Me? A saint?

     This coming Sunday is All Saints Sunday - the day the church sets aside to remember all the saints, and we rejoice particularly with those saints who have both entered the communion through baptism, as well as those who have died and continue the communion with the choirs of angels.  It is a day of celebration of the mystical  communion of all saints - past, present, and future - and into this celebration comes the Word of God from 1 John 3.1-3.  It is a perfect text for the celebration because it also starts with a celebration, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God".   
     I think that that statement can end both with a question mark as well as an exclamation point.  God loves us that much?? God loves us that much!!  It is a difficult tension to live in because we know what kind of people we are - sinful and disobedient to God's will - and  in spite of that God loves us and claims us as children in the communion of saints that is the body of Christ.  When we are washed in these beautiful waters, we are made saints while we are still sinners, and as a result we live our lives in the tension between already and not yet.  Already we are made saints while we are not yet quite saintly.
     In thinking about these juxtapositions of sinner/saint, life in sin/life in Christ, impure/pure, it comes to my attention that we generally believe that God does this for us. We believe God loves us and that Jesus died so that we could be forgiven of our sins, freed to live a life of service to others, and we believe that the Holy Spirit strengthens us to do all of this.  But we get caught up on ourselves.  God can love us and forgive us, but it is a different story entirely when it comes to loving ourselves and forgiving ourselves.  We think of other saints in the faith and start comparing ourselves.  "Mary is so selfless - always serving others and giving of herself."  "Bob seems like such a spiritual person - praying and reading his Bible..." We look to other saints and know that God loves them and has set them apart, but end up doubting ourselves and our own sainthoods.
    Fortunately for us, the writer of 1 John lays it out plain as day: you are children of God!  That makes us simultaneously saint and sinner, joined in the same family and with the same level of 'saint-ness' that we so admire in everyone but ourselves.  Why shouldn't we see this in ourselves?  We are the body of Christ, the saints here on earth. Each time we come to the table, eat the bread, and drink the wine, we are once again renewed, refreshed, and reminded that we are the body of Christ, saints, and children of God. 
     God loves us and in the bread and wine, water and word, makes us saints and children.  What love has the Father given us!