On All Saints Sunday we remember the saints who have gone before us even as we include ourselves within the community of the saints, a blessed community, bound together, through time, and over and against death.
Just last week Anne Marie and I were talking with the confirmation students about saints. We took a field trip from the youth room to the narthex – the space just beyond the glass doors of the sanctuary – and talked about the saints whose symbols are on shields that hang there. We talked about apostles – people sent into the world with the Good News – and about disciples – people called to follow Jesus.
“The community of the saints is not an "ideal" community consisting of perfect and sinless men and women, where there is no need of further repentance.”[i] If you go and examine those shields, you’ll count twelve of them because even Judas – who betrayed Jesus – is included among the saints.
Learning that God loves us, redeems us and makes us holy or sanctifies us even in our imperfections is a gift of our faith.
We aren’t saints because
we are perfect and blameless; we are saints because, in God’s sight, we are
wonderfully created, beloved children of God, and even when we are petulant and
selfish,
God offers us
forgiveness.
We aren’t saints because we can overcome grief or be stoic survivors of trauma; we are saints because God and God’s son Jesus are above every power, victorious over grief and suffering, and victorious over the brokenness of sin.
We aren’t saints because our hearts grew three sizes and now, we can forgive the people who have hurt us; we are saints because God’s mercy is new every morning. We are sinful, and every day, we turn away from God and inward on ourselves, refusing to confess our dependence on Him. But God never refuses his grace and God never gives up on us.
That is Good News. God is steadfast and abounding in love and mercy for you and for me.
With the confirmation students, we also talked about the people in our lives who have helped teach us about Jesus. Often it is a parent or grandparent, but sometimes it’s a neighbor or a family friend.
I tell the story of my
college roommate Lori inviting me to go to campus ministry.
I think our children
remember Ms. Nancy, a woman whom I worked with who also taught our one room Sunday
School in a tiny congregation in Harpers Ferry.
So on this All Saints Sunday, I wonder who are the saints you have met in your life?
We gather as living saints today because others have poured out God’s love in their care for us.
And we gather as the
community of saints because together we remember God’s promises for us.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul reminds the people there – people who are facing trouble and persecution – that they have already set their hope on Christ (v 12).
This hope empowers us to imagine the future that God is preparing, to see with not only our eyes but with what one pastor calls, “the eyes of our hearts”.
The hope we have in Christ helps us see beyond the divisiveness of the world now and see each other as God’s beloved children and to see each other as fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image. It is a hope that reaches beyond any one of us and is nourished in community and in relationship.
An
old Hasidic tale tells of a disciple who asked his rabbi the meaning of
community one evening, when they were all sitting around a fire. The rabbi sat
in silence while the fire died down to a pile of glowing coals. Then he got up
and took one coal out from the pile and set it apart on the stone hearth. Its
fire and warmth soon died out.[ii]
In his letter, Paul encourages the disciples at Ephesus to return to this enduring hope that is grounded in God’s saving power. (v. 18) He reassures them that God is at work in and through all that they are experiencing, having “put all things under his feet” (v. 22)
Jesus embodies this same hope when he delivers his sermon on the plain in Luke’s gospel. Instead of ascending to a mountaintop and making pronouncements from on high, Jesus comes into the crowd and meets the people there. Apostles, disciples and curiosity-seekers alike. He heals people’s illnesses and casts out demons and he talks with them about their lives.
When Jesus makes the declarations of blessings and woes that we hear in today’s gospel, he isn’t talking abstractly. He has witnessed the hunger, the grief and sorrow and the ways some are ignored or shut out. These are vulnerable people who come to Jesus with hearts laid bare. And Jesus meets them in their need.
His woes aren’t curses against the people who are satisfied with their lives as much as alarm bells to awaken complacent people who have become comfortable and convinced that they don’t need God. Jesus calls on them to be as vulnerable as the rest of the crowd; to recognize their own deep need for God’s love.
Because it is in Christ and in God’s loving action for us that our hope resides.
Let us pray…
Holy God,
We give you thanks for your Son Jesus who shows us Your love for all people.
Thank you for redeeming us from our sin and counting each one of us among our saints.
As we follow Jesus, give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation and help us live in response to your love for the whole world.
Amen.
[i] Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Cost of Discipleship.
[ii] Heidi B. Neumark. Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 61.
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