+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I was a bit down in the dumps this last week for reasons many of you will know, so yesterday we went to see an inspirational movie, a genre which many of you will also know is not my “go-to”. I was a bit uncertain about the film adaptation of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, particularly having read the book on which its based some years ago at Annie’s insistence, but we did attend the “sneak preview” yesterday afternoon anyway. On the one hand, “faith based” movies are often poorly made, sometimes by those who couldn’t hack it in mainstream, secular media, and there message sometimes theologically dubious. On the other hand, too often mainstream films adapting explicitly Christian themes inappropriately soft-pedal those themes to appeal to a secular audience (see, for example, the Wrinkle in Time and Chronicles of Narnia movies from several years ago). So, it’s a tough needle to thread as far as I’m concerned. In my opinion, though, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever succeeded, and when it comes to wide release next week, I’d heartily commend it to you.
In case you haven’t read the book, it helps to know that the alternate title for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever in Commonwealth countries was The Worst Kids in the World. A woman appropriately named Grace is saddled with directing the seventy-fifth annual iteration of her church’s children’s Christmas pageant, and like a lot of things in churches, it had been presented in exactly the same way each year for three-quarters of a century. She had not intended to change things up, but through a series of events the most ill-behaved children in town, the Heardmans, who had never gone to church before showed, up for the audition and essentially bully the other children into letting them take all the major roles. The worst of them all, Imogene Heardman–who smokes cigars and drinks jug wine and constantly takes the Lord’s name in vain–ends up cast as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Despite constant pressure from the other Sunday School parents to kick the bad kids out, Grace comes to believe that letting the Heardmans participate, and particularly letting Imogene play Mary, is what she’s been called to do. If Jesus didn’t come to save the Heardman children, “the worst kids in the world”, after all, then who did he come for? I won’t give the whole story away, but it will suffice to say that it ends up being both the best and the strangest iteration of the church’s annual pageant, and both the Heardman children and the whole community learns precisely whom the Christ Child came for to begin with.
In my younger years I used to lament the conflation of All Saints and All Souls, the celebration of the famous men and women of church history and all the faithful departed. I’m still stuffy enough to feel the need to maintain that distinction to a certain extent, to say that, for example, we may pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary but we only pray for the late aunt Mary, and that our adoption of an ecumenical lectionary has muddied this important distinction further. Our readings this morning are really more about all the faithful departed rather than the “capital S” Saints whom we more properly celebrate on this feast. That said, I think it’s good to be reminded that the most basic reality is that all Christians are, to slightly modify a famous saying by Luther “simul sanctus et peccator”–at the same time saints and sinners. This applies to the famous, named saints on our church calendar as much as to each and every one of us, as much as to those whom we love and see no longer. Jesus loves the worst kids in town just as much as he does those who live lives of heroic faith and service.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be a bit better, or rather that we shouldn’t try to let God work in us more what we cannot do ourselves. It does mean, though, that the righteousness of our Lord and Savior has been imputed to each of us to the same degree as to those who were famously faithful. When the Father sees us he no longer sees that which our concupiscence has made us do, but the righteousness of his Son which has been given us as a free gift. In this sense, while we can and should look to the “capital S” saints for their good examples, and while we may still request their intercessions on our behalf, we are all of us saints in a more fundamental and universal sense. Living into that, permitting the progress of sanctification in our lives and hearts, is a life’s work, the hardest part has already been done for us. And this is a work which God continues for those on that other shore and in that greater light whom we will one day join in a kingdom which has no end. Thanks be to God for that.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.