Wesley Chapel Episcopal Church, Wesley Chapel, FL
Preacher: The Rev. Adrienne R. Hymes
All Saints’ Day/Year A ▪ November 5, 2023
Matthew 5:1-12
Lord, take our minds and think through them; take our mouths and speak through them; take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.
All Saints’ Day is set apart to remember and commend the saints of God, who have gone before us, leading lives, and some losing their lives, in service to God and God’s people. Like Jesus, the saints, recognized by the Church, were human beings who walked amongst their fellow human beings. The saints have given us a rich legacy of lives patterned on Jesus’ outpouring of self-giving love in myriad expressions. One of the ways in which Jesus poured out his love was through teaching and equipping his disciples for the work he called them to do.
Prior to our passage in this fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus had been modeling for his inner circle, fishermen by trade, what “fishing for people,” looked like through his ministry. In keeping with the “fishing for people” theme, the great crowds, eager for Jesus’ teaching, had become a growing “school” of fish, all swimming in the same direction towards Jesus.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up to the mountain, took the traditional posture of a rabbi by sitting down to teach, and the disciples came to him. There’s an old, popular saying, that when the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. The disciples were ready. The crowds were ready—and Jesus, the teacher, appeared.
The teaching, known as the Beatitudes, were nine declarations put forth by Jesus about the present and future ethics of God’s heavenly kingdom. On the surface the statements addressed the various states of oppression that the Jewish people were currently experiencing under the Roman empire, for their existence was not without “poverty of spirit,” “mournfulness,” “patience under long suffering,” and “hungering and thirsting for justice.” Rarely would any of these states-of-being be classified as blessed human nature and behavior. But Jesus, masterfully paired these oppressive states-of-being with assertions that they will be reversed in the future coming kingdom of heaven, and the faithful will be divinely rewarded.
Breaking away from the future language of the verses sandwiched in between them, verses 3 and 10 mirror each other, speaking not to a future reality, but to a current reality. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven;” “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”
The word, “blessed,” as it is commonly used today, may be a stumbling block to breaking open a deeper understanding of what is meant by Jesus’ declarations. In Greek, the word, “blessed,” can be translated as happy or fortunate. Substituting the word, fortunate for the word, “blessed,” brings more depth to the profound message embedded in the beatitudes. Fortunate, as a state of being, implies that beyond one’s own efforts, success has been obtained by favorable circumstances, and points to God’s grace.
The Beatitudes reflected the “Now-ness” of God’s heavenly kingdom already among the Jewish people through the human person of Jesus, and assured hope for the “Not-yet-fully-realized” kingdom of God to come.
Jesus’ message urged right conduct according to God’s will; promised liberation from unjust structures of earthly kingdoms; and the ultimate reversal of unfortunate states of being. The Beatitudes were, and are a proclamation of hope!
Earlier, I mentioned that All Saints’ Day is set apart to remember and commend the saints of God, who have gone before us, leading lives, and some losing their lives, in service to God and God’s people. That statement, however, is incomplete. The Church defines a saint as “A holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ, as well as one who has been formally canonized or recognized as a saint by church authority.”[1] Anglican priest and theologian, John Macquarrie, described sainthood as, “…the focusing, in a human life, of the divine presence.”[2]
If someone says to you, “You are a saint,” most likely they are not labeling you as such based on the church’s definition, but on the Light of Christ that they witness and experience, emanating from your presence and through your actions.
Remember that it is Christ who makes it possible for us to be saints as we share his life. “We are washed, sanctified, and justified ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God’” (1 Cor 6:11). So, when you are proclaimed a saint by another soul, you can, with integrity, humbly accept such a title, based on your church’s definition, because you are a faithful Christian who shares life in Christ.
The Communion of saints, of which God’s faithful are all a part, is the fellowship of those past and present souls which were, and are, willing to be used by God to manifest his eternal, self-giving love through this temporal human experience. All Saints’ Day recognizes the saints of God who walk amongst us—the saints who sit next to you in worship today and those people who, throughout your life, revealed the love of God to you and helped you to grow spiritually. It is through us, that this dark world glimpses the Light of Christ, as we live and proclaim hope as Easter people in a Good Friday world.
As always, during Communion, you are invited to sing the hymns. While this might be obvious, it is a very good thing to not only sing the hymns, but to inwardly digest them—savor the words, the meaning—even when you don’t know the tune—just say the words. No doubt, the final Communion hymn will be very familiar to you. Even so, really digest the meaning, especially when you get to the third stanza: “They lived not only in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still…the word is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus’ will…for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”[3]
Let us each leave this place set on fire for sharing the good news of God in Christ, and growing into the gift of our ever-evolving sainthood—like we mean to be one, too. Amen.
[1] Saint – The Episcopal Church. November 4, 2023.
[2] Macquarrie, John. Principles of Christian Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), Second Edition, p. 253.
[3] “I sing a song of the saints of God,” 1982 Hymnal, Hymn #293.
