This sermon was preached at Whittier UMC on Sunday, November 3rd, 2019, based on Ephesians 1:11-23 and Luke 6:20-31. You can listen to it by clicking below.
Would you pray with me?
God of the living and God of the dead, thank you for bringing us together in this time and place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I love this time of year. Not just the weather, when it’s not pouring down rain, but what we celebrate and why. I love Halloween and All Saints Day and All Souls Day. I love that in this 72-hour period, we look what frightens us most in the face and then we invite it into a celebration. I love our resiliency in the face of death.
But resiliency might be the wrong word. Maybe welcome is better. Because the deep traditions behind All Hallows Eve, which used to be called Samhain, the traditions that contribute to what we call Halloween, are not about candy and costumes, they’re about the thinning of the veil between this life and the next. Throughout humanity’s existence, we’ve understood that people die and that that’s the end of our existence here. Unless a miracle happens, what’s dead is dead, and so we walk through the rest of our lives with loss.
And so, we find ways to deal with that loss, and ways to heal. And one way we’ve found to do that is to celebrate. We do it on a day that’s halfway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, as the harvest is happening, a day where those who have gone away can come home, no matter how far from home they’ve gone.
Traditions like this, traditions like the ones that lead to Halloween, are found in Celtic and Gaelic belief systems, which a lot of us are probably related to in our distant family pasts, and they’re also found in some indigenous cultures in the Americas. These kind of celebrations of the thinning of the veil are at the root of Dia de los Muertos, as well, the celebration of the Day of the Dead in Mexico. And so the church found these celebrations, these times where we look death in the face and say, “This world is not all there is,” and found that Christ was already in these celebrations, that hope of resurrection and restoration and reconnection was at the heart of these things. We Christians, of course, find that hope in Christ.
That’s how we end up with All Saints Day. Now, the Catholic Church celebrates all sorts of saints: Saint George, who fought a dragon; St. Catherine, who’s the patron saint of Ferris wheels and explosions; St. Anne, Saints Theresa, St. Jude, St. Francis, St. Christopher. There are all sorts of saints recognized by the church as living particularly holy lives, lives in line with God. We as Protestants don’t really do that, but we all know people who we think of as saints in our everyday lives, even if there weren’t miracles attributed to them after they die. I think of my grandmother as a saint for her never-ending patience. I’m sure you can think of people in your lives who have been saints for you, people who maybe aren’t here anymore, but who lived the holy life you want to live, the life that Jesus wants us to live in this world.
And so, the church took the day after All Hallows Eve and made it All Saints Day, to recognize these people who were living as God wanted them to live, people who lived like our passage from Luke this morning. This is Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, in the Sermon on the Plain in Luke, and it talks about the God of reversals that you find throughout Luke, where those who are mourning will laugh, eventually; where those who are poor will inherit a kingdom, those with nothing are restored to abundance.
The Beatitudes are Jesus’ first layer of teaching to the people who have gathered around him. He’s just called his disciples right before this teaching. And in this first layer of teaching, Jesus calls out the world for what it is. There are those who are mourning; God will restore you to laughter. But there is also the flipside of the blessings. You who have too much, you who are rich, you have received your reward. There’s nothing else coming down the pipeline for you. Jesus has blessings and woes. Jesus knows that the world isn’t fair and that it’s going to take all that God can give to the world to correct that imbalance.
And that’s Jesus’ first teaching. He has words of kindness and encouragement for those who the imbalance doesn’t favor, the poor and the mourning, and then he turns to those who are doing well and says, “You have already benefitted from this unfairness. When the world is righted, you will have woe.”
And you can see why that message would appeal to the people who were around Jesus, right? If you were struggling in the Roman Empire, hearing that the Emperor has it coming to him might encourage you, might shake you out of your despair that things must always stay the way they are and light a fire in your spirit because we desire fairness. And Jesus tells us that God is a God of justice and God is a God of fairness. Mountains will be lowered, valleys will be raised, and the rough places made plain.
And then Jesus moves into another layer of teaching. He says, “To you who listen,” to you who got the Beatitudes, to you understand that the world isn’t fair, I say to you, “Love your enemies.” I say to you, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If someone takes your coat, give them your shirt too.” This second layer of Jesus’ teaching is different from the first. Jesus gives us the blessings and the woes to show us the world as it is and once we understand that, Jesus tells us how to be in the world.
And the emphasis of this second section of our gospel passage this morning is that you need to love. You need to love your neighbors. You need to love your enemies. You need to be the presence of love in this world. And for people who can do that, people who can love their enemies, people who can pray for those who persecute them, people who can do unto others as they would have them to unto them in every situation, we call those people saints. Those people who live out that loving generosity, the people who choose to correct that imbalance with love? That’s who we celebrate as saints on All Saints Day.
And then the day after All Saints is All Souls, a day that celebrates not just those that we’ve elevated as saints, but all those that we’ve loved and lost. I think that All Souls Day, which was yesterday, is a particularly beautiful day, where we recognize that there’s a little bit of a saint in every single person, there’s always that potential for love, for making the world better through their presence. And even if the people who we know and the people who are dearest to us don’t go to church, that little bit of a saint is there, and we get to see it. On All Souls Day, we recognize that those who are closest to us (and maybe even those who aren’t so close) can seem like saints to us. They can give that Christlike love to us. Christ can reach out to us through every person we encounter, whether they’re an official saint or not.
And we do both of these things, recognizing the saints living out loud as Jesus teaches us to live, and the regular souls, the regular everyday everybodies just like us, because that’s what Jesus did. Jesus would raise up examples of those who had incredible faith—the woman with the issue of blood, the Samaritan leper from a few weeks ago, the woman whose back had been bent for eighteen years. All of them are healed through their faith and Jesus raises them up like saints. Jesus recognizes those people who live as he wants them to live. But he also seeks out the lost and the least, those whose sainthood is a little more hidden under the bushel. Jesus reaches out to these people and cares for them and seeks to bring them into the fullness of the light that he knows that they can be.
And Jesus reunites what has been broken. That’s what we celebrate on All Saints Day, that the great brokenness that we all experience, the brokenness of death and separation, Jesus tells us that that’s not forever, that’s not permanent, that’s just part of this world. Jesus died and was resurrected; the power of death is gone. On All Saints and All Souls, when the veil is thin between this world and whatever comes next, we celebrate that this separation is only temporary. One day, we will all be able to come together and be restored, and any brokenness that has been in this world will be gone, because brokenness belongs to this world. It stays here. In the kingdom that is to come, there will only be wholeness and goodness and fullness and love and joy.
We do all these things, remembering saints and recognizing the not-quite-saints, because Jesus tells us to live in love, and recognizing the best in people is the easiest way that we can live in love. Mr. Rogers, of Neighborhood fame, talked about loving as not something that is simple or easy, but as the act of accepting the person in front of you as they are. Maybe simple, when our loved ones are being loveable, but it quickly becomes complicated. When you’re loving your enemies, for instance, you’re not in that moment trying to change them into what you want them to be, you’re trying to love them, the way their mother might, their spouse might, the way their children might love. You are trying to see this person the way God sees them. You’re trying to see the saint in the person in front of you.
And that’s what we live for. That’s what we’re living for. That’s what we find in Christ. It’s our job to love everyone, the saints, the sinners, the forgotten, just as God loves them. That’s what we do on this day. We recognize those who have gone before us in our faith, who showed us how to live and who to be. We remember those that maybe others forgot. We remember those who we don’t necessarily want to give love to, because God cares for each and every one them. God restores brokenness both in this world, through the power of God’s Spirit, and more fully in the world to come. So today, we gather at this table and remember and read the names of those who have gone on before us, and we see our saints. We see those we long to remember, we see those whose sainthood only we see, and we see those whose sainthood escapes us, because they are all gathered with us at the table of celebration.
Amen.
All text and pictures (unless otherwise attributed) © Jo Schonewolf, 2019. You can read all our sermons by clicking here.