The Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew, the 5th Chapter
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are those who mourn,
When God created lizards, snakes, T. Rexes and all the other reptiles that have come and gone, grown and evolved over the course of the last 300-ish million years, God grew in their little reptile noggins, little reptile brains. Their brains aren’t that big and besides doing the background brain work of things like keeping the heart going and the lungs breathing, that little brain’s main function was, and still is, to make one... and only one... important decision about everything that reptile brain’s owner runs into as they walk or slither around in their life. That decision is, “Should I try to eat this, or should I run from this.”
When humans showed up, only about 200,000 years ago, God didn’t throw out the reptilian brain idea completely and stick a whole new model inside the human skull. Instead, God first put in the reptilian brain on the bottom and then heaped on top of that reptilian brain a serious, major addition. The reptilian brain still functions in here with that one question all the time... “Should I try to eat this, or should I run from this” and when I’m walking down a path in the woods and a snake slithers out, that reptilian brain can get me to jump about 50 feet without any thought whatsoever. So, for times when I come across poisonous snakes, it’s good that God put that little, reptilian brain in there. However, God did not give us this bigger part of our brains just to hold a hat! This larger part is what makes us human, WHEN we choose to engage it! This larger part can override the reptilian part and God gave us this bigger part so that we could USE IT to change the world!
Today is All Saints Day and I think one way to think about what makes a person a saint, is that a saint is a person who chooses to be a good steward of the WHOLE of the brain God gave them. Saints use that WHOLE brain, even and perhaps especially, in the face of frightening situations where all the world is tempting us to forsake the human part and just let the old reptilian brain decide to “eat it or run from it.” Saints are people who keep in mind that we are “saints” not because of what we do, but because we have all been created in God’s image and because of that we have been created gloriously and on purpose TO BE SAINTS! We have been blessed with a sense of honor, with power, might and WISDOM... AND we’ve been blessed in that way for a purpose far greater than just slithering over to our next potential meal. We’ve been created this way and blessed this way so that we might bring God’s love more deeply into this world... to, as the Beatitudes say, work and strive for righteousness, to be merciful and to be peacemakers... making the kind of peace that comes when everyone has enough... enough food, shelter, security, purpose, respect, dignity and self worth.
The threat of Ebola and the hysteria that has erupted this past week in Maine provides a good example of how God has given us the choice to either live as good stewards of our brains and the wisdom God has given us... to live as the saints God created us to be OR choose instead to ignore the part of our brains that make us human and instead react only with that reptilian piece of our brains in ignorance and fear. Ebola is a serious virus and the illness that results from an infection is not to be taken lightly, but the science, wisdom and experience that has been gained about this disease is very clear. Ebola has been known and well researched for almost 40 years. As a biochemist in my former career I will tell you the same thing all the health professionals have been saying over and over again... ONLY a person showing symptoms can transmit the virus and the virus can ONLY be transmitted through bodily fluids. The very first symptom that shows up in any patient is a fever and those who have worked, caring for Ebola patients, like the nurse Kaci Hickox up in Fort Kent, know to check their temperature and if they do happen to get a fever they know to get into isolation before they begin producing infectious bodily fluids. The saintly response to a serious disease like this is to not ignore the dangers or to be careless, but rather to use all of the known experience and wisdom gained from the work of saints in the past decades to take proper precautions and then GO and CARE and be a saint to those in need... just like she did, using all of God’s gifts to make a positive difference in this world.
The alternative response to Ebola is, unfortunately, something we’ve also seen at work this week here in Maine. Far too many media outlets seeking ratings and politicians seeking cheap political points have resorted to irrational fear to tempt the public to throw out God’s good gift of our human frontal lobes and respond, not like the saints God created us to be, but instead like a bunch of crocodiles, snakes and lizards! Vilifying science, dismissing the wisdom God has given the healthcare experts and scientists, presenting facts as opinions up for debate and insisting that our only option is to run for our lives in a reptilian hysteria is anything but saintly behavior!
Living to fully become the saints God created us to be, means embracing, not scorning God’s good and gracious gifts. It means rejecting groundless fear and embracing the perfect love that casts out fear. Living into our sainthood means seeing people in danger, taking the logical and scientifically appropriate precautions necessary and then GOING and SERVING anyway! It’s not that living as a saint means that we will never be afraid. Instead, living as saints means we will be honest about our fears but refuse to allow them to be a more powerful force in our lives than God’s infinite, transformational love. We are called to be saints not snakes! The saints who raised us, taught us, loved us and went before us, now stand behind us stretching back through time and space, reminding us that we have been created out of their collective love and out of God’s infinite love. Those saints stand behind us and challenge us to live into the saints we too have been created to be! To take that love we have first been given and use it to cast out every fear.
The saints we have remembered today stand behind each of us and challenge us to not forsake God’s gift of a thinking, reasoning and dreaming human brain filled with the knowledge, wisdom and experience of all the saints who have come before us. The saints we remembered today, and in fact all the saints from every time and every place, stand behind us and challenge us to NOT ONLY stand up to our fears but to also walk with all those who are having trouble even standing today for any reason... to care for them, carry them, walk with them to the place where they will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the place where the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; the place and the time and the place beyond time where the Lamb will be our shepherd and guide all of creation to the springs of the water of life, where God will wipe away every tear from every eye. It is time for each of us to shout out against the ignorance and the fear being sold to us by snakes and really BE the saints God created us to be! Amen.
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