In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
These
days it seems that everyone is interested in their ancestry. There are websites
that help you to fill out your family tree and more and more libraries have
staff ready to help in researching genealogy. There’s even a television show
called “Finding Your Roots” where celebrities explore the stories of their
family histories. Sometimes we are proud to find out that our ancestors were
influential people in their time and we are ashamed when we find out that our
ancestors owned slaves. We have an innate sense that people who lived hundreds
of years ago still shape our lives today. None of us were spontaneously
created, we all have parents and mentors who have shaped us into the people who
we are today, and those parents and mentors were shaped by their parents and
mentors, and so on. William Faulkner once wrote that “The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.” We live and move and have our being in a world constructed
by our predecessors.
The
Church recognizes the importance of history and the lives of specific key
figures in our communal history. Through the ages, there have been people whose
virtue, valor, compassion, and faith have been especially notable and
commendable. These people are known as saints, and today we remember their
legacy and give thanks for this rich ancestry of faith.
What
makes someone a saint? When we look at those remembered as saints by the
Church, we see a wide range of diversity. We see monks, nuns, bishops, poets,
nurses, prophets. We see men and women. We see Europeans, Africans, Asians, and
Latinos. We see Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans. We see the
young and the old, the rich and poor, kings and peasants. And when we look
closely at their lives, we don’t find perfect people. We don’t remember the
saints because they overcame sin, but we remember them for what God did through
them. We remember them for their particular courage, faithfulness, and openness
to the Holy Spirit’s work in them. The lives of the saints are important to
remember because they show us how God continues to be manifest in our world and
how God continues to provide saving grace. In the saints we see the Kingdom of
God breaking through.
As
we heard in Luke, the Beatitudes are a description of what the Kingdom of God
looks like. It is important to know that the Beatitudes are not a recipe for
sainthood. It’s not that you become a saint by becoming poor, hungry, tearful,
and excluded. Rather, the Beatitudes are descriptive more than they are
prescriptive. Jesus is not telling us how we are to act, he is telling us what
the Kingdom of God is really like.
It’s helpful to have some
context. The Greek word used for “blessed” is makarios, which could be translated as either “blessed” or “happy.”
But makarios was a word that applied
primarily to the gods. They were able to be happy because they were removed
from the circumstances of being human. The gods were not subjected to poverty,
disease, misfortune, or death, and so Homer and many other Greek writers said
the gods were makarios. It also came
to be that this word was applied to the ruling elite, those who never suffered
from want. And sometimes the word was used to describe the dead, who were no
longer able to suffer.
I
hope you can see just how radical it was for Jesus to use this word, makarios, in this passage. Jesus is
saying “You may have heard it said that happiness and blessings are only
available to the gods, the rich, and the dead. But I say to you, happiness from
God is available to you right now, even amidst suffering.” Jesus turns the
understanding of makarios around
completely. No longer are wealth, feasts, laughter, or popularity signs of
divine favor, but poverty and hunger are. This is why the stories of so many
saints involve sacrifice of one kind or another. As they lived for the Kingdom
of God, they pursued not their own security, success, or status, but sought to
be instruments of God’s reign of peace, love, and justice.
In
Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus then adds a series of woes against those
who the world would say are successful and powerful. As we all know, things
like money, food, laughter, and popularity can be lost as easily as they are
gained. They aren’t things that abide. They are sources of happiness that are
deceptive and unreliable, and they can endanger our relationship with God
because we fool ourselves into thinking that we are self-sufficient in
ourselves. The saints know better than this. They made conscious decisions to
open themselves to God. They trusted in the words of St. Paul in our reading from Ephesians, that Jesus has
been made the head over all things.
As
you can see, saintliness is not synonymous with worldly success. One preacher
has said that “God doesn’t intend to improve us, but to save us.” Trying to
follow the Beatitudes doesn’t make you a saint. But opening yourself to God
might mean that you will be put at odds with the world and may come to know
poverty, persecution, or peril.
One
person, while not officially yet a saint, who knew this truth was Daniel Berrigan,
who died earlier this year. He was a Jesuit priest, prophet, and poet. He wrote
“We cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because
there are no peacemakers. There are no peacemakers because the making of peace
is at least as costly as the making of war – at least as exigent, at least as
disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its
wake.”
As
much as we all might want to be faithful, brave, and true, I’ll speak for
myself and say that I don’t pray to be poor, hungry, tearful, or rejected.
While being a Christian doesn’t necessarily mean that you will suffer, it does necessarily
mean that you will have to make sacrifices. And we remember the saints because
they have said “yes” to God, they have opened themselves to God’s purging flame
of righteousness, they have chosen the Kingdom of God over the kingdoms of this
world.
Again, none of the saints
have been perfect, but have shown us what is possible with God. The saints are
not examples of perfection, but examples of faithfulness. The saints are not
remembered for their own striving, but God’s work through them. The saints have
shown us that it is possible to be kind to the undeserving, to be compassionate
to the suffering, to love our enemies, to profess the name of Jesus in the face
of the rulers of this world, to bless those who persecute us, to find beauty in
the ordinary, to pray for the welfare of those who take advantage of others, to
choose love over hatred. The saints remind us that all things are possible
through God – salvation can come to brokenness, joy can break through tears,
reconciliation can end division, and that Resurrection overcomes death.
Just as there remains an
interest in genealogy, the saints remain a part of our faith and All Saints
remains a Feast of the Church. As the hymn puts it: “O blessed communion,
fellowship divine;” through the Eucharist, we share in the Body and Blood of
Christ as the Body of Christ which transcends space and time, even life and
death. As we gather around this altar, we gather with St. Mary, St. Luke, St.
Perpetua, St. Patrick, St. Augustine, St. Catherine, St. Teresa, CS Lewis,
Martin Luther King, and so many more. Their stories are ours because we are
united in Christ. We are the recipients of their legacy of faith, and I would
encourage us to learn more about them. The saints are still here with us,
shaping us, teaching us, strengthening us, inspiring us, cheering us on in our
own journeys of faith. So tonight we gather to give God thanks for continuing
to act through the Body of Christ, to draw strength from the lives of the
saints, to pray for the grace to live fully into our Baptisms, and to give
glory, honor, and praise to God for our holy heritage. Amen.
