A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, November 1, 2020, Year A, All Saints’ Day

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

It’s a good thing that we gain an extra hour this Sunday because I think we might need it.  For us at Thankful, at least, this Sunday is full to bursting.

First, who among us doesn’t recognize the tension rising across the country as we near election day on Tuesday?  With the political divisions in our communities at an all-time high, we cannot leave our faith outside the ballot box. 

And, at Thankful, this Sunday also marks the end of our first ever digital “Saints & Stewards” stewardship discernment season.  Over the past six weeks, we have been asking ourselves how our stewardship helps us live more fully as the saints of God.  This Sunday, we celebrate the culmination of that discernment as we fill out commitment cards and rejoice in laying eyes on each other once again – if briefly – as we pop by Thankful for our “Saints & Stewards” event.

And then, as luck would have it, this year All Saints’ Day, the day on which the Church remembers all the saints of God who have come before us, lands squarely on a Sunday.  And while we certainly celebrate this day with the whole Church, personally, I also feel some grief around this All Saints’.  Traditionally we would welcome new members into the communion of saints through baptism on this day.  And I can’t help but think of how wonderful it would have been to gather together and baptize William Levy – and maybe a few others – into Christ’s joyful family at Thankful.  So, I’m grieving the loss of our gathered community because of the pandemic.

But, there is still much to celebrate on this All Saints’ Day.  We can still look around us with the eyes of faith for the saints in our history – both local and global – and for the saints that live among us now and reflect with joy and wonder on the abundance of God’s grace that makes living sainthood possible.

So, yes, let’s take the extra hour that this Sunday gives us to hold together all of these things – anxiety and gratitude, longing, grief and hope, joy and wonder – and offer them all up to God in our worship. 

And the readings assigned for All Saints’ Day help us to do so, since they, too, are filled to bursting as they hold in tension the realities of our faith and our experience.  There is the vision of Revelation that acknowledges the “great ordeal” that we all experience at times even as it offers the hope of the promised land where “God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.”  There is the psalmist who reflects on the “terror” and “troubles” she has faced but nonetheless finds refuge in the goodness of God.  There is the first letter of John, with its powerful reminder that “we are God’s children now.”  And like the jewel in the crown of these rich texts, there is Jesus’ recitation of the beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel, offering God’s blessings on the poor, the meek and the merciful. 

In these passages from scripture, we see God’s kingdom present within the upside-down world in which we live.  The letter from 1 John states it most simply.  “Beloved, we are God’s children now,” the author writes.  So even though “the world does not know us” as such, even though we experience a reality that tries to convince us of our alone-ness, of our lack, we know that we are beloved children of God.  We are God’s saints right now. 

Jesus does a similar thing when he kicks off a rousing sermon to his new followers at the top of a mountain.  He describes what the reality of God’s kingdom looks like.  In God’s world, the poor in spirit and those who crave righteousness, the meek and the merciful, the pure in heart and the peacemakers are all “blessed.”  Right now, right here, in the present-tense, they “are” blessed.  But, of course, we don’t tend to see that, do we?  In our experience, we usually see that meekness and mercy do not yield the rewards of fortune.  The “poor in spirit” are liable to be called losers; the peacemakers are outpaced by the warmongers; those who demand righteousness are more likely to be arrested than they are to be “filled” with good things.  There is a deep discordance between God’s reality as Jesus describes it and the reality of our experience – especially right now as illness and injustice seem to reign supreme. 

But, as Debie Thomas points out in her essay on this passage from Matthew, “Jesus […] recognizes this disparity and addresses it in the very wording of the beatitudes. ‘Blessed are…for they will be.’  The language […] bridges the present and the future, the now and the not-yet, the kingdom that is and the kingdom that is coming.  The blessing is here; God’s favor is now.  But its fulfillment — its perfection — still lies ahead.”

In other words, the beatitudes, like many of the scriptural texts we read for All Saints’ Day, remind us of the creative work that God is still doing in our world.  Even when things seem untenably tense, when our anxiety or depression overwhelms us, when we feel sick in body and sick at heart, we can look to our scriptures to remember that God’s love is more powerful than all of it and that such love defines our reality even now, even in the midst of the upside-down and broken world around us. 

And if you want to see rightly, if you want to perceive the reality of the divine kingdom as it exists now in this world, then all you have to do is change your perspective.  In the beatitudes, Jesus tells us how: stand with those who are already blessed by intimate relationship with God and who await the fulfillment of that blessing.  Stand with the poor in spirit and those who grieve.  Stand with the meek and the merciful, with those who demand justice and righteousness for all.  Stand with the pure in heart and the peacemakers and the persecuted.  See the world from their eyes and you will see God at work in the world right now. 

And, and… for this is the really really good news that Jesus gives us… we have a part to play in the re-ordering of the world into the reality of God’s kingdom.  You and I are invited into God’s work of re-creation.  When we stand with those who are blessed, when we see the world with the eyes of God’s saints, we, too, will be called into their work.  For how can we truly see and understand the suffering of those around us, the grief and the oppression, the longing for peace and the hunger for justice, and not feel compelled to offer what comfort and courage and change we are able?  We will get caught up in the creative cycle of grace that God’s love enables: in faith, we stand with God’s blessed saints right now.  By doing so, we are moved to work alongside them for the consolation and mercy and justice of God’s kingdom.  And in doing that work, we will be blessed, becoming one of God’s saints here on earth ourselves.  

Today, right now, there is so much for us to face – so much injustice, so much anxiety, so much grief, so much fear – but there is also the opportunity to grow fully into our identities as “God’s children now,” by giving our selves to the work of God’s kingdom.  This All Saints’ Day, full to bursting as it is with so much of our human emotion and experience, offers us the chance to remember that, in the midst of it all, we, too, are called to sainthood, to holy and ordinary, every-day sacred lives.  For we are blessed and we are invited into the “will be” that God is creating, even now.  Amen.