11012015 Mt. 6:12-15 Sainthood in Forgiving Spirit
Mt. Salem UMC
Today is All Saints Day. All Saints' Day is a celebration of all Christian saints, particularly those who have
no special feast days of their own, in many Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant churches. According
to Western Christian sources, Pope Gregory IV made All Saints' Day an official holiday in 835 CE. It is
speculated that he chose November 1 for All Saints Day in order to supplant the pagan Festival of the Dead.
Therefore, in many western churches it is annually held on November 1, (and in many eastern churches, it
is celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost).i So I would like to invite all of us to celebrate All Saints
Day by worshiping God together with the saints. Today is a day to celebrate the communion of saints as we
remember those who have died, both in our local congregations and throughout the Church universal.
According to the Roman Catholic Church’s tradition, since 1234 CE, the process of a person’s sainthood
has taken time and investigation in terms of beatification and canonization when a Christian person leaves
behind the form of sanctity-miracles and charity, or the form of martyrdom. For the process of one’s
canonization of sainthood, one must die.
There are famous saints, and there are also nameless saints who have left us with a faithful and charitable
legacy. To honor, praise, and remember all Christian saints, known and unknown, All Saints Day is treated
like a universal Christian Feast. Regardless of fame, legacy or sanctity, they have all died. However,
Saints are not just the dead in Christ. Saints are also the living in Christ. We, who now live on earth, are in
communion together with those who are alive now in heaven. They have become our standard of
accountability. Their witness in this life is now the way to measure ours. They serve as a guideline for what
it means to be faithful. They set the standard and we inherit it from them.
Leonardo da Vinci had started work on a large canvas in his studio. For a while he worked at it—choosing
the subject, planning the perspective, sketching the outline, and applying the colors with his own inimitable
genius. Then suddenly he ceased, the painting still unfinished, and, summoning one of his students,
invited him to complete the work. The student protested that he was both unworthy and unable to complete
the great painting that his master had begun. But da Vinci silenced him. “Will not what I have done inspire
you to do your best?” Our Master began two thousand years ago—by what he said, by what he did, and
supremely by what he suffered. He illustrated his message and he has left us to finish the picture. If I see
Christ in your deeds and words, you are a saint who participates in the picture of salvation that Jesus has
already started.ii
My favorite Scripture verse is from 1 Corinthians 6:19, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of
the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own”; this clearly
testifies that we have to use our bodies in order to live for God, the Spirit of God, who lives in us.
According to today’s theme, I would like to emphasize that it is our responsibility to live as saints – for a
person in whom the Spirit of God resides must be holy, a saint. God, whose name is love, dwells in us, as
we are called to be the Temple of God. We are not our own, but God’s. When we live as the Spirit’s
Temple, the Church, we will hear God call us, “my beloved saint.” The purpose of our lives is to honor
God’s will, that is, LOVE; and God whispers into our heart’s ears to follow God’s will.
All saints – known or unknown – have given us examples to follow so that we can become like them,
because they are like us; and in the end, we can all become like Christ our Lord. In fact, according to 1
Corinthians 1:2, a saint is a person cleaned up by Jesus and set apart for a God-filled life. Saints are
people who lived their days as faithful disciples, who died for God’s honor and glory. The saints of God are
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among us and touch our lives every day. I don’t want to weaken or degrade the holy sainthood in Christian
Church history. Rather, I would like us to remind ourselves that we are also eligible to be saints in the
kingdom of God, if we share a common vision of love through righteousness, mercy, and peace according
to the Spirit of God who dwells in us.
Here is a huge challenge that all of us face this morning. Your pastor tells you that you are eligible to be a
saint; in fact, you are to live a saintly life because the Spirit of God (who is Love) resides in you. Could you
say to the person next to you, “I am very glad to meet you, Saint ______”? I don’t think any of us would
accept such an honor of being called a saint without feeling discomfort, because we know we don’t live up
to the will of the Spirit of God; because we know we have a lot of baggage that blurs our spiritual eyes and
closes our spiritual ears so that we can’t see the face of God or listen to the voice of God to love our
neighbors. How many of us can raise our hands to clearly hearing God’s command to love God through
loving other people, and live accordingly? I doubt many of us, if any, could do so. This morning, I would
like us to focus on our attitudes towards relationships with one another.
Obviously, we are not saints yet, as we see tangled and messy relationships. All of the various problems
we deal with are expressed by anxiety. Anxiety is a complex and powerful emotion that arises from many
sources, including the loss of one's ability to trust or feel safe, intense worries, an excessive sense of
responsibility, weaknesses in confidence, guilt, modeling after an insecure or anxious parent, or even
biological factors. As trust and confidence decrease, anxiety and fear regularly intensify.iii
Everyone knows what anxiety feels like, and when anxiety remains in us, we don’t hear clearly, we don’t
see wholly, and therefore miss the voice of God, and become distant from sainthood. Gerald May, one of
the leaders at Shalem Institute, sees anxiety as the surface over many complex layers:
“Searching beneath anxiety, one will find fear. And beneath fear hurt will be discovered. Beneath the hurt
will be guilt. Beneath the guilt lie rage and hatred. But do not stop with this, for beneath the rage lies
frustrated desire [desire to be connected]. Finally, beneath and beyond desire, is love. In every feeling,
look deeply. Explore without ceasing. At the bottom, love is.”
We all have love. Love is given. We are made of love. And when the love of God is brought forth fully
through our bodily lives, we are marching on the journey of sainthood: love and holiness cannot be
separated. Yet, we don’t show love fully because we ignore the love that resides in us, or we forget we
bear the love of God (Spirit of God). Why? Because the love in us is covered with anxiety, fear, hurt, guilt,
rage, hatred, and frustrated desire. And when we hold onto those emotional layers, we do not give
ourselves time and effort to look deeply into our innermost being where the Love of God is. That love needs
to be brought forth: through our eyes, through our words, through the works of our hands, through the
journey of our feet, through our resources, through our prayers. The problem is: we know we should, but
we can’t or we don’t. Then how can we clear out the thick layers of emotional baggage? I am not a
psychologist, nor a neuroscientist, but a pastor who knows and believes that the key to every problem is in
prayer to God in the name of Jesus Christ, who reigns with God the Father and with the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, I want to face all of these problems of anxiety, all of these stumbling blocks in our journey to
sainthood, through the essence of prayer.
The most essential part of our prayers to God is the confession of our sins: that is the bottom line when we
come to God before we lift up our petition and supplication. However, we don’t do it because we feel like
we don’t have problems, and don’t know what to repent of. I suggest that we replace the word “repent” with
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“forgive” because we pray “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”(Mt.
6:12). When we overlook this essential part of forgiveness, we end up with unresolved feelings, even after
a long prayer or many prayers. We block God’s blessings by our choice of not forgiving others. According
to Charles Stanley, when we get hurt by someone, if we maintain an unforgiving spirit, hurt will develop into
anger, vengeance, and hatred; and when we have hatred in us, we cannot forget.
As long as we hold onto the memory of hurt, we cannot wish the other well; we will only want the other to
suffer the same hurt as we have. Furthermore, we doubt any other relationship, and thus, we have not only
suffer psychological frustration and guilt, which hinders our relationships with other people, but also end up
with physical illnesses. “Un-forgiveness” can be the basic cause of anxiety, fear, hurt, guilt, hatred, and
frustrated desire to be connected. But no one forces us to not forgive someone who has wronged us. It is
our choice to respond with an unforgiving or forgiving heart when we get hurt.
When we don’t forgive those who hurt us, those who make us angry, those who threaten us, those who
make us feel guilty… our prayer is incomplete. When we cannot pray for forgiveness and do not forgive,
love within us is blocked by them. I believe that when we pray the prayer of forgiveness, many of our
emotional layers that cover up the love of God can/will be lifted off.
According to Matt. 6:14-15, “If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if
you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Do you have any one, or two, or three… person(s) that you don’t/can’t forgive? When we know the other person is
wrong, we feel like if we forgive that person, we are letting him/her get away with their wrongdoing and from their
due punishment. We think that if we forgive her/him, she/he will be free from any consequence. But Romans 12:19
says, “Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, ‘I will
take revenge; I will pay them back,’ says the LORD.” Or sometimes, we try to forget about the person who
wronged us, and think that’s behind us. However, forgetting is not forgiving. We misunderstand that forgiving is to
let the other person off of the hook. The truth is that when we forgive someone, we are releasing ourselves. When
we see our relationship with God, as a child to Parent relationship, we trust God; the Parent’s vision is better than
ours. God tells us to forgive one another so that we can receive God’s forgiving grace.
I hope and pray that we let go of all the relationship problems in prayer and seek God’s perfect will. One of my
friends told me that she was challenged by a forgiveness issue in her prayer life. Someone offended her, and she
couldn’t forgive. The hurt was so deep and she didn’t want to forgive the other person. When she read Mt. 6 about
forgiveness, she heard God’s command. She didn’t want to disobey God’s command to forgive someone, even
while she was still struggling with her unwillingness to forgive. So what she did was – she prayed God, “Lord, I
know you want me to forgive her, but I cannot say “I forgive you” now. So I pray I will to forgive her.” With that
prayer, she prayed every day for two weeks, “Lord, I will to forgive her.” In 14 days, she was able to forgive the
offender and received the joy of release. She truly felt freedom, and her life has become more loving and
understanding ever since that prayer of forgiveness.
I sincerely desire for all of us to become saints of Christian faith, and I suggest that we exercise a moment of
prayer. The prayer that I introduce in this time is a prayer of forgiveness:
Think of someone you need to forgive. Whether that person has passed away or is alive; living together or far
away; whether your hurt is in the past or present… With your eyes closed, I would like you to think of that person. I
want you to imagine a chair in front of you.
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If you have someone in your life, from whom you are estranged, who hurt you in the past, or with whom you have a
broken, bitter, resentful relationship, invite the person into that chair.
Tell that person (silently) how you feel about what happened.
--Then tell him/her “I forgive you.”
If you don’t feel ready to say the words of forgiveness, you may say “I will to forgive you.”
Remain in silence for a while. Open your eyes “in the name of Jesus.”
I hope you and I, all of us here, become saints who openly and fully express the love of God, the Spirit of God,
within us. A saint is not someone who keeps all good thoughts and loving ideas for others to themselves and never
expresses them. The evidence of sainthood, whether famous or nameless, is in a person’s life- a life of love
activated from the Spirit within.
God loves us and has a purpose for each and every one of us in bringing about the reign of heaven here on
earth. The reign of God is through love. Where we block God’s love within us due to our unforgiving spirit,
we hinder God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven; then we are not in the journey of sainthood.
None of us should feel discouraged because our part doesn't seem very big—it is the part that God has
chosen specifically for you and for no one else.
Each of us is like a musical instrument. What kind of music are you making through your relationships with
other people? Are you making saintly music of love? Do you want to play a beautiful piece of love through
your life? No one else can play for us. It doesn’t matter how well we play. Our loving Lord takes pleasure
in the sound of all the music of the saints. When we make a sound of love, bringing forth the Spirit of God
within, great or small, we are foretasting a life in a new heaven and a new earth. Friends, let us all become
fellow saints, and join the marching of the saints’ journey toward the kingdom of God.
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http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/common/all-saints-day
James S Hewett ed., Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1988), 442.
iii
Richard P. Fitzqibbons, http://www.maritalhealing.com/conflicts/anxiousspouse.php
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