Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy.'

Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship... to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

God's temple is holy, and you are that temple. What sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness...?

3 John 4; John 8:31; 1 Peter 1:14-16; 1 Corinthians 5:6-8; Romans 12:1; Colossians 1:22; Colossians 3:1; 1 Corinthians 3:17; 2 Peter 3:11-14.

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Saints are many people but they have this in common: they remind you of Jesus. They love everyone. They know who they are. Saints inhabit every Christian denomination or group. They're people you feel good around: they radiate goodness. They're sinners - indeed more aware of their sins than anyone - but they have had a personal experience of God's grace and forgiveness. Because of that they can't be negative about the personhood (as distinct from the behaviour) of anyone else: they are very accepting people.

Saints not only remind you of Jesus, but they tend to see Jesus in others. Teilhard de Chardin once prayed, 'Grant me to recognize in others, Lord God, the radiance of your own face.'

They are simple people - not naive, or simplistic, but simple. They inhabit 'simplicity the other side of complexity' rather than 'simplicity this side of complexity' (or 'complexity the other side of simplicity'). They are simple as much because they're smart as holy!

And they are joyful people - partly because their lives aren't cluttered with material possessions and unspiritual entanglements. They enjoy God forever. God is all they need. They believe that if you have God and everything else you have no more than if you had God only; and if you have everything else and not God you have nothing.

In 1975 Time magazine listed the following as living saints: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Schwester Selma Mayer in Jerusalem, Archbishop Dom Helder Camara in Brazil, Coptic monk Matta El Meskin in Egypt, Annie Skau in Hong Kong, and John Lewis in San Antonio. (1)

Here we'll explore just one characteristic of all the saints: they have been cured of phariseeism. Cured? Yes, phariseeism is a spiritual and social disease.

The pharisees of Jesus' day were 'separatists'. They distanced themselves from evil, segregating themselves from anyone unclean. 'Away' was their directional signal when it came to dealing with evil. The evils they were concerned about were mainly of two kinds: heresy and sexual sin.

Now Jesus upset these people because his judgments were more against 'sins of the spirit' rather than sins of heterodoxy or sins of the flesh. Not that he made light of these. The truth sets us free, he said. After his pastoral word to the woman caught in adultery - 'neither do I condemn you' - he then adds, 'Go and sin no more'. (The pharisees - ask them! - always remember the latter but not the former statement by Jesus to this woman).

The pharisees' mind-set was to demand repentance before they practised acceptance. With Jesus these were reversed. 'I accept you,' he says to sinners, 'so let's work on change together.'

For the pharisee, the law is the means of telling the good guys from the bad guys. But, underneath, many pharisees are jealous of the bad guys who are enjoying their sins, but the pharisee isn't enjoying righteousness half as much. Immorality, Mencken said, is the morality of those who are having a better time. A pharisee is a good person in the worst sense of the word. Kenneth Bailey talks about 'law-breaking sinners' and 'law-keeping sinners' and each being worse than the other! For the saint, whose life is characterized by thankfulness, gratefulness, the law is a reminder, codifying a thankful response to the law-giver.

Every Christian is on a journey from sainthood to pharisaism or back the other way...

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In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

One of the most noticeable things about the saints is that they channelled their thirst for God into caring for the necessities close to hand - healing the sick and the lepers; feeding the poor and the needy; preaching the word of God to as many people as possible; providing education for the unlettered. Because they were totally absorbed with God, they were also totally absorbed with his creatures. The saints were joyous realists. Much is written today about self-acceptance and feeling good about oneself. The saints, as seen in their prayers, accepted themselves as sinners and knew that they were accepted by God for what they were. They stood in complete sincerity before God and believed deeply that growth and success were from him who was behind and beneath all their strivings. Their lives were thus filled with great joy. St Teresa wrote that she believed joy to be as essential to holiness as good works.

Praying with the Saints

`The simplicity that is in Christ.' - 2 Cor 11:3 `The simplicity that is toward Christ.' - R.V....

The word `simple' itself is a word which has come down in the world... When it first appeared, centuries ago, in English literature, it stood for a noble, shining, virtue; but no one likes to be called `simple' today. As originally used, it meant single-hearted, crystal-clear, straightforward. But today the word smacks of its own unfortunate derivative `simpleton', and so is under a cloud...

The world's greatest people have invariably been characterised by a deep simplicity of life and character. Tennyson's lines in his `Ode on the Death of Wellington' are familiar:

Foremost captain of his time, Rich in saving common-sense, And, as the greatest only are, In his simplicity sublime.

`As the greatest only are,' says Tennyson; and the poet is right. The really great - the Isaiahs, the Pauls, the Bunyans, the Wilberforces - have been at heart as simple as a child. And that is true also of those who, although their names never appear on any roll of fame, are nevertheless great in God's sight - utterly obscure and unknown to us, yet great in character. A person may be a saint without many of the qualities which this complex world ranks high: no one can be a saint without a deep simplicity of soul...

When St.Anthony of Egypt, sickened by the worldliness and vice of the great pagan cities around him, cut the cables, sacrificed all his wealth and standing, and made his home in the desert. So it was again when St. Francis of Assisi led his little band of friars out from the moral and social entanglements of mediaeval Italy into something like the joy and freedom of first-century Galilee. So it was most dramatically when Martin Luther, leading on the Reformation, cut at one stroke through the complex casuistry of papal doctrine, and gave back to the individual soul the directness and immediacy of true religion...

`The common people', we are told, `heard him gladly.' They did not hear their own Rabbis gladly. Their own Rabbis only fogged their minds, and blurred the issues, and spoke above their heads. But when Jesus spoke it was all so practical that they could connect it up at once with their own experience; it was so straight that none could miss its meaning; it was so concrete that it came on them as a glorious discovery after the weary abstractions to which their Rabbis had persistently treated them. Remember that simplicity of speech is a very different thing from superficiality of thought. The simplest language is often the profoundest...

J. S. Stewart, The Gates of New Life

There's a well-known phrase of Ignatius: `an intimate knowledge of our Lord, who has become very human for me, that I may love him more and follow him more closely'. We may remember the song from Godspell:

Day by day, day by day, oh dear Lord, three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly, day by day.

It is based on a prayer of Saint Richard, that goes like this:

Thanks be to thee, Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits and blessings which thou hast borne for me. O most merciful Friend, Brother and Redeemer, may I know thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, and follow thee more nearly.

Margaret Hebblethwaite, Finding God in All Things

`I judge no one... but if I judge...' The gentle and gracious souls who would never dream of criticising us are the very people whose silent and unconscious condemnation is the most devastating. A straight stick, lying beside a crooked one, does not judge its twisted neighbour, yet its very straightness is the crooked stick's most terrible exposure... It seems to vindicate the contention of Francis of Assisi, who held that those who live a beautiful Christian life have no need to resort to words in order to rebuke the iniquities that disfigure the Church and world around them.

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In

The villains of Jesus' parables were seldom people who did the things they ought not to have done; they were usually those who left undone the things that they ought to have done. The priest who passed by on the other side; the rich man who let Lazarus lie unhelped at his gate; the servant who made no use of his talent - these were the objects of his severest condemnation.

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In

Stand still, and look deep into the motivations of life. Are they such that true foundations of sanctity can be built on them? For truly we have been born to be saints - lovers of Love who died for us! There is but one tragedy: not to be a saint.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia

Paul the Simple, an Egyptian saint, once heard Anthony the Great read the first verse of the first Psalm: `Blessed is the one that does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly', and immediately, Paul departed into the wilderness. Only after some thirty years, when Anthony met him again, St.Paul said to him with great humility: `I have spent all this time trying to become the man that does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly'. We do not need understanding on many points to reach perfection; what we need is thirty years of work to try to understand and to become that new person.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, 'Meditation and Worship'

It is all too easy for us to treat the Pharisees as embodying all that is worst in humankind. But in fact they were probably the best men of their time, the most religious, the most devoted to the will of God, the most eager to express their loyalty to him in obedience to his every word, the most determined never to compromise with the world around them. But, as St.Paul came to see it in retrospect, they were exposed to a fatal flaw: the trouble with their outstanding righteousness was that, all too easily, it could be viewed precisely as their righteousness. It was a righteousness that could be measured, so that, at a certain point, you could say that you had now achieved it. This meant that it could all too easily come adrift from it s original inspiration in devotion to God and become self sufficient, an end in itself...

The basic form of complacency, after all, is that one is pleased with oneself.

Simon Tugwell, 'The Beatitudes'

Lord have mercy on me, A pharisee. Not when I pray, But surely, surely, thrice a day. I say, 'See her, see him. How foolish they...' Each one at whom I laugh Diminishes by half. So I grow tall By proving others small. Lord, pity me A Pharisee

Margaret Beidler, 'Pity me' (Luke 18:10-13).

As St. Paul came to see it in retrospect, [pharisees] were exposed to a fatal flaw: the trouble with their outstanding righteousness was that, all too easily, it could be viewed precisely as their righteousness. It was a righteousness that could be measured, so that, at a certain point, you could say that you had now achieved it. This meant that it could all too easily come adrift from its original inspiration in devotion to God and become self-sufficient, an end in itself... The basic form of complacency, after all, is that a person is pleased with himself.

Simon Tugwell, 'The Beatitudes'

It is, of course, true, whatever denomination you may happen to belong to, that the majority of your good churchgoers will be living under law and not under grace. The human heart is incurably legalistic... We prefer the limited demands of an ecclesiastical system, heavy though they may be, to the unlimited demands of genuine surrender to Jesus Christ. Within its own limits, legalism may produce admirable types of character. The pharisees were by no means contemptible people; they had a zeal for the law of God, and a devotion to it that would put many Christians to shame. The trouble is that what law can achieve is always limited, since the most that it can effect is modification of character from without, and not transformation from within. That inner transformation can really begin only when we pass from the sphere of law to that of grace, from the status of a servant to that of a son or daughter.

Stephen Neill, On the Ministry

Elmer had, even in Zenith, to meet plenty of solemn and whiskery persons whose only pleasure aside from not doing agreeable things was keeping others from doing them.

Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

It is significant that the One born that night was called 'Emmanuel', not 'Pharisee'. The word Emmanuel means 'God with us', while 'pharisee' means 'the separate one,' and when it comes to doing something redemptively about the power of destruction in the world, the difference between 'with' and 'away' is absolutely crucial... The approach of Jesus was the utter antithesis to phariseeism. He moved about, not as the Separate One or as a self-righteous Purist, but as 'the friend of sinners...'

John Claypool, 'The First Christmas: Jesus'

... This demonic process has affected every religious order which has ever existed. The escape into canon law has always been an escape from the awful challenge of religion and intimacy combined.

Andrew Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest

A pharisee is a righteous man whose righteousness is nourished by the blood of sinners.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of Guilty Bystander

I have long regarded the year AD 383 as one of the most disastrous turning points in history, since in that year for the first time, in the condemnation of the Spanish heretic Priscillian, the blood of Christians was shed by Christians...

...In the 16th century we find Francis Xavier, purest and most devoted of Roman Catholic missionaries, writing to the king of Portugal to urge that the Inquisition should be introduced into India, as an indispensable aid to the work of evangelization, and unfortunately securing a favourable answer to his request.

Stephen Neill, On the Ministry

When 'righteous' persons determine to do God's will, but are not first born again and awakened to a higher life, they cannot discern what is God's will... They believe their own desires and wishes are the will of God. For example, they refrain from human arrogance, imagining they are humble; but they retain their pride under the guise of the lofty demands of divine truth... They refrain from all lust for power and revenge, but they have by no means abandoned the lust for power and revenge. Nor do they in reality become less desirous of power and revenge, but rather more so. For now they can do so completely without regard for others in the name of God. They imagine that when they now seek to force through something, they do so for the sake of the kingdom of God. When they persecute or crush another, they do it thinking that the welfare of the church or of the Gospel or of Christianity demands it. The purely human desire for revenge and domination is thus represented under the guise of zeal for morality and the kingdom of God, for what is good and true. This is satanic. This is hypocrisy. However, hypocrites will never be conscious of it so long as they remain in their unregenerate state.

Hugo Odeberg, Pharisaism and Christianity

Many of the insights of saints stem from their experiences as sinners.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

The servants were permitted to hold evening prayer in the kitchen, under Mrs. Fairley's indifferent eye and briskly wooden voice. Upstairs, Mrs. Poulteney had to be read to alone; and it was in these more intimate ceremonies that Sarah's voice was heard at its best and most effective. Once or twice she had done the incredible, by drawing from those pouched, invincible eyes a tear. Such an effect was in no way intended, but sprang from a profound difference between the two women. Mrs. Poulteney believed in a God that had never existed; and Sarah knew a God that did.

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

All [the publican] knows, from being himself an extortioner, a moneylender, a thief, and so forth, is that there are moments when for no reason, because it is not part of the world's outlook, he will forgive a debt, because suddenly his heart has become mild and vulnerable; that on another occasion he may not get someone put into prison because a face will have reminded him of something or a voice has gone straight to his heart. There is no logic in this. It is not part of the world's outlook nor is it a way in which he normally behaves. It is something that breaks through, which is completely nonsensical, which he cannot resist; and he knows also, probably, how often he himself was saved from final catastrophe by this intrusion of the unexpected and the impossible, mercy, compassion, forgiveness. So he stands at the rear of the church, knowing that all the realm inside the church is a realm of righteousness and divine love to which he does not belong and into which he cannot enter. But he knows from experience also that the impossible does occur and that is why he says 'Have mercy, break the laws of righteousness, break the laws of religion, come down in mercy to us who have no right to be either forgiven or allowed in.' And I think this is where we should start continuously all over again.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom, School for Prayer

Healing is the result of love. It is a function of love. Wherever there is love there is healing. And wherever there is no love there is precious little - if any - healing.

M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie

I identify joyfully and painfully with the founder of my contemplative prayer fellowship. Whenever he has written to me, he has always ended his letters: 'With as much love as I have so far received'. He and I know that we have hardly scratched the surface - hardly begun to be filled with all the fullness of God's love.

Peter Dodson, Contemplating the Word

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Lord, grant your people your protection and grace. Give them health of mind and body perfect love for one another and make them always faithful to you. Grant this through Christ our Lord.

Daily Mass Book

Please look at me, dear Lord. In your merciful and loving kindness is my hope, for you see me just as a good doctor, anxious only to heal and correct. This I ask you, kind Lord, trusting in your powerful mercy and your merciful power. Forgive my sins; rouse me from my half-heartedness; forget my ingratitude. I acknowledge in myself those voices and evil passions which still fight within me, whether due to long-standing evil habits or carelessness repeated every day or deep-seated flaws of my weak nature or hardly recognised temptings of evil spirits. Against all these enemies may your gentle grace give me strength and courage.

Aelred

As an adolescent I had prayed a pitiful prayer for a clean life, saying, `Give me chastity and give me control over myself, but not yet'. I was afraid you might answer me too quickly and straighten me out before I was ready; for what I really wanted was not to be cured but to be fulfilled.

Augustine

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The saints, Lord, are profound and simple people, who pray profoundly simple prayers. Like 'Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.' Their perspective derives from a comparison between themselves and the holiness of God.

The pharisees, Lord, are profoundly complex people, who pray, 'Lord, I thank you I'm not as bad as so-and-so...' Their perspective derives from a comparison between the best in themselves and the worst in others, and any hypocrite can do that.

So, Lord, my simple prayer is this: help me to be more like Jesus, and less like the pharisees, day by day. Amen.

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A Benediction: May your sins be forgiven by Jesus, who loved sinners. May your pride be healed by Jesus, who was meek and lowly. May your self-esteem respond to his gentle acceptance, and may you live all the days of your life in the love of God the Father, the grace of Jesus the Son, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Aelred, cited in Praying with the Saints, Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1989, p.8-9.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, 'Meditation and Worship', in John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality: an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, p.28.

Augustine, in Sherwood E Wirt, The Confessions of Augustine in Modern English, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977, p.113.

Margaret Beidler, 'Pity Me' (Luke 18:10-13), in Faith at Work, October 1977.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom, School for Prayer, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1970, pp. 8-9.

F. W. Boreham, The Tide Comes In, London: Epworth Press, 1958, pp. 21-22, 62.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins, 1973, p.83.

Teilhard de Chardin's prayer, in Tony Castle (ed.), The Hodder Book of Christian Prayers, H & S, 1986, no. 30

John Claypool, 'The First Christmas: Jesus', sermon preached in Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, Mississippi, December 23, 1979.

Daily Mass Book, Brisbane, The Liturgical Commission, 1990, p.37.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia, Ave Maria Press, 1979, pp.23-24.

Peter Dodson, Contemplating the Word, SPCK, 1987, p. 55-56

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Pan Books, 1987, p.54.

Andrew Greeley, Confessions of a Parish Priest, Pocket Books, 1986, p.341

Margaret Hebblethwaite, Finding God in All Things, London: Fountain Paperbacks, 1987, p.77.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954, p.9

Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry, Panther, 1927,1961, p. 319

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, quoted in T. P. McDonnell (ed.), Through the Year With Thomas Merton, Image, 1985, p.8

Stephen Neill, On the Ministry, SCM, 1952, p.101, 120

Hugo Odeberg, Pharisaism and Christianity, Concordia, 1962, pp. 100-101.

M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon & Schuster, 1983, p.44

Praying with the Saints, Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1989, p.6..

George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905, p.11

J. S. Stewart, The Gates of New Life, Edinburgh: T & T Clark,, 1956, pp. 211-217.

Simon Tugwell, 'The Beatitudes' in John Garvey (Ed.), Modern Spirituality: an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, pp. 60-61.

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ENDNOTES.

1. Time cover story, 'Saints Among Us', Dec. 29, 1975, pp. 47-56).