Matthew 5:1-12
When Jesus saw
the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be
comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who
hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful,
for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed
are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are
persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are
you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you
falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the
same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Sermon
WE CAN DO THIS!
All Saints
Sunday. United Methodists have never really
known what to do with the idea of the saints. We think of the saints as famous people. The ones we are most familiar with, at least in
terms of their names; the ones that we feel most comfortable about, I think, are the ones
who are in the Bible – Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and then the four evangelists, we
usually have no trouble getting the four saints out of our mouths when we’re talking
about them either, Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke, Saint John. We have churches named after people like them. It’s okay to think of them, in our view, as
saints.
But then we’re
also aware that other Christians, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches especially, but
also Episcopalian and some Lutherans other Christians have other people who they consider
saints. And some of those people in some of
those denominations lived later in the New Testament; and so we know of Saint Augustin and
Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assissi and people like them. And some of them we find a liking for within our
own hearts, an admiration for; we acknowledge that they lived a holy life.
But then there’s
a way of living in relation to things in other churches that most of us find is not
comfortable, in the United Methodist tradition. We
did after all have some roots in the Protestant world.
And the idea of having an ongoing relationship with a holy person who has
died and is now supposed to connect with you somehow from heaven; that idea is not exactly
unacceptable to us, but it is foreign to us; since most of us find that we can get along
quite well just relating directly to Jesus Christ. And
so we have no need for the saints; and you might figure, I think, that we have no need for
All Saints Day.
I actually
question that part about no need for the saints. I
wonder how much unseen influence comes to us from a great cloud of witnesses who are
cheering us on from heaven. They may be
helping us a lot more than we know or acknowledge. So
we may need them, even though we don’t know about that.
But then also, this connection with All Saints Sunday, what are we supposed
to do with that? Actually that might be
better connected with the witnesses than the other kind, the famous kind; the people who
have been known in history as doers of deeds of great piety and power. Because when the New Testament uses the word
saints, it isn’t singling out these individuals, it’s talking about a whole body
of believers.
Saint Paul is
fond of using this word, he refers to the saints as not only the people who are now
Christians, but we are called to be saints – there’s a phrase that he uses more
than once – the idea that God has a plan for us that involves a sainthood or
sanctity, holiness. The “holy one”
is actually the literal translation of the word that we translate as “saint”,
and that’s what a saint means; again in the New Testament that was applied to all
Christians. And Jude, Revelations, Acts, as
well as several Old Testament books also use the words “holy one” referring to
God’s people. Not singling out famous
ones, but mentioning all of them. And even in
Catholic and Orthodox and Episcopal churches, All Saints Day is a day to recognize that
the saints aren’t just famous people. That
there are lots of saints that aren’t officially sanctioned as saints, due to their
sanctity being unknown, unknown saints, if you will, but there are lots of them. And we acknowledge them on All Saints Day. So we come close to observing this without even
realizing it on this one day. Because we’re
also coming close to the New Testament and the idea of sainthood that’s something for
everybody; not something you’re just given because we say you ought to be a saint. But, it’s something that can become a part of
us through an extreme openness with God and through a contribution I believe we make for
our own part.
How do we begin
to get our minds around this “universal sainthood”? The Sermon on the Mount would be a good place to
start – The Beatitudes, the opening verses of Matthew, chapter 5. He gives a very striking, provocative, (in those
days at least), picture of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus
tells us what it means to be blessed. What do we mean by the word “blessed”? The more modern translations say “happy”,
but that one doesn’t quite capture it, I think. Because
the blessed that the Bible
talks about is not just happy in the terms of enjoying yourself; it’s the kind of
happy that comes from being in touch with the secrets of the universe. The kind of happiness that puts you in line with
where you’re supposed to be and what your holy destiny is. And so the word “blessed”, I think,
is still a better word to use than the word “happy”. “Happy” leads us on this primrose path
that takes us away from the intent of the scripture. The
Beatitudes tell us what it means to be blessed, blessed.
Maybe you can
think of it as being touched by God. What I
have in mind is actually the “Midas touch”, whatever King Midas touched turned
to gold. Whatever God touches, perhaps, turns
to gold. At least, that’s God intention
when he touches us, and when he touches us it’s a moment of blessing. Now the striking thing The Beatitudes say about
blessing is that it doesn’t come to us in ways that seem holy and pious and
supernatural; but rather it comes to us in ordinary life experience. Some of these experiences it talks about are the
things that we do in our better moments, such as: Blessed are the
merciful, Blessed are the
peacemakers, we sometimes summon it within ourselves to be blessed in this way. Our better nature makes us be blessed in moments in
our lives. But other than these moments, where
God touches us, are moments that we didn’t bring on ourselves in any sort of willed
way at all. Particularly, blessed are those who
mourn.
Let’s look
at that one right now, because perhaps that’s the most striking instance of a
Beatitude that doesn’t seem like much of one. We
mourn when we suffer great loss, usually death; although the dynamic of grieving does
apply to other loss as well. That’s what
makes us mourn; and we don’t want to say that God touched us by giving us this loss. So what we’re left with is the idea that Jesus
is saying we are blessed when something awful and inexplicable happens in our lives and we
are having trouble coping with it. Yes, that’s
what grieving feels like, especially at first. But
think about grief in the long term. For a
while you feel like you can’t go on; for a while it may be sharp; and it feels like
it won’t go away and you don’t know how you’re ever going to make it.
But that doesn’t
last. Eventually, sometimes in a few months,
sometimes in many months, eventually, you start to see little rays of light shining
through the clouds. Not rays of light that
will make everything better; rays of light that will make everything different somehow,
maybe you can start noticing at that point a difference that has already been taking shape
in your life, in your grief. Your grief has
included, perhaps, a way of looking at the world with greater wisdom; with a more
melancholy, but also a more true vision of the ultimate desired destiny of human beings.
We never do
finally achieve all the things we want to achieve; we never do finally find the perfect
happiness; the happiness you want to have in this life.
You come to terms with those things as your grief progresses. You move into patches of sunlight. You move into moments where the mists clear, when
you start seeing the landscape ahead of you – it is a more complicated and yet more
beautiful landscape than the one that you had ahead of you before this great grief struck
you. You move and you move and you move until
finally you notice, at least for a moment in your heart, that you have a sense of peace. It takes a long time, but you notice that taking
root in your heart. And then, eventually, you
come to the point where you’re saying – “I was grieving”; or “That
was hard, and now it’s past.”
And “…it’s
past” doesn’t mean that it’s over, but it does mean that you have got to
the point where you are on the other side of
the pain; and when you look back from that vantage point, what you see is in a very
interesting way, beautiful. That wisdom, that
insight, that sensitivity that you’ve gained through the grieving process; all of
this comes as a source of comfort – that ability to be stronger in the face future
adversities and difficulties; that ability to weather the storms of life with more
graciousness, more gracefulness; with the gracious hand of God’s presence. On the far side of great grief is a kind of insight
that could be described with the word “comfort”.
And that probably is what Jesus was telling us when he said “Blessed are those who
mourn, for they shall be comforted.” That
process of grieving, ripping us asunder as it did, that process of grieving led to
something very good on the other side of grieving.
That’s just
one example, but at the heart of the examples, perhaps, that illustrates how all the other
Beatitudes work. They are situations that come
up in our ordinary lives – tragedy and farce, and farce and tragedy – of being
human. These are situations that crop up in
our lives, sometimes when we’re being good, other times we’re simply being
ourselves. But when they hit us, and other
people look at us and say “that person is very fortunate”, then indeed our
blessing can be great, that lays the foundation of the blessed life, the
foundation of the holy life.
Something else
is needed though besides the fact of great happiness, before we have glimmers of goodness
like when we are peacemakers; something else is needed, which is for us to be aware that
in these moments, God is present and leading and guiding and helping and supporting and
working us through those moments. In other
words these things happen in our ordinary experience, sometimes with conscious input from
us. But the other ingredient is God’s
ingredient, and how God carries us through. So,
that ingredient of God’s is something we experience, it’s an awareness of God’s
presence. Awareness, self-consciousness that
we are not only experiencing grief but this grief is something that is moving us on a
spiritual quest towards a destination that will lead us closer to the one who is holy.
These
Beatitudes, I think, put us in the frame of mind to appreciate everybody else that has
gone through the travails and difficulties of life. The
ability to appreciate them and realize how they could have acquired some holiness, mixed
in with all those other things we humans always bring to the equation. If they’ve acquired some holiness; maybe it
could rub off on us. These may be more
experienced humans, Christians, whom we know in this world.
They may be people in our own lives who are now living in the world that is
to come. Whatever it may be, however, holiness
is something that is offered to us, through the normal experience of life. Something that we need to put our own conscious
input into, we need to be aware of it, though it is God ultimately guiding us through.
In other words,
we can do this. Holiness is not just for
people who do famous deeds or achieve great insights; holiness is something that
recognizes the greatness in each person. And
the level inside, that each of us can have, is a mysterious, marvelous, complex, and
infinitely valuable love of God in Jesus Christ. Think
about that when you read The Beatitudes, when you encounter being called to holiness, and
when you think about All Saints Sunday. Think
of this. Amen.
^ top of page
