For All the Saints
+ In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Few feasts of the year have such striking lessons as the two sets appointed for All Saints' Day. As you will gather from the printed bulletin inserts, I have combined lessons from the two lectionary lists for today's readings. From Ecclesiasticus, written about two centuries before Christ, we have the noble introduction to a list of heroes of Israel, from Enoch, Noah and Abraham down through the great kings and prophets, through the time of the exile in Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple, all the way to Simon the son of Onias, who had been High Priest within the author's lifetime. From the letter to the Ephesians, written in imitation of St. Paul, but probably about thirty years after his martyrdom, we hear a magnificent description of the glory of the risen and ascended Christ, the head of the Church; and finally, from the Sermon on the Mount, we have the familiar reassurance of the Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes are familiar to us, of course, precisely because of the confidence the Church has found in them in times of persecution, the comfort that individual Christians have taken from them in times of their own hardship. Those who mourn have found consolation in these words, the meek have found promise. Those who work for justice and peace have found a charter here, and here Christians of every generation have heard the call to mercy and purity. For many of us, these are words that we heard at our mother's knee, words we grew up seeing stitched on samplers, or painted on black velvet just like a picture of Elvis, and they have a treasured place in our hearts.
And yet for all of that familiarity, or indeed just because of that familiarity, it's worth our trouble to consider how these words would have sounded to their first audiences, to the people whom Jesus would have addressed and the readers whom Matthew had in mind. The form of these sayings would have been familiar to them as much as it is to us, for it is a form which reaches back to the Psalms and other wisdom literature: indeed, the very first Psalm, which we heard in last week's lectionary, opens, "Blessed is the man who has not walked in the paths of the ungodly, nor sat in the seats of the scornful...he is like a tree planted by a watercourse...in all that he does, he prospers." "Blessed is the one who does so-and-so" was the expected formula at the beginning of a Hebrew proverb. And yet the Beatitudes do differ from the tradition, they do break the pattern people would have expected. The difference comes in the way these proverbs of Jesus end. Now the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament-the literature of which the earlier "Blessed is the man who" proverbs are a part-has a tendency to concentrate on relatively worldly concerns: its wisdom doesn't always strike us as being particularly religious. That tendency toward wordly concerns shows up in the older "blessed is the man" proverbs. The first psalm, for example, says that the "blessing" of the "man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly" is very much of this world: "he is like a tree planted by a watercourse...in all that he does, he prospers." Jesus himself taught that way sometimes, telling stories of the persistent woman and the unjust judge, warning his followers to be as wary as serpents and as innocent as doves (Matt. 10:16). But here in the Beatitudes, Matthew shows Jesus breaking this pattern by tying his new proverbs into the Kingdom of God, rather than into worldly success. In the psalm, the righteous man prospers; but in the Beatitudes, on the other hand, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will see that righteousness established under the reign of God. The sorrowful shall find consolation, the peacemakers will be called God's sons, the chaste will see God, when the Kingdom of God arrives; and later in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches the listeners to pray for that Kingdom to come, so that God's will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.
So the Beatitudes, like the Lord's Prayer, conceal under their familiarity something which, I think, seems very strange to us, an unfamiliar and even unsettling direction toward the coming kingdom, a yearning for the end of the world. Like St. Augustine praying, "God give me chastity, but not just yet," we pray for the end of the world every day, but few of us, I imagine, have let that petition determine our investment policy. It would be easy for a cynic to say-and indeed cynics do say, all the time-that the Beatitudes are merely promises of pie in the sky by-and-by. The sorrowful will find consolation-but not right now; the meek will inherit the earth, right after famine, war, pestilence and death are through with it. And so on. It's the kind of material that Mark Twain made a career out of mocking.
And yet the Beatitudes, rooted as they are in the idea of the end time, are nevertheless not merely empty promises. They are not empty, because the Reign of God to which they refer and for which we pray has already begun. Indeed, the Reign of God had never ended, from the beginning of the world: but in Jesus that reign became visible for those who had eyes to see, and he spoke of it to those who had ears to hear. The Kingdom, Jesus says to his listeners, is already among you; but pray nevertheless for it to come. This is a puzzle, even a paradox; but it is one which we hear over and over again in Christianity: now and not yet, already and eventually, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, we remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection, we await his coming in glory. Merely to say that these things are paradoxical, though, is no answer to the cynic. The person who mocks our trust in promises of an unspecified future can also mock our confidence in past events: it is just as easy to make fun of the idea that the King has come in the past as it is to doubt that the King will return. The cynic can say that perhaps there never was a Jesus, or that perhaps he was not what we proclaim him to be, not in fact "God of God, Light of light, Very God of Very God, ....begotten of his Father before all worlds, ...incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and made man." Or perhaps that Jesus was all those things, once upon a time, and yet today has somehow become irrelevant in a secular world, just one more Lord God among gods many and lords many. The cynic can make any or all of those claims, and if all we can say of God's Kingdom is that it was and will be again, then Jesus of Nazareth has no more claim on us now than does Arthur of Britain, that other Once and Future King.
But in fact we can say more than that about the Kingdom of God. God's reign is not only past and future, it is present as well. It is present, for example, in the sacraments of the Church. God's reign is present in Baptism which makes us already citizens as well as future heirs of God's eternal kingdom; and it is present in the Eucharist, where Christ comes among us as the "one full perfect and sufficent sacrifice" of Calvary and as the royal host of the messianic banquet, both at the same time, so that under the figure of this present bread and wine we truly share now in what has been as well as what is to be. More fundamentally even than these examples, though, the Kingdom of God is already present in the Church itself. The Sacraments, after all, work to establish and build up the Church: but it is the Church so established and so maintained which makes Christ present to the world at large. In the lesson from Ephesians, we heard of how God the Father "raised [Christ ] from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and...put all things under his feet:" it is a magnificent description of the glory of Christ as the king of the universe, the image of Christ the Ruler of All that we often see in Orthodox icons and mosaics. But we should note that that description of the cosmic Christ begins with the author's prayer for us to know "The riches of God's glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe"; and it concludes with the promise that God "has made Christ the head over all things for the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all." The Church is the fulness of him who fills all in all: that is to say, the Church itself is the sacrament of Christ's presence for the world, the sign of the King's presence in the Kingdom. The Church exists for the purpose of showing the world that there was and is a Christ, and that his promises can be relied upon, because they are already coming true in and through this community. The Church exists to witness to Christ, not only by the simple fact of its existence, but also by consoling the sorrowful, making right prevail, and having mercy on the merciful: for the moment, it is through the Church that God chooses to show himself to the pure in heart and to reveal his reign to those who have suffered persecution for righteousness' sake.
This is the Feast of All Saints. What, then, is a saint? The Greek and Latin and English words for the concept all mean "holy," the same thing that the "angels and archangels and all the company of heaven" cry out as they bow down before the throne of God. The saints are persons who are holy because they share in the fulness of Christ who is the fulness of all. We are reminded every year at this time that the New Testament uses the word "saints" to refer to all Christians, the holy people of God: we are all of us saints, sharers in the fulness of Christ. But to say that we are the holy ones is to say no more than that we have all been hallowed by Baptism for the work of the church. We, not just we Christians or we Episcopalians but we here at this Altar, we are the ones who show the world the present reign of God: the kingdom of God breaks into the world starting through us, and spreading out from this Holy Table.
Yet, clearly, the Feast of All Saints is not simply the Church's equivalent of a high school pep rally-we are not gathered here merely to celebrate ourselves and pump up local pride. Rather, as the lesson from Ecclesiaticus indicates, we are here to give thanks to God for the men and women whose lives have shown to us what we are called to show the world; we are here to celebrate the heroes of the faith who reveal to us that the Beatitudes are already coming true. We celebrate Stephen, the Protomartyr, and Perpetua and her companions, who were martyred at Carthage, and Thomas the Archbishop, murdered in his own cathedral, and all those whose examples show us that the kingdom of heaven already belongs to those who have suffered persecution for the cause of right; we give thanks for Agnes of Rome and Clare of Assisi, and all those whose vision of God encourages the pure in heart; we celebrate William Wilberforce, the politician who championed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the nineteenth century, and Jonathan Meyrick Daniels, a seminarian who died campaigning for civil rights in Mississippi in the twentieth, and all those who have worked to satisfy the thirst for right and justice; we give thanks for the gentle Francis, and we celebrate Margaret the Queen who strove for peace between Scotland and England; and first among them all we give thanks for the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose own heart was pierced with a sword as she saw the shameful public execution of her son, and who stands for us as evidence that the sorrowful will indeed know the consolation of the Resurrection. Though all of these have their own days in the Church's calendar, we celebrate and give thanks for them all today, along with all the other heroes of the faith, precisely in order to recognize that none of them became a saint by him- or herself alone but rather by the Holy Spirit, the power of God at work in the Body of Christ.
It is that same power which is at work in us, the power which maintains the universe in being and raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead to sit in the place which he enjoyed from the beginning of the world; and it is at work in us so that we can show the world the present truth of the Beatitudes, at work in us to make us, even us in this congregation here present, the city set on a hill, a lamp unobscured by any bushel basket, the sign by which the world can know at this present moment that Jesus lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
--John Wm. Houghton
+ In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Few feasts of the year have such striking lessons as the two sets appointed for All Saints' Day. As you will gather from the printed bulletin inserts, I have combined lessons from the two lectionary lists for today's readings. From Ecclesiasticus, written about two centuries before Christ, we have the noble introduction to a list of heroes of Israel, from Enoch, Noah and Abraham down through the great kings and prophets, through the time of the exile in Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple, all the way to Simon the son of Onias, who had been High Priest within the author's lifetime. From the letter to the Ephesians, written in imitation of St. Paul, but probably about thirty years after his martyrdom, we hear a magnificent description of the glory of the risen and ascended Christ, the head of the Church; and finally, from the Sermon on the Mount, we have the familiar reassurance of the Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes are familiar to us, of course, precisely because of the confidence the Church has found in them in times of persecution, the comfort that individual Christians have taken from them in times of their own hardship. Those who mourn have found consolation in these words, the meek have found promise. Those who work for justice and peace have found a charter here, and here Christians of every generation have heard the call to mercy and purity. For many of us, these are words that we heard at our mother's knee, words we grew up seeing stitched on samplers, or painted on black velvet just like a picture of Elvis, and they have a treasured place in our hearts.
And yet for all of that familiarity, or indeed just because of that familiarity, it's worth our trouble to consider how these words would have sounded to their first audiences, to the people whom Jesus would have addressed and the readers whom Matthew had in mind. The form of these sayings would have been familiar to them as much as it is to us, for it is a form which reaches back to the Psalms and other wisdom literature: indeed, the very first Psalm, which we heard in last week's lectionary, opens, "Blessed is the man who has not walked in the paths of the ungodly, nor sat in the seats of the scornful...he is like a tree planted by a watercourse...in all that he does, he prospers." "Blessed is the one who does so-and-so" was the expected formula at the beginning of a Hebrew proverb. And yet the Beatitudes do differ from the tradition, they do break the pattern people would have expected. The difference comes in the way these proverbs of Jesus end. Now the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament-the literature of which the earlier "Blessed is the man who" proverbs are a part-has a tendency to concentrate on relatively worldly concerns: its wisdom doesn't always strike us as being particularly religious. That tendency toward wordly concerns shows up in the older "blessed is the man" proverbs. The first psalm, for example, says that the "blessing" of the "man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly" is very much of this world: "he is like a tree planted by a watercourse...in all that he does, he prospers." Jesus himself taught that way sometimes, telling stories of the persistent woman and the unjust judge, warning his followers to be as wary as serpents and as innocent as doves (Matt. 10:16). But here in the Beatitudes, Matthew shows Jesus breaking this pattern by tying his new proverbs into the Kingdom of God, rather than into worldly success. In the psalm, the righteous man prospers; but in the Beatitudes, on the other hand, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will see that righteousness established under the reign of God. The sorrowful shall find consolation, the peacemakers will be called God's sons, the chaste will see God, when the Kingdom of God arrives; and later in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches the listeners to pray for that Kingdom to come, so that God's will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.
So the Beatitudes, like the Lord's Prayer, conceal under their familiarity something which, I think, seems very strange to us, an unfamiliar and even unsettling direction toward the coming kingdom, a yearning for the end of the world. Like St. Augustine praying, "God give me chastity, but not just yet," we pray for the end of the world every day, but few of us, I imagine, have let that petition determine our investment policy. It would be easy for a cynic to say-and indeed cynics do say, all the time-that the Beatitudes are merely promises of pie in the sky by-and-by. The sorrowful will find consolation-but not right now; the meek will inherit the earth, right after famine, war, pestilence and death are through with it. And so on. It's the kind of material that Mark Twain made a career out of mocking.
And yet the Beatitudes, rooted as they are in the idea of the end time, are nevertheless not merely empty promises. They are not empty, because the Reign of God to which they refer and for which we pray has already begun. Indeed, the Reign of God had never ended, from the beginning of the world: but in Jesus that reign became visible for those who had eyes to see, and he spoke of it to those who had ears to hear. The Kingdom, Jesus says to his listeners, is already among you; but pray nevertheless for it to come. This is a puzzle, even a paradox; but it is one which we hear over and over again in Christianity: now and not yet, already and eventually, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, we remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection, we await his coming in glory. Merely to say that these things are paradoxical, though, is no answer to the cynic. The person who mocks our trust in promises of an unspecified future can also mock our confidence in past events: it is just as easy to make fun of the idea that the King has come in the past as it is to doubt that the King will return. The cynic can say that perhaps there never was a Jesus, or that perhaps he was not what we proclaim him to be, not in fact "God of God, Light of light, Very God of Very God, ....begotten of his Father before all worlds, ...incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and made man." Or perhaps that Jesus was all those things, once upon a time, and yet today has somehow become irrelevant in a secular world, just one more Lord God among gods many and lords many. The cynic can make any or all of those claims, and if all we can say of God's Kingdom is that it was and will be again, then Jesus of Nazareth has no more claim on us now than does Arthur of Britain, that other Once and Future King.
But in fact we can say more than that about the Kingdom of God. God's reign is not only past and future, it is present as well. It is present, for example, in the sacraments of the Church. God's reign is present in Baptism which makes us already citizens as well as future heirs of God's eternal kingdom; and it is present in the Eucharist, where Christ comes among us as the "one full perfect and sufficent sacrifice" of Calvary and as the royal host of the messianic banquet, both at the same time, so that under the figure of this present bread and wine we truly share now in what has been as well as what is to be. More fundamentally even than these examples, though, the Kingdom of God is already present in the Church itself. The Sacraments, after all, work to establish and build up the Church: but it is the Church so established and so maintained which makes Christ present to the world at large. In the lesson from Ephesians, we heard of how God the Father "raised [Christ ] from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and...put all things under his feet:" it is a magnificent description of the glory of Christ as the king of the universe, the image of Christ the Ruler of All that we often see in Orthodox icons and mosaics. But we should note that that description of the cosmic Christ begins with the author's prayer for us to know "The riches of God's glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe"; and it concludes with the promise that God "has made Christ the head over all things for the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all." The Church is the fulness of him who fills all in all: that is to say, the Church itself is the sacrament of Christ's presence for the world, the sign of the King's presence in the Kingdom. The Church exists for the purpose of showing the world that there was and is a Christ, and that his promises can be relied upon, because they are already coming true in and through this community. The Church exists to witness to Christ, not only by the simple fact of its existence, but also by consoling the sorrowful, making right prevail, and having mercy on the merciful: for the moment, it is through the Church that God chooses to show himself to the pure in heart and to reveal his reign to those who have suffered persecution for righteousness' sake.
This is the Feast of All Saints. What, then, is a saint? The Greek and Latin and English words for the concept all mean "holy," the same thing that the "angels and archangels and all the company of heaven" cry out as they bow down before the throne of God. The saints are persons who are holy because they share in the fulness of Christ who is the fulness of all. We are reminded every year at this time that the New Testament uses the word "saints" to refer to all Christians, the holy people of God: we are all of us saints, sharers in the fulness of Christ. But to say that we are the holy ones is to say no more than that we have all been hallowed by Baptism for the work of the church. We, not just we Christians or we Episcopalians but we here at this Altar, we are the ones who show the world the present reign of God: the kingdom of God breaks into the world starting through us, and spreading out from this Holy Table.
Yet, clearly, the Feast of All Saints is not simply the Church's equivalent of a high school pep rally-we are not gathered here merely to celebrate ourselves and pump up local pride. Rather, as the lesson from Ecclesiaticus indicates, we are here to give thanks to God for the men and women whose lives have shown to us what we are called to show the world; we are here to celebrate the heroes of the faith who reveal to us that the Beatitudes are already coming true. We celebrate Stephen, the Protomartyr, and Perpetua and her companions, who were martyred at Carthage, and Thomas the Archbishop, murdered in his own cathedral, and all those whose examples show us that the kingdom of heaven already belongs to those who have suffered persecution for the cause of right; we give thanks for Agnes of Rome and Clare of Assisi, and all those whose vision of God encourages the pure in heart; we celebrate William Wilberforce, the politician who championed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the nineteenth century, and Jonathan Meyrick Daniels, a seminarian who died campaigning for civil rights in Mississippi in the twentieth, and all those who have worked to satisfy the thirst for right and justice; we give thanks for the gentle Francis, and we celebrate Margaret the Queen who strove for peace between Scotland and England; and first among them all we give thanks for the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose own heart was pierced with a sword as she saw the shameful public execution of her son, and who stands for us as evidence that the sorrowful will indeed know the consolation of the Resurrection. Though all of these have their own days in the Church's calendar, we celebrate and give thanks for them all today, along with all the other heroes of the faith, precisely in order to recognize that none of them became a saint by him- or herself alone but rather by the Holy Spirit, the power of God at work in the Body of Christ.
It is that same power which is at work in us, the power which maintains the universe in being and raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead to sit in the place which he enjoyed from the beginning of the world; and it is at work in us so that we can show the world the present truth of the Beatitudes, at work in us to make us, even us in this congregation here present, the city set on a hill, a lamp unobscured by any bushel basket, the sign by which the world can know at this present moment that Jesus lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
--John Wm. Houghton
