Because we are all mimics at heart, because we are all copycats from the day we are born, because we all learn by imitation, we need heroes. We need good people to model ourselves after. We need people worth looking to and people worth looking up to.

Even in America, where we like to thin k we are each prized originals from conception and everyone does their own thing, we still learn to walk and talk by watching and listening to those we look up to. If we didn’t think this matter of influence mattered, we wouldn’t need parents; we could all just replicate in laboratories and grow up to be the unique individuals our genes destined us to be. And this would relieve a lot of parental worry, don’t you know?! We wouldn’t fret about the friends our kids hang around. We wouldn’t start planning in utero where the kid will attend preschool in order to get into the right college one day. We wouldn’t try to censor their music and movies and Internet activity. We would just let them do their own thing and say, Isn’t it interesting the way junior is showing his individuality?

The church isn’t against individuality. We don’t want to make cookie cutter Christians or Stepford children. But we know that character is formed by the example of those around us. And even if, as Baptists say, faith is a gift God gives, it is nonetheless shaped by the faith of those we come to emulate. Which is why I like to say, It takes a church to raise a Christian.

 Which is also why we need more faith heroes. On this All Saints Sunday, we might think of those heroes of faith that shape our lives. What makes a hero a saint? All saints are heroes, but not all heroes are saints. How do we know the difference?

Good Morning America turned 30 this week. The retrospective made me think about how television news has changed over the years. Whether a morning show or the evening news, the line between news and entertainment has blurred. We seem to want more and more gossip about celebrities, more inside information about the lives of the rich and famous, more insight into their personal lives and lifestyles. Who’d have thought that the gossip tabloids would be a stronger influence on the shape of the serious news media than, say, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? What is that about? It seems we have lost our sense of who and what is worth paying attention to.

 I mean, consider Hollywood heroes generally. What do they do for the world to make it better that we should be so interested in them? Aside from the few activists who try to use their fame for some good humanitarian purpose, they collect millions of dollars from people who idolize them, and then they do everything they can to avoid them. They live lives separate and apart from normal people. They don’t fly commercial. They don’t shop at the local grocery store. They don’t mingle with the common folk unless to promote some new movie. And God knows you don’t find many of them next to you in the pew at church on Sunday.

Now, before we demonize these people too much, consider how much we contribute to the problems of celebrities. If these people did show up in our pews, would we allow them to be normal people? If you see a celebrity out with her kids somewhere, can you leave her alone, not stare, not try to get an autograph, not try to figure out what brand of jeans she is wearing? And then consider the faith of celebrities. What is so appealing about Scientology and the like? So much of the fad of new faiths is the custom-fit character of their doctrine. It’s all about a very conscious self-centeredness, about how the practice of these ideas can help you achieve the dreams you have for yourself. It’s all about you.

Being a saint is exactly the opposite. Saints live with a God-centeredness that is jarring to almost everyone around them. They love and honor God in a way that often seems strange to us, and yet in the end we come to see that they know something about the essence of life we cannot know by living on the surface the way we most of us do most of the time. As the Catholic scholar Gil Bailie puts it, saints look slightly ridiculous to believers and utterly absurd to the worldly, and [yet] they are strangely happy, even when afflicted or shunned.

And the reason for that, I think, is that they worry less than we do about being happy, afflicted, or shunned. They are more interested in taking their cues from God, living for others, and doing the small and simple things that never get on TV but that make the world a holier and healthier place.

The fourteenth-century Sufi poet Hafiz said something that might as well summarize saintliness: Greatness is always built upon this foundation: The ability to appear, speak, and act, as the most common man.

And this is just the thing that makes saints so uncommon. While all the rest of us are trying to emulate uncommon people who spend their lives trying to separate themselves from common people, saints go the other way: they identify with those nobody else seems to notice.

So who are some of these saints we honor today and ought to look up to for inspiration? Well, some of them are no longer with us in the flesh. If you grew up Catholic or Episcopalian, you might know some of their names. But many are nameless to most of us. The vision God gave to John of all the saints that live round the throne of God was meant to encourage him and all of us to remain faithful in the world. These saints were martyrs: they shed their blood for the common cause of Christ. They would not worship the vain idols of this world; they would not bow their knees to Caesar; they would not choose self-glory at the expense of the glory of God or the honor of ordinary people.

 John McCain has just co-authored a new book on people of character. McCain is a politician of uncommon character. He wasn’t always that way, though. He lived for self-glory most of his young life, but he learned what mattered during years of torture and deprivation as a prisoner of war in . He realized how much we depend upon others to make life livable. In a recent interview he recalled one such hero. As a scared American prisoner of war in , I was tied in torture ropes by my tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer through the night. Later in the evening, a guard I had never spoken to entered the room and silently loosened the ropes to relieve my suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and re-tightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He never said a word to me. Some months later on a Christmas morning, as I stood alone in the prison courtyard, that same guard walked up to me and stood next to me for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. We stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.

To me, that was faith: a faith that unites and never divides, a faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. It is the faith that we are all equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the faith I would die to defend.

And that is in fact just what the martyrs in John’s vision did. They died to defend that faith. We don’t actually know whether the scene in heaven that John is permitted to see is the veil pulled back on the invisible realm of heaven today or a peek into the future from the present. We do not know whether they are saints alive with God now, or whether they are simply saints whose lives so inspire us still that they seem alive to us now. But either way, we are seeing the reward in heaven that God grants to those who sought no reward on earth. These are people who lived as if what mattered was any little thing that needed doing to serve God. So many of us want greatness, but we don’t want to do the little things for others that constitute greatness in the eyes of God. We want to do things that gain attention for ourselves instead of attending to the needs of others.

Former president Jimmy Carter is widely acclaimed as our most impressive ex-president. (I’m sure he takes that as a backhanded compliment.) But he recently said this of himself: I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. I’m free to choose what that something is and the something I’ve chosen is my faith. Now, my faith goes beyond theology and religion and requires considerable work and effort. My faith demands—this is not optional—my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have, to try to make a difference. It isn’t difficult.

Now to me this is the secret of the saints that compels us. They do not think of the things that they do as being difficult or a sacrifice; they do not feel as if they ought to be recognized for them or applauded. It’s what they do, because it’s who they are. They don’t have to find a cause; they just live their lives in ways that reflect the character of God.

I would like to name names of those I consider saints alive in this church today. But if I did, I would so embarrass them that they would scold me for it. And if they didn’t feel that way, we wouldn’t consider them worthy of our mimicry. It is precisely that quality of humble service that makes them the kind of Christians we want to model ourselves after. So I won’t mention their names, but I want to give you permission to look around to find them for yourself. Take a minute. Look around. … Now, in another year, or ten, or twenty, or fifty, could you imagine someone looking at you that way? What would it take for others to think that way of you? Well, it wouldn’t be that you set out to be a saint; it would be that you just set out to live like those you so admire.

I was the designated pray-er at a luncheon this week at the Belo Mansion sponsored by Texans Care for Children. The organization was honoring its founder, our own Phil Strickland. For more than twenty years Phil has been working to bring together people from all over the state to advocate for the well-being of children. He has been a voice for the voiceless, sometimes even a voice crying in the wilderness. I was proud to be there to honor him, along with a room full of people of faith from all walks of life. I would be happy to be like him when I grow up. The church holds up people like Phil when no one else would because he has been holding up people no one else would. And what we say to each other when we do that is, See him? Be like him. He gets it. See her? Be like her. She is like Jesus. You want a hero? Look at her. Look at him.

 A couple was in marriage counseling, and at a certain point the therapist asked the man if he really loved his wife. He said he loved her so much he would die for her. The therapist replied, You love her enough to die for her, but do you love her enough to live for her?

You know, sometimes it’s easier to say what you would die for than what you will live for. Let me ask you today, what are you living for? Saints love God and the world enough to live to serve them. So much so that even when they die, they remain among us forever as living witnesses. They are now and always saints alive! Thanks be to God!