All Saints Sunday
Matthew 5:1-12
When I was in elementary school, I was in this performance jump-roping team called the Kangaroo Kids. We’d go to malls and baseball games and community events and perform. Sometimes there’d be 30 of us jumping around in a routine set to something like “Another One Bites the Dust.” But we also did individual routines, either with our own jump rope or with double dutch ropes. We kids would create our own routines, and the goal was always to come up with something wackier or more daring or more absurd than the last idea. People came out jumping on pogo sticks or on those plastic jumpy balls that we have in the muscle room. Or they’d do a handspring through the double dutch ropes. I had one friend who was a gymnast as well as a jump roper. And she decided that she wanted to do an individual double dutch routine upside down. She could balance and walk around and even jump while standing on her hands, so she figured it would be no big deal to just add jump ropes to the mix. She practiced and practiced jumping on her hands until she had a short routine down. And then she had a couple of us come over and spin the ropes for her so she could try it out that way. But as soon as the ropes started moving, she just couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t get her timing right, felt like the ropes were coming at her too fast. She just couldn’t get the knack of jump roping upside down.
It’s not easy being upside down – trying to see the world in a new way. And yet I think it’s good for us. And I find that God is very skilled at providing opportunities.
While we were in Oregon recently, Sophie and I went with my aunt and uncle to their bi-lingual Episcopal church. Holy Cross is struggling financially, but it’s bursting at the seams with people, especially children. The service runs long, since almost everything is said twice (in English and in Spanish), so for a lot of the service the kids are invited to gather for Sunday school. Sophie was interested in joining the kids, so I walked her in there. There were probably 25 kids in the room, and Sophie of course didn’t know any of them, so I stuck around for a little while to get her comfortable. They were talking about the Lord’s Prayer and doing an art project decorating a handout of the prayer to bring home. The kids were all Latino, so they were talking about the prayer in Spanish. But for Sophie and my benefit, one of the kids very sweetly turned to us and, to help us understand, started to translate the prayer for us, beginning with the first line. “Padre Neustro,” the little boy told us, means “Our daddy.”
Somehow hearing the word “daddy” in place of the more formal “Father” really surprised me. I guess I’ve been hearing and saying that prayer for so long that I’ve lost the radical meaning of “Father” that is not a title of respect, but a description of God as loving, caring, nurturing parent. So thinking of God as Daddy really turned me on my head.
Hopefully today will give us a few more chances to be turned upside down.
Today is All Saints’ Sunday. The word “saint” for me tends to connote someone who always behaves perfectly – too perfectly. Someone who is more angelic than human. Someone I can’t really relate to. Someone you name a church after, not someone you might know, much less be.
And of course, that’s not at all what a saint really is, and so it’s good that All Saints’ Sunday comes around once a year and helps us to un-skew our preconceptions.
Every Sunday we talk about the “communion of saints.” The concept is present in the Creed, and in the Prayers of the People, and in our eucharistic prayers. But often it’s something we say without reflecting much on it. The communion of saints sounds like some gathering that happens up in the sky – a bunch of perfect goody goodies up there worshipping Jesus on bended knee. But it’s actually a way of expressing our union with those who have gone before; a way of living right now. The cathechism in the back of our prayer book defines the communion of saints as “the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those whom we love and those whom we hurt, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer and praise.”
So the communion of saints isn’t limited to just the famous, churches-are-named-after-them kinds of saints, like St. Aidan, and St. Patrick, and St. Mary. And it doesn’t stop with the more recently church-recognized saints, like Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Harriet Tubman. The communion of saints includes all the folks that we’ve loved and lost – like Bruce Bell and my mother and Heather Sanderson’s uncle. And it includes those of us that are still kicking, whether their saintly qualities are obvious – like Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama – or less obvious, like me. We are all part of the communion of saints! I love All Saints Day because it’s about the only time I really stop and consider that idea. And it always surprises me anew and makes me look at people differently.
But that’s not the only thing about All Saints Sunday that stands me on my head – check out our Gospel for this morning. The Beatitudes are one of those parts of the Bible that are so uber-familiar that, at least for me, the tendency is to hear it without really hearing it. All of these repetitive ‘Blessed ares’ strike me initially as sort of preachy and sacharine. We’ve heard them so many times that the actual content of what Jesus is saying easily gets lost. But these sayings of Jesus’ are actually wildly radical.
The word “blessed” that is repeated so often in this reading means something close to “happy,” which seems strange given what the word is used to modify. Happy are those who mourn? Happy are those who are persecuted? These aren’t the folks we’d ordinarily consider happy.
Which reminds me of Thomas Vander Woude. Some of you may have seen the article in the Post in early September about him. Thomas Vander Woude’s 20 year old son, who has Down syndrome, had fallen into the septic tank in their back yard and without any hesitation at all, his father jumped in after him, submerging himself in sewage so he could push his son up from below. He died saving his son’s life. It turned out that Thomas Vander Woude was something of a mentor for our babysitter at the time, Marie, who had gone to Christendom College where Vander Woude was athletic director for a time. She was devastated by his death, but she remarked that he would have been happy to have died that way if it meant saving his son. It struck me at the time that “happy” was a strange word to be connected with the awful way Thomas Vander Woude had died.
Just like the people Jesus describes as “blessed” or happy that seem like such unlikely subjects. Jesus is describing the people that might be considered the bottom of humanity – including victims and pushovers and fools among the “blessed.” It’s as if Jesus is taking all the qualities of leadership and success that we are used to here on earth (things like strength, and self-confidence, and good luck, and the ability to win an argument or come out on top) and saying that it’s just about the opposite of what’s valued in the Kingdom of God.
So often we’ve got it all wrong. And Jesus challenges us to rethink our expectations – to stand on our heads and see the world in a whole new way. And he invites us to take on the saintly qualities of the blessed that we hear about in our gospel reading.
How can we be “poor in spirit,” realizing that we need God’s help and can’t do it on our own? Like the father of the possessed boy in Mark’s Gospel who cries out to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!”
How can we mourn in a way that makes room for the healing touch of God our Comforter? Like Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ tomb who met the risen Jesus in the midst of her weeping.
How can we be meek, seeking to do the will of God rather than striving for power and success? Like our own Aidan who was known to all as a gentle monk who distributed immediately to the poor whatever was given him by kings or rich men of the world.
How can we hunger and thirst for righteousness, discontented with the status quo and fighting and scratching for a better tomorrow? Like Martin Luther King, Jr., whose dream of freedom and equality for all people led him to spearhead non-violent demonstrations against racism and strive for economic empowerment of the poor.
How can we be merciful, feeling the pain and suffering of others and going out of our way to give to others from our own abundance? Like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who ran orphanages and hospices to care for, in her words, “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, and uncared for throughout society.”
How can we be pure in heart, seeing the best in the world around us? Like Anne Frank, whose diary narrates her two years living in hiding from the Nazis, and shows her clarity, courage, and hope in the midst of impossible circumstances.
How can we be peacemakers, willing to step into the middle and get clobbered from both sides? Like Nelson Mandela who, despite being jailed for 27 years for fighting against apartheid, after his release urged a national policy of truth and reconciliation that helped lead the transition to a multi-racial democracy in South Africa.
How can we be willing to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, like the 32 Christian young men in Uganda in the late 1800s whose example in singing hymns and praying for their enemies on their way to be burned to death inspired so many bystanders to faith that Uganda became the most Christian nation in Africa.
How can we – like these saints and multitudes of others that we have read about or encountered – how can we have our worlds turned upside down and get the knack of living that way? For therein lies the kingdom of heaven. Amen.
Elizabeth Rees