Apply to be a saint!

Happy All Saints, everyone! I don’t know about you, but I feel a little more like a saint having had an extra hour of sleep this morning. Going off of Daylight Savings is one of my favorite things – if they ever finally decide to do away with it, I’ll still have to have a ceremonial one extra hour every year at this time.

We use the word ‘saint’ in several ways, obviously. Most of the time we think of saints as truly holy people, people who lived lives of heroic goodness, who saw visions of God and who changed the lives of those around them in their day. They seem like otherworldly people, no one any of us would really meet on the street, and certainly people none of us could aspire to become. But the other way we use the word ‘saint’ is simply as a word to describe all of us, people who are members of the universal church, the Body of Christ, the communion of saints. And on All Saints, we commit ourselves again as part of this larger community of saints. As our hymn today points out, saints can be ordinary people in shops or at tea – and there’s not any reason (no, not the least) why we all shouldn’t be saints too. 

Jesus gives a list of these saints in the familiar part of the Sermon on the Mount that we just heard, what we call the Beatitudes. In Jesus’ sermon, as the gospel of Matthew relates it, the saints are the poor in spirit, those who are weakest of all, the beaten down and destitute. The saints are those who mourn, who weep for what is wrong in the world, and for the sadness in their own lives. The saints are the meek, those who are slow to anger and who aren’t bound up in their own pride. The saints are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who seek justice and right living for themselves and for society. The saints are the merciful, who love and forgive others, both friends and enemies. The saints are the pure in heart, who remain loyal to God. The saints are the peacemakers, who seek shalom, the total well-being of others. And the saints are the persecuted, who will suffer for being and doing all of these things. These people are called blessed, happy, honored, right here in the present, even those with unhappy experiences in their lives, because God is close to them; they seek after God because they know they need God; they seek for God’s ways in a world that runs too often in the opposite direction. 

That’s wonderful, but we have to be honest and say that this is a whole list of people and states of life that we don’t usually think of as blessed at all, and certainly not happy. Mourning? Hungry? Poor and persecuted? Huh. And it would have been particularly surprising for those listening to Jesus – prosperity and good reputation and a good family were the signs of God’s blessings, not the opposite. We tend to assume that as well, actually. We talk about feeling blessed when things are going well for us – when we get the job, or the tests come back benign, or we have a wonderful vacation with our family. We don’t say we’re blessed when everything seems to be going wrong. ‘Have a blessed day’ doesn’t mean ‘I hope you get persecuted today.’

But the list of ‘blesseds’ that Jesus preaches did correspond pretty directly with the state of the people who were gathered to listen to him – those who had left family and livelihood, who had walked away, or been thrown out from, traditional codes of honor and righteous living. People who were pursuing a life that was offensive to many around them, enough so to be persecuted. Some of them were poor, the meek of the earth, not the power people. Some of them were just poor in spirit. They were all listening to this Jesus of Nazareth because they hungered for something better, for righteousness. Jesus’ words to them were a reassurance, a comforting statement that they were on the right path, no matter what others may say of them. Looking squarely at the suffering of their lives, Jesus was teaching that even so, they were blessed.

And all of that list of blesseds was embodied by Jesus himself: Jesus was poor and poor in spirit, owning nothing and living nowhere, spending his time with outcasts and sinners. Jesus was meek, that unpopular word, seeking the well-being of others before himself. Jesus was hungry and thirsty, both literally and in his desire for righteousness; he was merciful to those who struggled with their sins; he brought and preached shalom, peace, everywhere he went; he was pure and steadfast in heart, never forgetting his call and his grounding in God; Jesus mourned over Jerusalem and those who could not change their lives to follow God, and he wept over Lazarus and those he loved. And in living this way, Jesus was reviled, persecuted, and killed. The blessed, then, in the Beatitudes, are those who live like Jesus, who act as Jesus does. 

But it is a set of ‘moral values’ that doesn’t line up with the ways of this world. It is, indeed, completely upside down from the way the world works. None of the political campaigns for Tuesday’s election are built on this platform. This is what the kingdom of God requires of all of its followers, what a saint might look like. This is the picture of the world according to Christ – a very different picture from the world according to us. This list of ways to be ‘blessed’ is a surprise – it is not what we expect, or what we would perhaps like to have affirmed…it is counter-cultural, and it’s counter our usual ideas of self-interest.

But if this all sounds beyond us, well, guess what: we’ve already signed up for it. In a moment we’ll do what we do every year on All Saints, and every time we perform a baptism – we’ll renew our baptismal covenant, the promises made at our baptisms. We’ll promise again to resist what is contrary to God’s will in this world, and to go out of our way to show and live out God’s love for all people. ‘Striving for justice and peace among all people,’ ‘seeking and serving Christ in all persons,’ ‘loving our neighbor as ourselves’ – all of those promises we make several times a year – all involve living and being the way Jesus describes in the Beatitudes.

And our answer to every question in the baptismal covenant is, ‘I will, with God’s help.’ We can only live out our faith, we can only really align ourselves with this radical kind of morality, with God’s help. When things are comfortable in our lives, it’s easy not to take these promises too seriously. But when things really go south for us, when our fortunes take a dive or the marriage ends or the medical care runs out, then we see it all more clearly. Those named by Jesus as blessed are called this because that’s how God is with them. Those who have nothing need everything – they can’t find other ways of sustaining themselves besides God. God comforts, fills, is merciful, and ultimately gives everything, even God’s own self, to those who ask for it, those who rely on God completely. So we are blessed – and we can give that blessing freely to others – when we are truly ready to receive. 

Being a saint, then, means not accomplishing some list of good deeds, but allowing ourselves to be made new by God. The great saints of old are remembered not so much for their own greatness as for the way they pointed towards God, living as translucent windows for God in the world. We are called to live differently not to be simply good, moral people in our own right, but to align ourselves so closely with God’s desires that we ourselves show God to others. To live with God’s help, to accept God’s nourishment, God’s love and mercy, and to be instruments of this grace to others as well.

And so, at this Feast of All Saints: we reaffirm yet again what we have already signed up for: to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to offer up our own selves to Christ to be transformed, blessed, sainted. In good times and in hard ones, may we all know the blessing of God’s help as we live out our calling in the communion of saints. Amen.