postID: 6991; title: All Saints’ Sunday
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All Saints’ Sunday
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
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All Saints' Sunday
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 5:1-12
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Matthew 5:1-12
✛
We Are Never Alone
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To put it in one sentence: All Saints’ Day tells us that we are never alone. There are saints, and they surround us, all the time.
***
When the storm was passed and our church reopened on Wednesday, when our three daily Eucharists resumed in the chantry chapel and this large holy space opened for all comers from before eight o’clock until after six, there was [as it seems to me there is today] something here that is not often sensed. This was not only a holy place but a safe place, and not only a safe place but a saved place, a place where we could feel [and today, can feel] what salvation is. There seems to be a correspondence between the ferocity of storm and the awesomeness of sanctuary. God’s power is beyond our imagination; the destructiveness of wind and water that we have recently seen is only a hint, a mere glimpse, of his vast strength. Likewise, God’s love is beyond our grasp; the beauty and safety felt here is but a hint of the strength and glory of his saving arm.
After the ravages all around us, it was unspeakably good to be able to come here.
***
The stories are only starting to be heard, but we know there will be many of them, stories of heroism, of self-sacrifice, of sharing, more stories than can ever be told. These are stories of, if you will, secular saints, human beings who have shown by their actions that eternal truth of our nature, that we are social beings, bound together, one to another. Today in this sacred, beautiful, saved place, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses—“first responders,” police officers, firefighters, nurses, physicians, parents, neighbors—extraordinary witnesses to that ordinary truth. We are never alone.
***
So All Saints’ Day begins there, begins with those right around us. But it does not stop with space. We are also surrounded by witnesses in time, saints of the church whose stories are also those of heroism, self-sacrifice, sharing and devotion, whose stories are likewise so many they cannot be told. Some of them used to kneel in these pews right where we are today. Some have their earthly remains in rest in the Resurrection Chapel. Some lived in other continents, and in ancient centuries before the Gospel came to these shores—the Gospel, itself a great surge of baptismal water that has changed forever boundaries and relationships. Saints have raised cathedrals and taught catechism, they have built hospitals and tied bandages, they have founded universities and swept corner stores, they have translated scripture into every language so that the greatest and the least of persons could hear the best news that has ever been news: that God has become a human being. God knows and loves us, which means that we can know and love God. Saints have picked up the dying, touched the untouchable, seen the likeness of God in every face.
All Saints’ Day means that these saints are not absent from our lives. They pray for us, this temporally-extended cloud of witnesses; again, in this sense too, we are never alone.
***
And what is the point of their witness? If the secular saints remind us that we are bound together on this earth, the saints of the church point us to Jesus. Their witness is to him, to their Lord, and here we glimpse the profundity of the truth that we are never alone. Those who are in Jesus always have Jesus with them. The saints are bound together because each of them is bound up in Jesus. The reason we can be bound up with the saints is because we have been baptized into Christ.
***
And now to the scriptures. In the first Gospel, that of Saint Matthew, at the head of the first teaching of Jesus, Jesus speaks to everyone, seated in accordance with his role as Teacher, on a mountain in accordance with his place as the Word of God who speaks for God. Yet what he says, were it not so familiar to us, would be strange in the extreme. He says: blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who are afflicted and long for righteousness and not injustice to reign. In short, blessed are those who are persecuted and oppressed. To which we would say, were it not so familiar, Oh yeah? Where do we see this blessedness? Or, thanks very much Jesus, but I’d rather be rich, strong, and successful rather than poor, meek, and downtrodden. Jesus goes on: blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted because they love righteousness. And again, were this not so familiar, we would find ourselves completely flabbergasted. The merciful get taken advantage of; the pure in heart are sitting ducks; peacemakers seldom make a long difference; and again what’s so great about being persecuted?
So the question, the big question, the question of the Gospel and the question of our lives is: Is Jesus right or wrong about this? And, for myself, I think he is wrong, and I think we should not sentimentalize the poor and meek and downtrodden.
… Or so I thought, until I heard it another way. Who, really, is poor in spirit? Is it not Jesus himself, who counted not equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but became poor, that is to say human, for our sake? Who, in the first place, mourns, if it is not Jesus who weeps at the death of his friend and weeps again when he sees the injustice of the earthly city? Who is really meek, apart from this one who would not snap a bruised reed; and who more afflicted, than the innocent one who let the whips and nails pierce his body? Who more than he is merciful and pure in heart and a peacemaker? And who more than he has been persecuted just because he wanted, and indeed embodied, true righteousness?
The beatitudes are first of all about Jesus himself. He is the blessed one. But it is also true of Jesus, what is true of us: he is never alone. The saints are in him, sharing his blessedness, bound together in mercy and righteousness and that lovely pure heart. And we too are with him, bound by our love for him and our longing to be there with him. And everyone who so much as gives a bottle of fresh water to one of the least of those in this city, he too has grabbed onto a little bit of this great truth, that surrounding the devastation and heartbreak of this world there is an embracing love, a blessedness where it is indeed finally true: they shall see God.
