November 02, 2008

All Saints’/All Souls’ Sunday

 

Revelation 7.9-17; Matthew 5.1-12

Pastor Jennifer K. Morrow

 

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“I’m so blessed.”  You hear it more and more these days.  Most noticeably in my opinion, from famous people, and often in acceptance speeches.  Clutching a golden statue they say, “I’m so blessed to be here today.”  I’ll be interested to see if Tuesday’s winning candidates follow suit and use the language to describe their victory.  My issue with such usage is not that it is flippant, or even untrue.  Actors and politicians can be deeply sincere about feeling blessed.  My issue with such usage is that it is so easy.  It requires little effort, in a moment of victory, to know oneself as blessed. Perhaps a small dose of humility is necessary, but nothing more.  And for those of us watching at home—the un-elected, and un-famous—it’s easy to nod our heads in agreement.  “Yep, you’re blessed alright.”

 

The task before us today, is to take this language of blessing and think carefully about it—about the ways we use it and the ways we don’t.  And having done that, explore what in our lives might change if our understanding of blessing changes too.

 

“Blessing” is up for consideration for several reasons.  First, because today we celebrate All Saints’ Day—a day of remembering those literally “blessed ones” who have gone on before us in the faith—in this congregation and throughout the ages.  And second, our gospel lesson today is Jesus’ beatitudes—which literally means “blessings.” (Beatitude comes from the same Latin word used by Roman Catholics for the process by which one becomes a saint: beatification.)  Saints and blessing go together.

 

Much has been made of Jesus’ beatitudes, in large part because several of them strike us as odd.  Blessed are: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, and the persecuted.  The poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek and the persecuted?  Are you sure about that?  Then Jesus rounds out the list with peacemakers, the merciful, the pure in heart, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

 

One way to interpret this passage is to speak individually about the blessing that accompanies each particular group Jesus mentions: the poor in spirit, the persecuted, etc.  Such an interpretation makes the most sense if we assume Jesus was working from a list of some kind—eight groups of people God blesses.  I hear it more generally than that though.  As Jesus begins to address this huge crowd gathered to hear him, he rattles off a number of circumstances people typically don’t associate with blessing and says—almost as a wake-up call—friends, even if you find yourselves mourning, or persecuted, or feeling poor in spirit, you’re blessed!

 

In other words, when taken altogether, the beatitudes profoundly proclaim: wherever it is you find yourself feeling beyond God’s reach: there you are blessed.  When the circumstances of your life seem the unlikeliest place for blessing—look for it there, because there you are blessed. 

But what does it mean to be “blessed”?  Are we essentially saying the same thing Oscar-winners and election-winners say, or are we saying something more?  Of course, it is more.  When the victorious use the word “blessed” to describe themselves they’re talking about something like divinely inspired luck and good fortune.  In which case, blessing is linked directly to circumstances.  But as Jesus alludes in the beatitudes, God’s blessing transcends circumstances, transcends even confidence and arguably character.

 

The saints of the bible are a questionable bunch—certainly not set apart by their perfection.  Jacob was a trickster, Sarah laughed at God, Moses murdered a man, Mary was an unwed, teenage mother.  Yet, we remember them all as God’s blessed ones.  How?  And why?  Not because of the circumstances of their lives, not because of their clean records or good luck.  No, I believe we call them saints—blessed ones—simply because God loved them and they had the audacity to believe it every now and then.

And that is what blessing is—to be loved by God and occasionally live as though we believe it.

 

Among the things I miss about living in the south are all the churches with clever sayings on their signs.  Nearly every church in the entire state of Tennessee has one of those marquee signs out front with the removable letters.  Weekly, churches would post these pun-ridden zingers to attract attention and assumedly, congregants.  Some were pretty hard core, like “Get right, or get left. –Jesus.”  Some were nauseating like “If you think Dairy Queen has good sundaes, give us a try!.”  But every once in a while there would be one that stuck with me.  My favorite of all time—and I’ll admit that it’s now overused and a little cheesy—was this prayer, “God, help me to be the person my dog thinks I am.”

 

Whether you’ve ever had a dog or not, you get the picture.  Dogs are as excited to see you when you’ve been away five minutes as they are when you’ve been away five days.  Dogs do not care how successful you are, how well you sing, what you look like, or if you feel like talking.  Dogs are unreserved in their displays of affection and loyalty. “You’re the best, the absolute best!” dogs say with their whole being. And if you have a dog around, it can feel pretty nice sometimes.  But, at the end of the day, they’re dogs, and in moments of self-doubt or despair, we can still ask ourselves, “What do they know?”  And we’d be right.  They’re dogs.

 

The problem is, we’re prone to do the same kind of second-guessing when it comes to God and how God sees us.  Remember what our working definition of blessing: to be loved by God and occasionally live as though we believe it.  What is not up for grabs is whether or how much God loves us.  As Paul put it to the Christians in Rome, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[1]

 

There is nothing we can do, or fail to do, that can separate us from God’s love.  Nothing that can convince God to stop the ceaseless displays of affection God shows us in the gifts of creation, of children, of friends and of beauty.  God looks at each and every one of us and says what God sees: “you’re the best—the absolute best.”  And at the end of the day, when self-doubt and despair creep in, we can’t really ask ourselves “What does God know?”

 

What we can do is believe it.  Believe it and see what happens.  That’s what the saints did after all.  They believed God loved them and it changed their lives.  Believing in God’s love gave them the courage to confront wrong and the humility to admit wrong; it gave them the tools to repair broken homes and broken relationships; it gave them the vision to serve in schools and hospitals; it gave them the passion to change their local communities and the drive to travel far from home to change the world. 

 

Ask yourself, how did believing in God’s love change the life of the saint you remember today?  Then ask, how might it change you?  The message of All Saints’ Day is this: we are the only saints God has.  There is not some more special, more perfect, luckier group of people reserved for the job.  We are saints, all of us.  We are God’s beloved; we are blessed.  May our prayer this day be: God, help us to be the people you know we are.  Amen.