(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Home of the Saints”, originally shared on November 1, 2021. It was the 162nd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Today is All Saints Day. What does that have
to do with San Dimas, or to San Dimas High School, or to you and me? Today,
we’re going to find out. Today is also my 7-year beardoversary. But please no
cards, no parades, no accolades. No. Really. [blush] 😊
When we say, “today is All Saints Day”, what do we mean? The answer to
that question depends on what kind of a Christian you are.
Are you Roman Catholic, or Anglican or
Episcopalian, or any of the many Orthodox churches? Then you might say that
today is a day to honor all the saints. That is, all those who the Church has
recognized as those whose lives were and are divinely empowered and set apart
to illustrate the power of God in a special way. So, these Christians might
refer to those recognized saints as St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Joan of Arc,
Santa Monica, or San Dimas, depending on their primary languages.
Are you a Lutheran, or a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a member of a
non-historical church, or any of the dozens of Protestant denominations? Then
you might say that today is a day to honor all the saints. That is, all
baptized believing Christians of all time. You might point to passages in the
Bible such as where Paul writes, in his first letter to the Corinthians,
chapter 1, verses 1-3,
Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the
will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,
2 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:
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Or in Romans 1:7,
7 To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Or, in Ephesians 1:1-2,
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints who are in Ephesus
and are faithful in Christ Jesus:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Martin Luther, the 16th century Church reformer, believed
that we are all saints because we have been made
righteous through faith, by God’s grace, and in baptism. Only those
mentioned and described in the Bible as a part of the history of salvation
could be given the honorific title of “Saint.”
But every one of the great people of the Bible were flawed, except
Jesus. Abraham lied, saying that his
wife was actually his sister when he thought powerful men wanted her. Twice.
Jacob was a hustler. Moses was a murderer. David was an adulterer who had his
girlfriend’s husband killed so that David could have her. The disciples
abandoned Jesus, and Peter claimed he didn’t know him, three times, in Jesus’
greatest hour of need. Saul persecuted Christians. They were flawed. But they
were not cancelled.
I think it was Pastor Rick Warren who said,
“God does not call the qualified. God qualifies the called.”
If you see people as either saints or sinners, you might take a harsh
approach as in “fire and brimstone preachers”, or an aspirational one as in
Oscar Wilde’s observation that, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a
future.”
If you take a more Lutheran approach, you might say that we are saints
and sinners at the same time. How is that possible?
As I mentioned above, Luther believed that we are all saints because we
have been made righteous through faith, by God’s grace, and in baptism. But we
still struggle with sin and sometimes we fail.
Even the apostle Paul described his struggle in Romans 7:19-25a
19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not
want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not
want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is
good, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in
the law of God in my inmost self, 23 but I see in
my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the
law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched
man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks
be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Who can deliver us when we fail? “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ
our Lord.”
I went by San Dimas High School in San Dimas the other day.
San Dimas gets its name from… Well there’s a probably historical story
and there’s a more colorful, but less likely, explanation.
First, the colorful version the way I heard it.
When San Dimas was a part of the land grant given by Spain to two
Spanish Dons, the area was called Rancho San Jose. It was plagued by horse
thieves and cattle rustlers. One of the Dons, Señor Ignacio Palomares,
is said to have taken a group of men to search for his property and the men who
were robbing him and stopped in what is now San Dimas Canyon, which was filled
with remote hiding places. He didn’t find the men, but he knew they were out
there, so he prayed loudly that they would repent like the repentant thief on
the cross next to Jesus whose traditional name is San Dismas (or a variant) and
return his cattle and horses. The name stuck and was taken-on by the town that
grew nearby.
The more likely version is that Don Palomares
was from Sonora, Mexico, and there was a village nearby named San Dimas.
San Dismas, St. Dismas, and San Dimas are all variants of the name. The
Lutheran Congregations in the Maryland State Correctional System is called The
Community of St. Dysmas.
San Dimas High School is the school from which Bill and Ted
time-traveled for a school assignment in the 1989 movie “Bill and Ted’s
Excellent Adventure”. One of the characters in the movie gives up on an attempt
at public speaking and just yells, “San Dimas High School Football rules!”
which became part of American popular culture. That also became the name of a
popular rock song by The Ataris in 1999.
San Dimas High
School’s mascot is the Saint. It is the home of the Saints.
Where is our
home, the home of the saints of God? Heaven. A place we have already entered,
but not yet in its perfection
We have
entered the already but not yet Reign of God, we have entered into reality, as
the author of Hebrews writes in chapter 12, verses 22-24,
22 But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living
God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal
gathering, 23 and to the assembly of the
firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the
spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 and to
Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a
better word than the blood of Abel.
We are
connected in a living relationship with the one true living God by God through
faith and in baptism, with all the saints who are alive today, who have ever
lived, and in a weird way since all time is the present with God, with all
those who will ever live.
As Paul writes
in Colossians 1:11-12,
11 May you be made strong with all the
strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure
everything with patience, while joyfully 12 giving
thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance
of the saints in the light.
Heaven is our
home. We are in this world but not of it. But we serve it as God does.
Sacrificially. And we live as saints and sinners at the same time, fully
dependent upon God who has shown us His love for us on the cross and whose name
we praise with all the saints.
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