Energy of Love: A Sermon for All Saints' Day, 6 November 2011

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, La. & Church of the Redeemer, Oak Ridge, La.

As many of you know, I’m a relative newcomer to the Episcopal Church and I came from a radically different “non-liturgical” tradition. I was raised Mennonite, a Protestant denomination descended directly from the original Anabaptists. It was a tradition in which the concept of “saints” was akin to idol worship.

Of course, I now understand that the hostility of the Mennonite Church toward “saints” was really about the Medieval church’s abuses of Saints with a capital S, such things as encouraging magical thinking about the Saints in order to extract money from the devout through the selling of relics—relics often of highly questionable authenticity.

Today All Saints’ is among my favorite church feast days, and I’ll say more about that in a moment. But first a word of explanation. It kind of doesn’t seem like All Saints’ Sunday because Halloween was almost a week ago and we know there’s connection, even if we get hazy about what that connection is!

All Saints’ was established as a major feast day of the church to honor all of those saints with a capital S. It was set to be celebrated November 1st. A lesser feast called “All Souls,’” for the purpose of celebrating ALL of the faithful departed, was set for November 2nd. These dates were most likely chosen because late October was already a time of annual celebrations of the harvest, which in some cultures included honoring the dead.

Revelation 7:9-12

                                   
The Saints with a capital S were also called “Hallows,” short for “the hallowed ones,” and so the evening before All Saints’ was called “All Hallows Eve,” later shortened to “Halloween.” The Halloween costume began as a way to mock evil by dressing up and partying in scary outfits.

Over time, All Saints’ and All Souls’ kind of merged, at least in the Western Church, and today we celebrate both on a single day. And here’s the final bit of historical trivia: Since November 1st doesn’t usually fall on a Sunday, we transfer the celebration to a Sunday, but according to the quaint traditions of the Anglicans, we can only transfer it to the Sunday following November 1.

So here we are, nearly a week after the fact, celebrating All Saints’ Day! And it is a day on which we honor not only the official saints of the church, the saints with a capital S, but all of the faithful departed.

Many of us—perhaps most of us—are here in these pews this morning because of the examples of faith, hope and charity lived out in front of us by those who have gone before us to their heavenly reward. When I hear those words from John’s Revelation (7:9-17, NRSV), I see faces in that multitude of witnesses: my parents and grandparents, pastors and teachers over the years.

Even those with whom I no longer agree, like my Mennonite preachers and teachers who were anti-saint. There they are among the multitude, robed in white, waving palm branches and saying, Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!

But if we listen carefully to John, we see in that multitude not only the faces of our own dear departed, but strange faces in all hues. And we hear their rejoicing not only in our own comforting language but in many languages at once.

On that glorious day when we stand within the multitude, I believe we will hear many names for God, names like Yahweh and Allah.

This picture painted by John is comforting, but surely it’s also an antidote for all religious exceptionalism. Whenever we are tempted to think we’ve got the right answers, the right doctrine, the right religious practice, we would do well to remember this image. Who knows with whom we will be rubbing elbows when we ourselves stand among the multitude?

Turning to today’s Gospel lesson, we learn more about that multitude. It is Jesus’ beloved Beatitudes, a part of the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5:1-12, NRSV).

These too are comforting words: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Who among us has never felt “poor in spirit”? Who has never mourned? Who has never felt powerless in the face of the challenges of our political system? Our economic system?

The meek shall inherit the earth? Not likely! At least not by earthly standards.

Life is often hard. We are comforted by these words because they promise that in spite of the very real difficulties of everyday life, a better day will come.

They promise that we will ultimately be measured by other standards, God’s generous, loving and merciful standards. And we will not be found wanting.

These words give us hope for that future glory so vividly shown through John’s vision.

But these comforting words might also serve as a warning and cautionary tale. I cannot read the Beatitudes without being reminded of those old Burma Shave advertising signs. Remember those?

Burma Shave Signs

 Kind of like the Beatitudes, the Burma Shave signs set up a situation, then come back with a resolution—one that is kind of unexpected. And many of them were cautionary tales as well. Here’s one I found on the Internet yesterday: Big mistake, Many make, Rely on horn, Instead of brake. Burma Shave.

The Beatitudes make us smile. But they also remind us of our responsibilities as saints as long as we are here on this earth.

WE are to comfort those who mourn. WE are to fill the hungry and thirsty. WE are to be merciful. WE are to be peacemakers.

WE are to seek God above all else and love our neighbors as ourselves. And we can rejoice when that gets us into trouble with those systems and forces that oppress humankind.

In his book Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen wrote: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. ...I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. …Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love. (Thanks to the Website Edge of the Enclosure for this quote.)

The “energy of love” is God. When we connect with it, we become saints—agents of God’s love on earth.

AMEN

Humble Yourself: A Sermon for 30 October 2011

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.                                         

We just can’t seem to get away from those darn Pharisees and their sinful ways, can we?

At this point in our march through the lectionary for Year A, which obviously features the Gospel according to Matthew, it seems that Jesus has nothing better to do than to argue with and criticize the Pharisees.

In fact, this game of one-upmanship that Jesus always wins, gets even nastier. Soon we will hear Jesus say, Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

So maybe it’s time to step back a bit and look at the larger picture. Maybe it is time to look at all of the agendas coming together in these stories.

There’s the agenda of the Pharisees, for sure, and it is to discredit Jesus. Then there’s Jesus’ agenda, which is to reform Judaism—often by turning upside down the most cherished tenets of the orthodox faith.

But then there’s the agenda of the Gospel writers, in this case Matthew. That’s the agenda we have the hardest time focusing on—and for good reason. We believe God inspired the Gospel writers. We believe what they wrote contains everything necessary to our own salvation.

And since our eternal lives depend on Holy Scripture, we sometimes have trouble scrutinizing it and considering the social and political contexts in which it was written. We especially have trouble when it seems to mesh so nicely with our own human contexts, our own cultural and political perspectives and, yes, prejudices.

But every so often we need to step back and look at the larger picture, not only of the agendas coming together in Biblical stories, but how those agendas intersect with our own.

Let’s begin with Jesus. He was not a Christian. He was a Jew and a devout adherent to the Jewish faith. When he answered his Father’s call to begin his ministry, he went to a synagogue. Throughout his life he preached and taught in synagogues.

Yes, Jesus was very critical of the religious leadership of his day. He was critical of the Sadduccees, who were the temple priests. He was critical of the scribes and Pharisees, who were learned and devout lay people who studied the Hebrew Scriptures and practiced the Hebrew laws contained therein. The Pharisees especially were known for their strict and diligent observance of Torah, which they understood to be God’s law.

But Jesus’ critique of Judaism and its leadership should first of all be understood as internal criticism, not criticism from without. He never left the Jewish faith. He was crucified as a Jew by the Roman state, with the consent and encouragement of the most powerful religious leaders of his day.

Moreover, Jesus’ criticism was part of a long tradition of internal criticism practiced by Judaism. That’s why so many saw him as the latest in a long string of prophets who had called the Israelites back to the faith over the centuries.

Little wonder then that the Pharisees mistrusted and questioned Jesus! They were the defenders of the traditional faith. He was the radical seeking to reform the faith.

Our Holy Gospels were written some 50 to 70 years later. That is, 50 to 70 years after Jesus spoke out against the hypocrisy and arrogance of some of the leaders of his faith.

And why then, you might ask? Because that is when the followers of Jesus were busy separating themselves from Judaism and forming a new religion, namely Christianity.

Little wonder then that the Gospel writers, carrying out the crucial work of creating a new faith identity and a new religious structure, tend to cast the Pharisees in a negative light and to show Jesus handily defeating them at every turn. And because the Gospel writers disliked the Pharisees, we think we should too. 

But external criticism is very different from internal criticism, and we know that Christian dislike for Jews has produced centuries of anti-Semitic prejudice and even violence. The words of Jesus, criticizing some of the religious leaders of his time, have been put to a use Jesus himself abhorred.

And that brings us full circle. In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus teaches not only that hypocrisy and self-righteousness are wrong, but that we need look no further than within our own ranks for examples (Matthew 23:1-12, NRSV).

I am reminded once again of contemporary politics, and specifically of recent episodes of hate-filled behavior at political rallies and forums. Things like shouts of “Let him die” when discussion turned to the problem of people who need major medical care but have no insurance.

Things like booing a gay soldier serving in Iraq when he asked a question about his own government’s policy toward him. Things like cheering at a prideful claim by a candidate that he has presided over more than 200 executions.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these incidents is that the candidates, many of whom openly stand on their Christian credentials as a campaign strategy, did not speak out against or even seek to distance themselves from the hate-filled outbursts.

Love God, and your neighbor as yourself, Jesus said, just last Sunday.
   

Jesus Washing the Feet of His Disciples, by Michal Splho

But of course, we needn’t leave our own homes and communities to find examples of the problem Jesus addresses in today’s lesson. Most of us at least some of the time fall for the illusion of self-reliance and indulge in feelings of moral superiority.

We have been at least somewhat successful in making the social and economic system work for us. We go to church on Sunday, put our offering in the plate and thank God for our many blessings, even though we are quite sure we earned that new car or lovely home or promotion or rise in stock prices or… whatever.

And that becomes a burden we tie up and lay on the shoulders of others, sure that if we did it, they can too. We don’t have to leave our own churches to find contempt for the poor, even though Jesus calls us to love and serve them as we would Jesus himself.

Humble yourself, Jesus says. The greatest among you will be your servant. He will soon demonstrate the point by getting down on his own knees and washing the feet of his disciples as they share their last meal together. And finally, he will go to the cross, in humility and for love of us, his neighbor.

AMEN