In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Blessed feasts of blessed martyrs, holy women, holy men, with affection’s recollections greet we your return again. Worthy deeds they wrought, and wonder worthy of the Name they bore; we, with meetest praise and sweetest, honor them forevermore.” Those words come from a 12th century text about the saints of the Church. The Feast of All Saints is the day on which we offer our thanks and praise for the witness of the Saints. We do so not because they are perfect examples of how to live, but rather because with all of their diversity of stories and gifts, they were all reshaped by God’s redeeming love. In short, the Saints are people who, being rooted in the difference that Christ made in their lives, made a difference in this world.
Of course, any list of Saints will be incomplete. There are always lives that are dedicated to the Gospel that were never written down. There are stories lost to history or concealed in godly humility. There is no one thing that makes someone a Saint. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, we do not have a process of canonization for Saints. And so tonight we come to give thanks for all the Saints, known and unknown, and to join our voices with them in singing praises to God.
There is, though, a difference between the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. Yes, in a sense we are all saints, with a lower-case “s.” And tomorrow we will have a liturgy in our columbarium at 5:30pm to remember all of the faithful departed, and especially our loved ones and members of this parish who have died in the last year. But there is something special and unique about the Saints with an upper-case “S.” It’s not necessarily that they are better than us, but rather they are God’s chosen vessels of grace who have been the lights of the world in their own generations. The Saints show us what is possible with God, and their lives are worthy of our awe and attention.
In thinking about what makes a Saint saintly, it is clear that they are different. Saints march to the beat of a different drum. And that drumbeat sounds something like the Beatitudes which we heard from Matthew this evening. “Beatitude” comes the Latin translation and has nothing to do with our word “attitude,” so please don’t hear Jesus’ words as a set of instructions about how you are supposed to feel.
The word that Matthew attributes to Jesus is makarios in Greek, and it’s a difficult word to translate, as no single word can really capture the meaning. Anytime you want to compare Biblical translations, Matthew 5 is a good place to start. You can find this word translated as “blessed,” but also “happy, fortunate, blissful, prosperous, favored,” or even as “congratulations to.” So you can see, there are many ways to understand what Jesus is telling us about being poor in spirit, or mournful, or meek, or peacemakers.
This bliss or favor that is experienced though is quite interesting in how it is presented. Jesus says “blessed are” in the present tense, and the follows up with a statement made in the future tense. These blessings are not rewards for the hereafter, but are very real and present. The Beatitudes remind us that the dominant narratives that we tell ourselves simply are not true. Money is not a sign of your power. Popularity is not indicative of how much God loves you. Eloquence does not equate to your value as a child of God. Though we may be meek, or have reasons to mourn, or are persecuted, those do not need to be the dominant facts of our lives. Rather, God’s grace is the core of our story. The Beatitudes save us from always seeing ourselves as victims or wondering if we’ve fallen out of favor with God. The world may overlook you, dismiss you, spit upon you, say that you’re down on your luck – but God says “No,” that’s not the measure of your worth. God’s abundant and abiding love for us should be as obvious as the nose on our faces, and the Beatitudes remind us that our present situation is always one of being favored by God.
Each of the Beatitudes also has a future element, such as “they will be comforted” or “they will inherit the earth.” This means that we have hope that current state of affairs will not continue forever. There will indeed come a day when the meek will inherit the earth. Though that day may not come in our lifetime, we are assured that it will. And because that day will come, it reshapes the battles we fight today as we hunger and thirst for righteousness because we know that the righteousness of God will ultimately prevail. It gives a deeper meaning to our struggles for justice because we know that, in the end, love will win. The Beatitudes are both about today and tomorrow. The Beatitudes remind us of our future, that we are on the winning side if we are with God.
What all of these Beatitudes have in common, and regardless of how you translate “blessed,” is that they are the opposite of what a Roman version of the Beatitudes might say. The dominant culture of Jesus’ day and ours scoffs as these Beatitudes as nothing more than wishful thinking. Wall Street laughs at the notion that the meek will inherit anything. The military-industrial complex which drives our world mocks the notion that peacemakers will ever get anywhere. The prosperity gospel derides those who think that the mournful are blessed by God. But the Saints don’t care what the world has to say because they trusted in God more than they did in reputation, or kings, or presidents, or money. The Saints followed the drumbeat of God because they were able to trust that these Beatitudes describe the truest reality of this world. They knew that it more blessed to given than to receive. They trusted that in dying we are born to eternal life. They lived as if all manner of things shall be well. They believed that love really is the greatest force in this world.
The Hebrew root of this idea of the blessedness comes from a word that means “to be on the right road.” And this is why we remember the Saints, because they were on the right path of living differently in God’s kingdom as it is unfolding on earth as it is in heaven. The Saints are great examples and patterns for us. Take Augustine here, he was the first Archbishop of Canterbury and converted the King of Kent to Christianity, paving the way for the Church to flourish in Britain. There’s Aidan, who restored Christianity to Northumbria, founded monasteries, and evangelized both the rich and poor. There’s Timothy and his mother who spread the Gospel and changed their lives to do so. There’s Samuel and Eli, who were prophets that knew the importance of listening for God’s voice. We have the example of St. Wulstan who in the 11th century publically opposed the slave trade and was a faithful bishop in a turbulent time when William the Norman conquered England. William of York was viciously slandered by his opponents, and so gracefully left his position as bishop to be a faithful monk and never voiced resentment. There’s the apostles who left behind homes and gave their lives to spread the Good News. Hilda was key in converting the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and was a peacemaker when there were bitter disagreements between Celtic Christianity and Roman Catholicism. Alphege was an Archbishop of Canterbury who known for his piety and was ultimately killed by Viking raiders; he’s often depicted holding an axe, the instrument of his death, and as protecting his flock from wolves. David reminds us of the gift of music and was a faithful, though flawed, leader of God’s people. And Mary, the mother of our Lord who by saying “yes” to God enabled the salvation of God to be born among us. What a rich heritage we have in the Saints.
The thing about the Beatitudes is that they aren’t rules to follow. Jesus does not present them in the imperative, but rather in the indicative, as declarations. The Beatitudes are not a path to follow for us, rather they reveal what sort of god God is. And what we see is that God is the God of risk-takers, of people who love boldly, of faithful men and women who put their whole trust in God, of those who have found something worth dying for in following Jesus. The modern theologian Stanley Hauerwas has astutely said that the Beatitudes are not a strategy for building a better world, rather they are a vision of it. The Beatitudes reveal what this world should and could look like. It’s the world that the Saints, who through the grace of God, have shown us is possible. And so on All Saints we remember Saints like Francis, Luke, Teresa, Alban, Patrick, Absalom Jones, Constance, and Mary because they painted a picture of what God’s dream looks like. It is a beautiful picture, one that is described by the Beatitudes, one that provides inspiration in our own lives of faith. So as I began, I’ll close with those 12th century words, “Worthy deeds they wrought, and wonder worthy of the Name they bore; we, with meetest praise and sweetest, honor them forevermore.”
