What Sort of Life is Worth Celebrating?
All Saints Sunday
There is a long-standing tradition to dedicate the Sunday closest to November 1 to remembering and celebrating the lives of the saints. This got me thinking - what sort of life is worth celebrating? I am often struck when I hear the types of people that modern American Christians tend to celebrate. Quite often it is either a Christian who is a celebrity or a politician. Last year social media was buzzing with the news that hip-hop artist Kanye West had “been saved.” Before him were celebrated celebrity-converts like Chris Pratt and Justin Bieber. And in the early 2000s I can remember the Tim Tebow craze. There was an absolute zealous fervor surrounding Tebow because he was a devout Christian, as well as a Heisman Trophy winning quarterback. I remember hearing someone say, “I think Christians need to rally behind Tebow because it’s so important to have good Christian examples for the young people to model.”
I do not want to question the validity of faith regarding any of these aforementioned people. What I do want to question is the common assumption behind the statement. I do not disagree that it is important to have good Christian examples for the people to model. But the assumption that one’s elevated cultural status directly correlates to one’s significance as a Christian example does not seem to be a Christ-inspired assumption (to say the least).
While this may be easy to point out, it is nevertheless a difficult assumption to shake, even for those who know better. Who among us ordinary folk do not frequently question the value of our lives, which is often lived in obscurity? Could it be that the draw to social media platforms is in part due to an innate craving to be seen, to be counted as significant, to be noteworthy?
What sort of life is worth celebrating? Who should we encourage our children to emulate? Which person is more appropriate to lift up as an example of faithful discipleship: the famous celebrity christian, or the 4th century peasant woman named Chione?
Most of you have probably not heard of the poor, humble, Christian peasant woman who lived in Asia Minor. But my hope is that she can inspire those of us who live our lives outside of the spotlight. What I love about All Saints Day is that it is a day when Christians answer the question, what sort of life is worth celebrating? We answer that question in a dramatically counter-cultural way.
The vast majority of the saints that the church has celebrated throughout the years are people who lived normal lives, often in poverty, vulnerability, and obscurity.
The Gospel text that is usually read on this day focuses on the beatitudes. It is worthy to note that in classical Greek literature, the word blessed (or makárioi) was used exclusively for the gods on Mt. Olympus. Humans could not dwell on that mountain, nor could humans experience the divine state of blessedness. These are gods who have the luxury of remaining detached and unaffected by human frailty.
The word slightly evolved to refer to people whose lives resembled the divine state of the gods, which is to say, the rich and powerful. These were people whose resources and positions in society put them above the normal cares, problems and worries of the lesser folk — the other 95% of the population. To be blessed, you had to be very rich and powerful.
So when Jesus talks to the people about blessedness, he does so in a very peculiar way. In the Gospel of Luke, he does not go to the top of a mountain, which was often associated with proximity to the divine presence. Rather, Luke says that he “He came down with them and stood on a level place…” It is as if Jesus is saying, the God you thought you knew as inaccessible, detached, and in many ways unaffected by humans, now meets humanity within the space of poverty, hunger, sorrow, and persecution.
And so the saints, whose lives we periodically celebrate, are lives that have met Christ in on this blessed lower ground. Most of the saints are celebrated precisely because they embodied the beatitudes, and by virtue of that fact, they are rather ordinary people. They are poor, humble, pure of heart, persecuted people. They are people who lowered themselves. By and large, they are not celebrated because they went to places of power and prestige. Many times they are recognized because they gave up power and prestige, and lost their identity and significance in order to find it in the Christ who united himself with the obscure and the insignificant.
Which brings us back to the humble Chione. She sparked the interest of Dom Gregory Dix, an Anglican scholar and monk who remarked:
There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor: — ‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbors who saw all one’s life were sure one must have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday eucharist in her village church every week for a life-time mean to the blessed Chione — and to the millions like her then, and every year since then? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever-repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought.*
The greatness of our lives is not determined by the things we leave behind, or the difference that we make, but by the faithfulness with which we follow Christ. We follow a Christ whose divine radiance was concealed in a human womb; whose nobility found a home in poverty; whose dignity endured the shame of the cross; and whose humility found the inheritance of the kingdom. May we too embrace the blessed ordinary on the hallowed ground of our everyday lives, and become one small reflection of the full humanity of Christ.
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* Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, (Continuum, London: 2005), p. 745.