Scripture: The Beatitudes
Whenever I read the words of Jesus, I think about what a rockstar presence Jesus must have been.
What was it about him that made people leave home and follow him?
What was it that made people crowd seashores, and make holes in his roof, and climb mountains to hear him speak, and to watch him help others?
Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, of which the first twelve verses are called the Beatitudes, is not exactly soaring rhetoric. It’s more of a repetitive mantra — an ordered list of who is blessed in this world. It doesn’t exactly tug your heart strings or make you want to jump for joy.
Instead, it really makes you go: “wait, what?”
And yet people were hungry for it. People are still hungry for it.
There was something about Jesus that people craved.
Perhaps it was just that the world of Jesus’s time was so challenging, and no one was doing anything about it — or no one could do anything about it — so that when Jesus stood up and said, the way things are is not the way that things need to be — people paid attention and gravitated toward him and his abundant love that could change the world.
The sermon up on the mountain is widely considered Jesus’s most famous sermon. Some call it Jesus’s inaugural address, for the way Jesus lays out his countercultural beliefs about God’s Kingdom as a vision for what will come in his ministry — Jesus’s Kingdom of God exists in contrast to the world as it is. It’s where he is trying to lead and send his disciples.
On the eve of midterm elections here in the United States, what is more counter-cultural than spending time this morning learning from Jesus’s inaugural address of a sermon?
I think it’s fair to say that the Beatitudes of Jesus are a series of unexpected blessings for people in the world who sometimes go unnoticed.
It’s like J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Lord of the Rings. In a big world full of warriors and wizards, kings, and queens, and powerful armies waging epic battle to decide the fate of good and evil for all time, Tolkien has made the most important character of them all a three-foot-tall hobbit, gardener, and homebody named Samwise Gamgee. Jesus does the same.
Jesus does not say, blessed are the powerful. He says blessed are the meek. Not blessed are the royals and the rich, but blessed are those who have been held back and stomped down.
On this All Saints day, the Beatitudes reminds us the saints of this world are not always the people whom history remembers; they are the people Jesus calls out in the Sermon on the Mount.
All Saints Day is sometimes held up as a day of celebrating the people in stained-glass windows — not here at Newman Church with our clear windows and simple meetinghouse of our Puritan ancestors — but in others places people look to those who have been immortalized in places of beauty.
Instead Jesus throws open the windows and offers us a wider-angle view of a world of saintly possibilities.
People who are poor in spirit
People who mourn
People who are meek
People who hunger and thirst for justice and righteousness
People who show mercy
People who make peace.
People who are persecuted for doing what is right.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the hobbit Samwise Gamgee who is a brave little creature in a world full of warriors, dragons, and big mean beings.
But the Beatitudes reminds us that there are Samwise Gamgees all around us. Not just in fairy tales.
The unseen saintly people who drive hours into the Arizona desert at great personal risk to put water in places so that people traveling on foot don’t die.
The quiet work of a clinic in Haiti that seeks a more peaceful by caring for all people who come to them who are injured.
The person who cared for a spouse or parent through years of illness.
The neighbor who brought over meals without being asked.
The network of people who bring cold-weather clothes to the vulnerable.
The person who made other people feel like the best version of themselves.
These are the Samwise Gamgees of our world. These are the saints.
The saints are not people who do just good and live righteously. The saints are the those whose lives have belonged to God. They are saintly through the grace of God. We can all see their lives being shaped by God, even if we only notice it as we look back at their lives.
And as the hymn asks, why shouldn’t we let God’s saintly grace flow through us too.
[litany of names]
All Saints Day is about learning to recognize the holiness in those who are living in our midst.
And so it is that the work of the church, the work of all of us together, is to learn to see the world as Jesus sees it, to recognize the blessedness of those who struggle alongside God; to honor those who make peace; to stand beside those who hunger for justice; the remember those who history forgets — and then to take part in the grace of God through their example.
The kingdom of God is not an abstract place. It is this world in front of our eyes, if we can see it. It is yours, if you can find it. It’s our, if we can be it.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
