Christopher Thomas
Sermon for the Feast of All Saints, Episcopal BCP Lectionary
11/1/2020
Sirach 44:1-10, 13-14
Psalm 149
Revelation 7:2-4, 9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
“Who are these people, robed in white, dazzling as though stars, radiant before the throne of God?”
And I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.”
“These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
And they cried aloud, day and night (because it was all they could do, all they wanted to do, all that joy would possibly allow them to do):
“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
And thanksgiving and honor
And power and might
Be to our God forever and forever more! Amen!”
“Salvation resides with OUR God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb! Hallelujah!”
Who are these people? Saints? Sinners saved by grace? Who knows? You, you know. Somewhere, deep within, you know. You know who these people are. You share DNA, that God-stuff that makes you, us, all of us a part of the holy, wholly, holy divine (did you catch that – holy, holy, holy, God in three persons, blessed Trinity!).
For what is a saint, after all, but a sinner, just like you and like I, fortunate enough to be saved by grace, God’s unmerited, unbounded, unending grace that sweeps each and every one of us up and carries us away, to be deposited at the foot of the throne ourselves. Oh, it’s easy to see the saints who have been extolled in their times and in their places, and rightly so.
Let us sing the well-deserved praises of famous women and men, our ancestors who came before, to whom the Lord apportioned great glory. They ruled kingdoms and made names for themselves through valor and intelligence. They were wise and prophetic, and they listened to their peoples’ lore and counseled wise words of instruction. They utilized God-given talents to compose tunes and verses and all sorts of creative resources, and they lived peacefully, and peaceably, in their lands.
Valor and intelligence; wisdom and prophecy; empathy and counsel; creativity unleashed amidst peace. Characteristics of sainthood in Ben Sira’s day. Characteristics of sainthood in ours?
When I think of modern day saints, the ones upon whose shoulders I stand, the ones who have directly impacted and changed me, I go to the ones who have already transitioned, as though passing through that veil, the illusion that seems to separate this life from the next as if that somehow graduates the potential saint into sainthood. Now I’m not sure if I thought of my grandmothers as saints before they passed, although all their saintly work, everything that they did to qualify for sainthood, at least in my estimation, took place on this side of the veil.
All of that valor, all of that intelligence, all of that wisdom, and prophecy, and empathy, and counsel, and creativity and peace, it all happened in the here and now, and it affected me, affects me, and the ripples continue to affect out in front of me all those with whom I come into contact, well into the future. The linear nature of human time (Chronos) melds into the overarching arc of God’s time (Kairos) as past, present, and future become one. They were there, they are there, and, the good news is, they continue to be there.
I don’t think they, any of them, had any idea at the time that this is what they were doing, but they were writing their own sacred “sainthood” stories, not the ones Ben Sira tells us about, or the even mighty roll call of saints our faith story recognizes in Hebrews 11 (Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and on, and on, and on). They were living lives of faith, and love, and joy, and hope, divorced from any sense of perfection, wrapped tightly in their own skins of humanity.
There is something about sainthood that necessarily involves a turn toward what I like to think of as “radical otherness,” orienting one’s gaze away from self, from self-preservation and self-interest, from what’s in it for me, to other. That’s what I saw in my grandmothers. There was something different, though, about their “radical otherness,” I believe, that altered their sacred stories. Maybe it was the secret sauce of sainthood, the ingredient that moved them, and all the others, from good to great.
And we can look for that secret in the beatitudes, Jesus’ introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, pearls of wisdom describing in didactic form how we are to orient ourselves to life lived in this world. Remember, in God’s new world order, we’re in this world, and we have to live in it, for this linear time that we occupy, but we’re a part, already, of this new thing that God’s doing, this overarching arc of God’s time, that takes a completely different shape, but incorporates everything that we know of this world. We’re in this world, but we’re not of this world. We have something inside us, this new DNA, that’s changed, that’s rewired, that knows that something is different.
And that’s where the beatitudes come in. They flip the script. If you think being poor is the problem, guess what, it’s not. It’s the world. Go be with the world, realizing that you are not of the world, but you are in it, for a time, to be God’s presence, hands and feet. Go comfort those who mourn. Go be with the meek, they’re going to be the inheritors of the kin-dom. Fill those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; you have everything that you need to do all of that! (valor, and wisdom, and intelligence, and prophesy, and empathy, and counsel, and creativity, and peace)
Show mercy. Be pure in heart. Make peace, not war, or hate.
The beatitudes are a pretty tall order for 2020, wouldn’t you say? If there is anything that 2020 might go down as being known for, or as, it will probably be the year of great and deep division, division that in reality is born in the fear and anguish of loss – loss of self, loss of identity, loss of community, in many cases, loss of life, loss of a way of life that we probably didn’t appreciate nearly enough when we had it. “All that loss has set up incredible divides of “ins” and “outs,” are you with us or against us, do you think the way we think, or not?” “It’s past time to choose up sides!”
The reality is, we get to choose whether we react or we respond to 2020. Divisions, making people choose sides, entrenchments, are reactions to our circumstances. “Beatitudinal” living, making choices in favor of the radical other, are intentional responses to 2020. And it’s those responses that begin to shape our own sacred stories. We get to choose!
And know this, brethren, when you are persecuted for my sake, for righteousness’ sake, and the world reviles you and slanders you and utters every kind of evil against you falsely, as they already have good people of St. Thomas, all you need to do is this.
And this is the secret sauce, my friends.
Rejoice and be glad. Why? Because, dear ones, you know how the story ends.
“…weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning, every morning.” Psalm 30:5
Every single morning we go to that tomb, he is not there. For every single Good Friday, there is always an Easter Sunday. Always!
Rejoice and be glad.
That ineffable joy, that unspeakable joy, that joy that surpasses anything you could possibly ask for or imagine, that is the secret. Joy is hope projected into the future. That’s what takes folks from good to great, from sinner to saint. My grandmothers knew it. You probably have saints in your life who knew it as well.
The ability to praise and worship the God of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, to praise God up into the overarching arc of God’s time, from right where we are, moored into our own humanity of linear time, that is what the beatitudes want us to do. That’s what turns us from ourselves to other, from self-interest to the “radical other,” from me to you to we.
Do we stay there all the time? Probably not. The world comes crashing back in. Dreams die. Hopes seem to fade. People disappoint us. But God continues on, in the form of faith and hope and love, and so we continue to rejoice in the fullness of that joy.
I love All Saints. “The saints provide a glimpse of God’s already in the midst of our not yet.”
“Some of them have left behind a name,
So that others declare their praise.
But of others (Grandmothers and friends) there is no memory;
They have perished as though they had never existed;
They have become as though they had never been born,
They and their children after them.
But these also were godly women and men,
Whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten;
Their offspring will continue for ever,
And their glory will never be blotted out.
Their bodies are buried in peace,
But their name lives on generation after generation.”
And all God’s people said
Amen.
