All Saints Sunday
Scripture
Epistle
– 1 John 3: 1-3[1]
1See what love the [Creator] has given us,
that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that
it did not know [God]. 2Beloved,
we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when [God] is revealed, we will be like [God],
for we will see [God] as [God] is. 3And
all who have this hope in [God] purify themselves, just as [God] is pure.
Gospel
– Matthew 5: 1-12[2]
1When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the
mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2Then he began to speak, and taught
them, saying:
3“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
4“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will
be comforted.
5“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit
the earth.
6“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they will be filled.
7“Blessed are the merciful, for they will
receive mercy.
8“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will
see God.
9“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will
be called children of God.
10“Blessed are those who are persecuted for
righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11“Blessed are you when people revile you and
persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12Rejoice and be glad, for your
reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who
were before you.
“We Are Given a Lifetime."
We're moving toward the end of one church year and the
beginning of another – toward Advent, the season in which we anticipate both
that first coming in a place called Bethlehem, and a "second coming"
that I like to envision comes when we place Jesus, as the Christ, at the center
of our lives. In this movement toward
the holy we are invited into moments of great blessing. We have been given a lifetime in which to
learn just how blessed we truly are.
As many of you know, in some texts the translation
"blessed" is rendered as "happy." In the context of the Ancient Near East such
a feeling is intimately connected with wisdom – knowing how to "live
well" the life that each of us has been given. After all that is the way to discover true
happiness. So I could just as well have
chosen these words from the Book of Proverbs where wisdom (hoķma in Hebrew),
because it's a feminine noun, appears as a woman:
13 Happy are those
who find wisdom,
and those who get understanding,
14 for her income
is better than silver,
and her revenue better than gold.
15 She is more
precious than jewels,
and nothing you desire can compare with
her.
16 Long life is in
her right hand;
in her left hand are riches and honor.
17 Her ways are
ways of pleasantness,
and all her paths are peace.
18 She is a tree of
life to those who lay hold of her;
those who hold her fast are called happy.[3]
We are given the blessings of
a lifetime in which to discover the truth of this.
In my sermon last month on love[4] I
quoted from a portion of T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Rock," to illustrate
the importance of community. For Eliot
the church wasn't just a building, or even any single congregation, but a
communion of saints past, present and future, actively involved with each other
in the work of making God known. His
anachronistic non-inclusive language aside, listen to a bit more from the
second chorus of that poem as Eliot writes of how important it is that we not
only preserve the good of our past, against its decay and neglect, but that we
also build on the good that we've all inherited:
And of all that was done that was good, you have the
inheritance
For good and ill deeds belong to a man alone,
when he stands alone on the other side of death,
But here upon earth you have the reward of the good
and ill that was done
by those who have gone before you.
And all that is ill you may repair if you walk
together in humble repentance, expiating the sins of your fathers;
And all that was good you must fight to keep
with hearts as devoted as those of your fathers who
fought to gain it.
The Church must be forever building,
for it is forever decaying within and attacked from
without:
What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community
And no community not lived in praise of God.[5]
Have you noticed in the Beatitudes just how much our feelings lie behind each blessing? "Blessed are those who mourn, for they
shall be comforted." To
"rejoice and be glad" is to know how to show mercy to those who need
it, to know how to be a peacemaker when others cry out for revenge. In a strange reversal here, grief and loss,
suffering and pain, become occasions of profound blessing and moments of
unbelievable joy! At least this seems
strange to us in our culture because we've always been taught to deny our most deeply
felt emotions. Strong feelings of any
kind, whether they're feelings of anger or sadness, joy or deeply religious
awe, cause most of us Anglo Europeans to be so uncomfortable that we turn away from
anybody who hasn't got the good manners to at least suppress such feelings and
keep them to themselves!
We've become so accomplished at hiding our emotions that
often we forget that we even have them.
To be cut off from those depths of our heart, though, is to come to lead
a very flat, if not empty, life. One of
the consequences of this kind of denial and emotional repression is an epidemic
of depression. "I'll be all
right," we stoically say.
"I'll make it." And yet
so many of us don't sleep well, while we feel as if we'd like to sleep all the
time. Many more of us have long
stretches when we feel so low on energy that life seems to give us very little at
all that we can savor. Others of us feel
weighed down but we don't know why.
Oddly enough, when we learn how to block out our intense anger or our profound
sadness, all too often we also block any true joy or comfort that we might
otherwise be able to receive. They all
inhabit the same country. Walling
ourselves off from the deepest longings of our hearts, that wall also becomes a
self-imposed barrier between us and God, because it's in the midst of our deepest
feelings that God will show up in our lives.
There is no way to stay well or get well without mourning
our losses; and there's no way to mourn one loss without mourning them
all. But we'd have to stop pretending
that we're all right, that we don't hurt, or that we have everything that we
need. To admit a deep hurt that we've
plastered over a long time ago – because we believed then that there was no way
to heal it – does take courage, but it's the kind of courage that can lead us
back into living the life that we were meant to live.[6] What's more, if we have found the strength to
mourn our losses, we'll also come to discover that we've been given the
compassion to embrace with tenderness and care the losses and the sufferings of
others.
A colleague and friend of mine whose mother is from
We are given a lifetime to live, but like my colleague and
friend, we need to know whose children we are, and what that heritage promises
for our future. Today let's reclaim
that, among all of God's creatures, we are truly blessed.
* * *
[1] This
passage from the 1st Letter of John comes like a burst of
light. The writer invites us to remember
that by realizing ourselves as being, as it were, God's offspring should make a
difference in how we live out our lives.
It makes us a people set apart – i.e.,
our lives should give evidence of our commitment to Jesus, as the Christ, and
that fact should be apparent to anybody who knows us. In a very real sense, then, we're to be seen
as brothers and sisters of Jesus himself.
[2]
Matthew's version of the so-called "Beatitudes" is often referred to
as a basic rule of life for Christians, but most of us dismiss them as
impossible, if not impractical, ideals.
It's worth noting, then, that the Jewish community out of which these
sayings come, had Jewish converts in mind – e.g.,
they presented Jesus as the new Moses.
So Jesus climbs up a mountain, like Moses hiking up
Some
translations use the word "happy" instead of "blessed;" the
meanings overlap, really, since in Jewish thought happiness was simply a direct
effect of receiving God's blessing or benediction.
[3] Proverbs 3: 13-18.
[4] October 23rd, "What's Love Got to Do with It?"
[5] T.S.
Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963).
[6]
Psychoanalyst Alice Miller believes that mourning is the beginning of all
healing. Acknowledging and suffering our
deepest sorrows and losses – which always includes the sorrows of our childhood
– Miller believes, can lead to the release from our inner prison. When we do rediscover our deep
disappointments and buried pain, we also can discover our need for God and our
capacity for joy and love. The ways in
which we express our hurt, anger, disappointment and sorrow will always
threaten our partners in life and, depending upon their maturity, will always
distance us from them. But if we create
a tolerance for these deep and disturbing realities in ourselves (through
therapy or prayer or both), we will find somebody who will not be frightened
away, who will have compassion in the face of our sorrow and anger, until they
turn into joy and vitality. We're so
used to the negative reactions when we show our truest selves, Miller notes
though, that it doesn't seem to occur to us that God might react
differently. At the very moment when
most people back off, God is closest to us, and offers us healing and love (Prisoners of Childhood and The Drama of the Gifted Child [New York:
Basic Books, 1981]).