Ambrose Bierce, in his humorous “Devil’s Dictionary,” defines a saint as: “A dead sinner, revised and edited.”  Bierce’s humor works, as does all humor, because it is based upon truth. How many of the holies recognized by Rome as saints were truly good, as opposed to well advertised?  The process of becoming a saint in the Roman Catholic church, canonization, is often a highly bureaucratic and political process.  Although some (Mother Theresa, and likely Pope John Paul II) are put on a fast track, the usual process takes years.  The candidate must, among other things, have been proved to have performed three miracles. 

What pass as “miracles” are sometimes suspect. Don Novello (a.k.a. Father Guido Sarducci), a comedian who poses as a priest, has a routine where he complains about the politically motivated rush to canonize American saints. “Some of these Americans,” he says, “have only three miracles, and two of them involve a deck of cards.  Do you know how many Italians waiting to be saints have five or six hundred miracles?"

             Although some have sought to see the saints of old as regular humans who were serious about their relationship to God (as in Frederick Beuchner’s biographical novels Brendan, and Godric), most of us continue to define that word “saint” as a person who is a pristine (often pontificating) piece of stained glass.  Most would secretly agree with Mark Twain who said he preferred “heaven for the climate, but hell for the society,” or with Billy Joel who sang that he’d “rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”

             The Encyclopedia Britannica, in an article on “Saints” calls a saint: “A person connected in a special way with what is considered to be sacred reality.” The article goes on to point out that all the world’s major religions have a host of holies – persons who have achieved a high level of piety and are benevolently disposed towards less mature believers.  The standard for a saint, a Buddha, a sadhu, or a wali, then are roughly the same.  This is how we use the word.  Is it how God uses it?             The New Testament word “saint” means “one who is ritually cleansed”.  Its verb form comes to us in most English translations as “sanctify.” A saint is one who is sanctified. Sanctification, not Canonization is the Biblical process of making a saint.

 We have all been sanctified through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ.   Hebrews 10.10            

All.            

Therefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people through his own blood, suffered outside the gate.   Hebrews 13.12            

The People.

            The writer of Hebrews has told us who saints are.  Saints are “all” “the people” who have been cleansed through “the offering of his body,” and “his own blood.” A saint is simply, and gloriously, a Christian. This is why we Christians are referred to as saints so often in the New Testament (cf. Romans 1.7; I Corinthians 1.2, 6.2; Ephesians 5.3; Jude 3; Revelation 16.6).

             We Christians are the saints – holy but imperfect, cleansed but flawed, bathed in blood-born of blood-flesh and blood children of God.

             Because that blood continually flows (I John 1.7) we are all “specially connected to sacred reality.”

             And so Ambrose Bierce was almost right. A saint is “a sinner, revised and edited”  - but a living one.