All Saints Sermon 11 1 20

All Saints A 2020 Matthew 5:1-12
I am struck by the irony of celebrating All Saints Day in our current season of coronavirus.
Normally today would serve as a reminder that the saints who have died and joined the church
triumphant are still united with us, God’s saints who remain on earth. Yet even our church on earth
doesn’t feel united: we worship not together but split into three services plus many individual
households watching from home. Normally I would say that the eucharistic table around which we
gather extends to include our deceased loved ones who are seated at the heavenly banquet; but these days we commune far away from each other, let alone far away from heaven. Once we give thanks for having survived the pandemic thus far, we might have a hard time in our current circumstances feeling blessed at all. Which is a good reason for us to look really closely at how Jesus uses that word, blessed, and also how we use the word saint on this All Saints Day.
This passage comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry: he was baptized and tested in the
wilderness, then he announces that the kingdom of heaven has come near. To show what that means, he begins healing people, which is why the crowds start following him. Then he sits down on the mountain to teach the beatitudes to his disciples, what we might think of as his mission statement for what the kingdom of heaven is supposed to look like. But he’s talking, as he almost always is, not about the kingdom of heaven in heaven, but the kingdom of heaven on earth. We have a snapshot of what heaven looks like from Revelation: the great multitude from every nation, too numerous to count, robed in white, having come through the great ordeal, standing before the throne, worshiping God day and night, hungering and thirsting no more, with every tear wiped from their eyes. That’s the vision of our heavenly future.
But in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven breaking into this world that
we’re living in now and beginning to change our perspectives and priorities. Those whom Jesus says are blessed are not experiencing what our world considers blessings. Just think of what somebody’s Facebook status or Instagram feed looks like when they label it #blessed. Or think about the blessings we name around the table at Thanksgiving—however altered that celebration will have to be this year: We look back and count our blessings, often things that we feel we’ve earned, as the bounty on the table represents the tilling, sowing, tending, and reaping that the farmer has accomplished. It’s appropriate for us to give thanks for those things, but they don’t sound like what Jesus teaches here.
We don’t give thanks for poverty, mourning, meekness, hunger, thirst, or persecution. Those are the opposite of what we think it means to be blessed; those are the things most of us spend most of our time and energy trying to avoid. That shows us that our culture’s idea of blessing isn’t biblical; we’ve distorted Jesus’ teaching until we’ve made “blessing” mean a healthier, wealthier, more powerful experience of life lived by the values and standards of this world—goals for us to achieve.
Jesus’ list of who is blessed is ironic because it’s countercultural; but then we went and hijacked
that term and made it un-ironic in order to apply it to our cultural ideals again. But if we take Jesus’
teaching at face value, we see it is not a checklist for how we are to achieve blessing, especially not the blessings that are valued in this world. These aren’t things we are supposed to seek out, to do, or to be. This is not Jesus’ prescription for how we are supposed to get blessed; this is Jesus description of how people are blessed even when their lives don’t reflect worldly success and happiness. And again, Jesus is not just pointing toward the future, promising that temporal suffering earns an eternal reward. There is hope here of a reversal of fortune for the afflicted, of future healing, comfort, fulfillment, and wholeness, but Jesus doesn’t say that the poor, meek, mourning, hungry, thirsty, and persecuted will be blessed but that they are blessed right now. How can that be?
The age old question always surfaces in situations where bad things happen to good people:
Where is God? In the midst of mourning, hunger, poverty, oppression, persecution, we always want to ask, Where is God? But if we remember our mantra of God’s work, our hands, then the question in times of trouble becomes not Where is God? but Where are God’s people? In other words, how do we think God is going to bless the poor, hungry, and afflicted if not through God’s disciples who have been called into kingdom living—that is, if not through us? When we see the world as one whole family, we can’t say, “Well, that’s too bad that those people are suffering” and still be happy ourselves. We can’t  say, “They have it tough now but things will get better when they get to heaven” and still claim to be participants in God’s kingdom. We’re called to do the comforting and the filling, to give mercy and show God’s love, to bless those who suffer: that’s the job of sainthood.
We usually think of saints as those who have exercised extraordinary faith, famous historical
figures for whom churches are named and feast days observed. On All Saints Day we include
especially those who have died within the last year, and maybe we think of them as being more holy now than when they walked among us. But the word saint really just means one who has been set apart for God’s holy work…and in baptism, that’s what happens to all of us. We all have been called to live out God’s holy purpose in this world, to be a blessing to others through our words and actions, through our kindness and care, through our solidarity and advocacy. All Saints means just that: all of us responding to God’s call, which is never about our personal piety but always about our service to others on God’s behalf. It is probably not St. Francis or St. Patrick, St. Teresa or St. Julian who have  made the greatest impact on our faith, but the saints whose names we’ll remember this day, and the saints whom we’ve known personally throughout our lives, the saints who answered the daily call to bless those around them with the love they first received from God. As we remember today that all saints means us, too, may we hope not so much to be blessed as to be a blessing to others.