I am never sure how I feel about All Saints Day, which we commemorate today even though it was really this past Wednesday on November 1st. The reason for my ambiguity about today is not because I am opposed to all of the saints, or any of them for that matter, it is just that something seems to get lost when all of the saints are lumped into a big bucket. It feels kind of like the participation trophy of Holy Days. Sort of like when they decided that Washington’s Birthday would become President’s Day. In reality what this meant was that Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were commemorated in the same way as Warren Harding and Millard Fillmore. I am sure Warren Harding’s mother loved him, but being remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal is not quite as impressive as being remembered as the Great Emancipator. But back to All Saints. The history of it is a little tricky, but here is what we know. In 609 at the rededication of the Pantheon, Pope Boniface IV declared it to be dedicated to St Mary and All the Martyrs, but the day on which he did that was May 13th. It would only be later, in the 8th century that it was moved to November 1st by Pope Gregory III, and shortened to All Saints Day. Anyway we commemorate it today and now we now have to decide what to talk about for the next eight and a half minutes.
The reading that we have from Matthew today to commemorate All Saints is from the Sermon on the Mount and this particular section is generally referred to as the Beatitudes, which comes from the Latin word beatus meaning blessed. And since most of the verses in our reading start with the word blessed, it is pretty easy to see where it got that name. I assume this section was selected as a reading for All Saints because it was seen as a kind of description of the saints – the meek, the hungry, those who mourn, those persecuted for righteousness sake, etcetera; which may make us ponder if we really want to be included in the list of all the saints. By having this reading in such a context, it seems to be saying that this is prescriptive. In other words, it seems that we are being told to go and become meek and hungry and then we get to go to heaven in a righteous robe. And while that may be the case of what those who put together the lectionary wanted (I don’t know because I never met them), I am not sure that this is what Jesus was getting at.
In this country and probably in others we tend to suffer from an incomplete and often incorrect version of what Jesus came to earth for. The popular view is that if we believe in Jesus, then when we die, we float up to heaven and strum our harps and dance around in clouds. And in such a context when you read this passage from Matthew the tendency is to think that it is telling you to just sit tight. If you are suffering or persecuted it will all be okay once you die and float up to heaven. The issue with such an understanding is that not only does it put too great of separation between earth and heaven, it also puts too great of a separation between us and heaven. Jesus is not saying that if you believe in him that he will one day help you get out of this dump, but rather that one day there will be a new heaven and a new earth and in that joining much will be the opposite of the way that it is now. When God’s Kingdom is ultimately fulfilled a lot of things will be set right. But see this is the thing with today’s reading; it is not to be read passively. We are not to sit back and say, “Well that will be nice when God takes care of all of those poor people persecuted for righteousness sake.” Instead, it is a call and a call that is on us to participate in. This is the call that was answered by the saints we remember today. These are the people that set out to comfort those who mourn, to feed the hungry, to show mercy to the merciful. The reading today is not about something that God will take care of, but rather about something that the saints, through God’s help, took care and are taking care of. And so really the call to be a Saint has nothing to do with the first half of the statements but rather with the second half. Jesus is announcing a new a different kind of world and we, if we want to be saints, are called to participate in that new world.
And in some ways we might like the first interpretation better because it does get us off the hook. If we see someone suffering we can just tell them to cheer up because God will fix it after they die. But God does not let us off that easy; he wants us to help. He wants us to look around and ask how we may comfort and feed those who are in need of such things.
One of the problems that has come as a result of the vast strides in communication is that we know too much about other people’s problems. What I mean by this is that if you lived in Philadelphia 200 years ago and something bad happened in Charleston it would be several weeks before you heard anything, if you heard it at all. Now if you pick up the paper or watch the news you have a whole smorgasbord of tragedies to choose from. You not only hear about bad stuff in Charleston you also get the bad stuff from Miami, Cleveland, New Orleans, London, Seoul and any other place around the world. We get more bad news quicker than at any other point in history. And the problem with this is that it can sort of freeze us. If we do something in our community it seems so insignificant compared to whatever the latest world tragedy may be. How can visiting the lonely ever be as significant as stopping a mass shooting? But here is the nice thing about the call of the saint. It is not about geography or working on only the worst of tragedies. Rather, it is a call to help with injustices we see in our everyday life or with things you can actually do something about. Think about Jesus’ ministry. From the northernmost point to the southernmost point in his three-year ministry it was not much more than 75 miles. I mean that wouldn’t quite get you to Sheboygan from here. But should we look at Jesus and say well sure you healed a blind man in Bethsaida, but what about the Lepers in Alexandria – there were like hundreds of those guys.
There is a statement about saints that you have probably heard me use, but it bears repeating. A saint is not an ordinary person who does extraordinary things, rather a saint in an extraordinary person who does the ordinary things that other people will not do. A saint will probably not solve the fighting in the Middle East or get rid of North Korea’s nuclear program, but they might comfort a friend who suffers or help out at a woman’s shelter. One of the benefits in commemorating all of the saints at once is that it reminds us that saints come in all shapes and sizes and that we are only really asked to leave the campground cleaner than we found it. We don’t have to fix everything, but we have make things a little better. Or as Calvin Coolidge put it “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” The call of the saint is to make our little corner of the world a little better, a little more like God created it so that we may be God’s not only now but forevermore.