All Saints Day Sermon

Sunday after All Saints Day

Transcribed from a sermon given

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

November 6, 2011

Matthew 5:1-12

I was exploring the Internet on my IPad this week and came across an interesting advertisement. I wasn’t sure whether it was on Craig’s list or somewhere else, and it wasn’t clear whether it was a help wanted ad or personal ad, but it read something like this:

Wanted - merciful, meek, naïve person, preferably slightly depressed, who wants to change the world. Must be comfortable living in poverty. Persecution to be expected. Rewards heavenly.

Anybody want the job? Or whatever it is? Can you imagine going in for a job interview and saying, “I think that one of my greatest strengths is that I am very meek.” In the world of assertiveness training?  Jesus says the meek will inherit the earth. Or would you say, “Well, yes, I am in deep grief right now and tend to sort of cry at random times, but I am just the person you want to hire.”

What Jesus says is very countercultural. It is countercultural today, and it was countercultural when he said the beatitudes 2000 years ago.

But wait, there was more in this advertisement. It did have the duties if you chose to accept the position.  The duties include trusting and praising God, going to church, proclaiming the good news, serving everyone, loving everyone, and working for justice - and when you fail at any, or all of these, asking to be forgiven. Those are our baptismal covenant - it is what we agree to do when we are baptized.

For me the beatitudes and baptismal covenant are a job description for a Christian, or as Paul put it in the reading today, a child of God, for once we make the commitment to be Christians, we become children of God.

Now I wonder who would possibly accept such a position. Well today we’ve got three people who said yes to that. We have Ethan, and Audrey and Dylan. They have all decided that they want to be baptized. They want to make that commitment. They find themselves at a place where they want to know Christ better. They want to walk with Christ.

We always read the beatitudes when we celebrate All Saints Day. All Saints, to remind you who don’t know, All Saints Day is celebrating everyone who has died. All the saints who have died. Not just people who lived what we might call saintly lives. In scripture, the Greek word that is translated as saints comes from the root word for holy. So a saint is a holy person and a holy person is one that is close to God, or like God. It is not a group of people who had miracles. There was no special kind of decision that they were a saint. It is rather everyone who said yes to God. Everyone who did their best to try and serve God. Or even did a mediocre job to try and serve God, but who wanted to. The saints are all of us, and the saints that we remember on All Saints Day are the ones, the faithful in Christ, who have died and are part of what is called the fellowship of saints, or the communion of saints.  All the people being baptized are joining this great communion of saints. All the Christians alive today, all the Christians who ever lived, and all the Christians who ever will live. When we are baptized we become part of a huge community, and they are here with us today - that fellowship which we celebrate. 

Now the beatitudes are kind of interesting. They say blessed are…. And we can sort of get around blessed are ones who morn or blessed are whatever, because blessed means to us that they are saintly. But there are other translations, English translations like the Jerusalem Bible, that instead of using blessed they use the world “happy”. And they say happy are those who mourn. Happy are those who are meek. Happy are those who are persecuted. Happy are those who are poor. Well that’s really countercultural. Because in our culture we think that you are going to be happy because you’ve got money, and you don’t have any problems, and all that. But happy to me is not quite the right word to translate it, because I usually think of happy as something I feel from something outside. Like happy is how I felt when my daughter called me up and said that her work gave her a new IPad, do you want my old one? I was happy then. Happy is when everything is going great in the external world.

So I think a better word, instead of blessed or happy is the word “joyous” because when we are joyous it is not dependent on the outside world. Joyousness is something that comes up from inside of us. Something that over takes us and wells up from within. And we can be in grief and yet also know that there is that inner joy, in the grief and beyond the grief. That is a joyousness that can’t be taken away and isn’t affected by getting good things or bad things. It is a state of being.

The beatitudes - if Jesus lived today I am sure he would have used Twitter because the beatitudes are just the right length to tweet. You can imagine that, right? If you got a tweet that said, “blessed are the poor.” And you go “Hmmm, I could think about that for a couple of days.” They are easy short summaries.

I encourage you to pick one to spend a year with because the beatitudes are something that you can meditate on for a long time. Each one of them takes you to different places. For example, the one “Blessed are those who mourn.” Joyous are those who mourn. Happy are those who mourn. What in the world could that mean? Because to mourn, doesn’t that mean sadness. That’s just the opposite of being happy. And yet it is honoring that grief is real. And there is a blessing in those who are able to feel their grief, to know their sorrow, because it is only by knowing our sorrow that we can go through it and find the joyousness that lies beyond it. And those who mourn are not just those who grieve for someone they know who has died. There are those who mourn form the world, those who mourn for the people one the other side of the earth who have died in an earthquake, those who mourn for the poor and the children who don’t have a home, those who grieve for the imperfections of the world. Blessed are those who can really feel and acknowledge their grief, and know their grief.

It is interesting that the first reading that we read today is one that is often used at funerals. And it ends with “He will dry all their tears, wipe away all their tears.” So when we grieve, we grieve with Christ and there is a way in which when we are honest with how we feel and with our lose and our grief that we are close to God. God is there with us, walking through it, helping us through it. And so on those nights when we grieve, and we stay at home, and we curl up on our bed and we cry Jesus is there, his arms around us, helping us and promising us that we will make it through. Promising that we will begin to be able to experience that joy again. Not the happy, happy joy, but the deep satisfaction of knowing God.

One can do that kind of meditation on any one of the beatitudes.

(At this point the recording ended. I am not certain of the words I used to end this sermon. I am pretty sure that I reviewed again that the beatitudes and baptismal covenant make up the job description of Christians and then went into the service of baptism.)