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All the famous saints, those eaten by lions or burned at the stake or crucified
upside down, those who spoke with prophetic power or gave instruction from their deep supply of wisdom,
the writers of poetry and scripture or the leaders of people who were famous in their day, all those who
left behind them a name like Peter and Paul and Moses and Jeremiah -- all those have their own feast
days, those holy days in the Church’s calendar on which we remember them and what they wrote or did.
There are others, Jesus Ben Sirach reminds us this morning, who are unremembered. “They have
perished as though they had never existed, as though they had never been born.” But not so our
forefathers, he adds; their virtuous deeds have not been forgotten. “Their line will endure for all time;
their glory will never die. Their bodies are buried in peace, and their name lives for ever.”
And that’s what All Saints’ Day is for. It’s for us to remember all the faithful departed, those
“who were true to their faith” -- those who were poor in spirit; those who mourned, perhaps; the gentle
and meek who showed mercy and made peace and maybe were persecuted for the sake of righteousness, but
whose deeds did not catch the attention of many and who do not have their own day in the liturgical
calendar. And we’re going to take a look at four of them this morning.
One such saint is a person whose name is known only to God. We would not even know she ever
existed, except that she was noticed one day by Jesus when he and his disciples were hanging around
watching people making their offerings at the Temple. Many of the rich put in a lot of money. Then a
poor widow came to the treasury. Nobody even noticed her, because she wasn't carrying a large purse like
all the rich folks. In fact, she wasn't carrying anything at all that anyone could see, so everyone else
just kept talking about the big purses some of the others had brought to the Temple that day.
But Jesus was watching the woman intently. In fact, he seems to have been the only one who even
noticed that when she reached the offering plate she timidly dropped in two small coins, the equivalent of
a penny.
And after the woman turned away, Jesus called to his disciples and asked them if they had seen
her. "Who?" they asked. "That widow," Jesus said, the one walking away in the ragged coat and the old
scarf and with the holes in her shoes.
"No," said the disciples, "we didn't notice her. Not until now, that is, now that you point her
out. What about her? She's looks like lots of other women here. So what?"
"Yes," said Jesus, "but in truth I tell you that poor widow has given more to God than all those
others you've been watching who have put offerings in the plate, because they have put into the treasury
some of the excess of their abundance, some of what they have that they don't really need. They've put in
some of what they have left over after they've bought what they want, some of what they could spare. But
this poor woman has contributed out of her poverty; she has put in everything she possessed, all she had
to live on."
Notice that Jesus does not praise the widow. He simply sees her. And he is apparently the only
one who does, until afterwards, when he opens the eyes of his disciples to her presence and to what she
has done.
And notice that Jesus does not discount or disdain the offerings of the big shot saints, the rich
and the religious. He's just not particularly impressed. Jesus simply notices what happens and calls his
disciples' attention to it. He calls his disciples over to notice the widow, and he suggests that they
think about the difference between abundance and poverty, about the difference between large sums and two
copper coins, about the difference between apparent sacrifice and the real thing.
Jesus does not dismiss the gifts of the prominent and the substantial and the rich. They are
accepted. He simply points out that the major characters are the minor givers, while the minor character,
the poor widow, turns out to be the major giver of them all.
A widow in Jesus' day was a small, insignificant person in the world's scheme of things, someone
who was invisible to the legal, religious, and political eyes of her society, a person without social
standing, an object of abuse at worst, and of pity at best, one of the really vulnerable, the poorest of
the poor. So no one sees her or her act of generosity. No one but Jesus. And Jesus sees, too, something
else that no one else sees. He sees that what matters to God is not the amount given, but the nature of
the act of giving itself. This woman had given sacrificially, had given out of her poverty, "her whole
living."
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus draws our attention to those whom we might otherwise overlook. He
turns our gaze toward the little people, toward people like this widow. And through the eyes of Jesus we
are empowered to see that these little-known, little-heralded saints are mirrors of truth for us. Though
it is sometimes painful, we see what we had not seen before. In looking at this poor widow and her
extravagant gift, we see Jesus better, too. And we see ourselves better as well. Blessed is this poor
woman, for hers is the kingdom of heaven.
We do know the names of the other three saints we’re considering today. The second and third are
Mary and George. George -- George Washington Carver -- was the slave baby born to Mary and Moses
Carver on a plantation in Missouri in 1864.
Because of the Civil War and the thirteenth amendment, George Washington Carver grew up free, but
as a child he was often sick and, of course, poor. His parents wanted him to have an education, but no
school nearby would accept black children. So his mother gave him what she had -- a speller and a
Bible. And she taught him both. Those two things, along with her love and her vision, were Mary’s gifts
to her son during his childhood.
His childhood lasted ten years. At age ten, George Washington Carver left home to attend a
grammar school, paying his own way doing odd jobs. He worked his way all the way through high school in
Minneapolis, Kansas, and through Simpson College, and through an advanced degree at Iowa State College of
Agriculture and Mechanical Arts. He was then given a position at Iowa State overseeing research in botany
and bacteriology.
In 1898, Booker T. Washington heard about him and asked him to join the faculty at Tuskegee
Institute. Carver accepted, and he remained there more than forty years. During that time he helped to
revolutionize the agriculture of the South, finding uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pecans that no
one had ever dreamed of before.
Asked, once, to testify to a congressional committee, Carver took the ten minutes he had been
allowed and then prepared to stop. But the committee was so fascinated by Carver that it put aside its
other work and asked him to continue, and for another hour and forty-five minutes Carver told them how you
can get blue and purple pigments from Alabama red clay and how you could make fiber and rope from
cornstalks and how you could get gums, starch, and dextrin from cotton stalks.
Carver gained a world-wide reputation and received extravagant offers to do his research at other
institutions, but he chose to stay at Tuskegee and to offer his services freely. A group of farmers sent
him a check for his work in eradicating peanut plant disease, and Carver returned the check with his
thanks. In 1940, he gave his life savings of $30,000 to establish a foundation at Tuskegee to continue
research on soil fertility problems and to continue to find new uses for what most people saw only as
disposable trash, but which he, with the grace and vision his mother had given him, could see were useful
resources.
When someone asked Carver the secret to his incredible insight into the usable power of the
natural world, he said, "I have made it a rule to get up every morning at four. I go into the woods, and
there I gather specimens and study the great lessons that Nature is eager to teach us. Alone in the woods
each morning, I best [see and] hear and understand God's plan for me."
Some would say that such a quiet, strong following of the Spirit, such service to the world
without the seeking of recognition, such a singleminded overcoming of immense obstacles with gladness and
singleness of heart -- some would say that such characteristics lie at the heart of sainthood. I would
say so, too.
But Jesus would suggest that we also keep our eyes open to another, to someone we might easily
overlook. Where did George Washington Carver receive such grace and vision and perseverance? He
received them before the age of ten from a poor woman everyone, except Jesus, has forgotten and does not
see.
"Did you notice that?" Jesus asks. "Notice what?" we respond. "That poor woman, and that
speller and the Bible, and especially the love and vision she poured into him when he was a boy?" "Oh,
yea, those...."
"Blessed are the poor in spirit and the meek and the gentle," says Jesus. "The kingdom of heaven
belongs to people who have little enough to offer in God's service, but who are humble enough to offer it
and who have no temptation to boast of what they have or who they are, those who just give themselves in
trust to God.
We also know the name of the fourth saint we’re looking at this morning. His name is Harry Cohen,
and here is the column his son Richard wrote in the Washington Post on September 9 of this year, two days
after his father’s death:
Harry L. Cohen died early Sunday morning here after a long illness. He is survived by his wife of
66 years, Pearl "Pat" Rosenberg Cohen, two children, two grandchildren and the sweet memories of anyone
who knew him. He was 94 years old and my father.
Newspaper obituaries are generally reserved for the notable, the exceptional -- people of some
achievement or notoriety. My father does not fill that bill. He was a mere high school graduate who
worked almost all of his life for one firm. He invented nothing, discovered nothing, wrote nothing and
was elected to no office, high or otherwise. He was the most ordinary of men -- but, God, I have known
few like him and neither have you.
Over the years I have written several columns about my parents. I did that by way of sending them
a gift and also because they were great material. My mother, 91, was born in Poland just before World War
I. She came to this country as a child and she was -- always in Poland and for a time in America --
desperately poor. If there is a single person who embodies the glory and the promise of this country, it
is my mother. It is that simple.
My father, too, has a story. His starts in some Ken Burns documentary, a black-and-white photo of
the Lower East Side of New York, where he was born in a tenement. It was in a tenement, too, where his
mother died when he was still a child. My grandfather, poor and unskilled, put my father and my uncle in
an orphanage, where -- with some Dickensian spells with foster families -- he was raised.
He was a Depression kid, my father. In some ways, though, the worst of times were the best of
times for him. He had a job. He had a car. Soon, he had a wife and she, of course, worked, too. The
two of them virtually never stopped working. Even in retirement, my father took jobs. He went door to
door for a polling firm. He parked cars in West Palm Beach, where he had "retired" with my mother. He
worked as a doorman in a fancy Palm Beach high-rise. In some sense, he did this because the Depression
was, for him, always lurking nearby, but also because he found dignity in work.
Some of this is colorful, I know, but it is not why my father was exceptional. It's because he
was a good man. Not once -- not ever -- did I know him to cheat: not in business, not on his wife,
not on his friends and never on his children. I know of no one he hurt, no one he slighted, no one he
abandoned. The great men I have spent a lifetime around -- the politicians, the statesmen, the rich,
the powerful, the creative -- can make no such claim. They always say they had to break some eggs to
make their omelet. My father made no omelet. But he broke no eggs, either.
I have written this before, but it is worth saying again: My father's sort of goodness is rare.
As he lay dying, as we talked about his life, he expressed no regrets. Not from him came reservations
about how he neglected his children in favor of work, how he spent too much money, how he cared too much
about the appearance of things and little about their substance. He did not understand men who were not
charitable, who exchanged wives as they do cars, who would slight a child to score another business deal.
He had his dreams, but the overriding one was to lead an honorable life.
To be perfectly truthful, we did not always agree -- not on certain issues (Israel, for
instance) and not on how one should live one's life. I could not -- I have not -- been him. He did
not set standards, he lived them -- and deep into my career I kept thinking that some of the things I
wrote and some of the things I did were like a bad report card I was bringing home from school. His
disapproval, sometimes not even stated, was concussive. I reeled.
He died in his sleep. He died at home, still tended by my mother and my sister, Judith, and the
remarkable women whose chosen work it is to care for the dying. He was never in pain and he was alert
almost to the end, still getting the joke, still not wanting to go. He was, I tell you, the most
extraordinary of ordinary men, what in Yiddish is called a mensch -- not a great man but, much rarer
still, a good one. There is nothing greater.
These four we have looked at this morning -- the unnamed widow, Mary and George Carver, and
Harry Cohen -- these are the blessed, the saints, Jesus says. But they are not the only saints we
remember today. There are others, the ones you and I know who are like them: the meek, who make no
claims for themselves, but who offer themselves in trust to God; those who hunger and thirst to see right
done; those who show pity for others day after day in their own lives, the merciful; those who make peace,
who bring reconciliation to quarreling neighbors. All those who have done on earth the work of God
himself -- it is they, Jesus sees and acknowledges, who inherit the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus tells us that in God’s kingdom the last shall be the first and the smallest shall be the
greatest. Those who are weak shall be strong. Those who mourn shall receive strength and comfort.
Those who encourage shall be encouraged.
These four remind me of all the "little people," all those small, anonymous saints in whose
faithful lives we can see, if we look with the eyes of Jesus, the life of Christ himself.
So remember Mary Carver today, and her son George, and Harry Cohen. And remember the nameless
widow who offered all she had to God, a gift that foreshadowed the great gift of Jesus himself. For just
a day or so afterwards, Jesus, too, would offer up all he had, "his entire living," not in an offering
plate at the Temple, but on a Cross at Calvary.
And remember today those you know, or knew, personally -- not great people perhaps but, much
rarer still, good people, all those you know who have swelled the ranks of the saints and of heaven after
the pattern of Christ himself. There is nothing greater.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |