help her.”

Then there was the time when several bystanders sprang into action to save an elderly woman when her home went up in flames. She couldn’t get out of her chair, so two men carried the chair with her in it out of the home.

Then, one of the rescuers collapsed and suffered a heart attack. A third hero, who happened to have a medical background, got to work saving his life.

In another incident, five men from a halfway house saved an elderly couple trapped in a burning car.

“It was just weird, Godly timing. God wanted us to be there at that time, at that spot, at that moment,” one of the heroes said.

Who are our heroes?

We love the occasional stories of people doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances, but overall, these are not the people who come to mind when we think of our heroes. Our heroes are not usually the saints among us. For example, our heroes tend to be our favourite show business celebrities or sports personalities. Earlier in the last century, the heroes were the free thinkers, the scientists, and the revolutionaries. Perhaps there were saints in those groups, there may well have been, but overall, most of those involved would not qualify as saints.

To grasp the idea of truly saintly heroes, we have to go all the way back to the Middle Ages, when the Church first began the recognition of saints. Way back then, the heroes of ordinary folks, were those people who gave their lives over to living out the Gospel, people whose actions expressed kindness, generousity, caring, moderation or abstinence in many things, and the deepness of God’s love.

Who are the saints?

“Jesus looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are ...’”

And Our Lord lists those qualities which are saintly, not necessarily in the eyes of the world, but in God’s eyes. “Blessed are you who are poor.” Matthew adds the modifier “in spirit”, but were we to read Luke, considered by scholars to be the earliest version of Jesus’ address, it is much plainer and straightforward. The poor to whom Jesus refers are the lowliest of the low. In the Greek of the New Testament, the word for “poor” shares the same root as the word for “spit”. The poor are the “spit upon”. Yet, these people, who do not possess earthly wealth, will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who are hungry and who mourn. Was Jesus speaking only of the poor and disenfranchised, only of those who suffer? Yes – He was – but at some point or other in our lives that is all of us. None of us gathered here are among the one or two percent of the population who are considered to be the wealthy, and while we may never be deeply poor or desperately hungry in the way Jesus speaks of, we may still have already experienced a time of financial crises in our lives, a time of painfully pinching pennies. As for mourning, all of us will at some time in our life have the experience of grief.

Then Jesus says, "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.t Jesus’ words must have been a great comfort to the early Christians who were the direct object of Roman persecution. In our modern world, here in Massachusetts, we may not have personally ever experienced religious persecution, but we know what it looks like. In our increasingly polarized society, we can see it on the rise against other religious groups around us, and can only wonder if and when it may turn against us as well.

And yet, amid the ugliness turned toward the innocent, we hear many stories of heroism, of the saints at work, of those who sacrifice much or all for others.

Who are the saints?

They are those people who, despite all pressure from without, have chosen to give up their allegiance to that which the world holds dear, and to instead value what Jesus tells us is most important, to sacrifice, to possibly suffer, to hold onto the knowledge that love, the agape love which Jesus taught us to prize above all else, is the most important thing of all.

Today is a day of great joy, a day we are called on to remember those saints who have touched our lives with happiness and holiness. Yet, while we think fondly or with great admiration of those people whose saintliness we have personally experienced, we must also remember that there are saints of which we know absolutely nothing - that to be a saint is a decision taken in the heart, the result of which may, in the end, be known only to God.

Who are the saints?

If we so choose, they are us. Mother Teresa summed it up well when she said, “Saints are only sinners who keep trying.”

Let us pray:

Lord, we come to You incapable of being able to live holy lives by ourselves, and we humbly ask You Lord, to teach us to be holy and show us how You would have us live. Open our eyes to see what You would have us do. Unblock our ears so that we may hear Your still small voice, and give us willing spirits to learn all that You would teach us. We know that alone we can do nothing, but in Christ, Who is our life, we can do all things. Lord, teach us to be holy. In Jesus' name,