A Sermon
All Saints Sunday, 5 November 2023
St James’s Episcopal Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts
by Thomas DeFreitas, Preaching at the Invitation of the Rector
Texts: Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12
“I will bless God at all times: praise shall ever be in my mouth.”
“Look to the Most High and be radiant.”
“Taste and see that God is good.”
We might say that the saints are those who have done precisely these things. A saint blesses God at all times, even when the traffic is gnarly, even when they have slept poorly and their left shoulder screams with inexplicable pain, even when some random luminary on the internet calls them nasty names. How do they respond? They look to the Most High, their faces radiant with glory. They taste and see the goodness of our God.
But when unpleasant things happen to me? When my dignity gets dented in a conversational fender-bender? When some loutish wiseacre dares to hurl rude and caustic language in my direction? I have been known to lose my religion. I have been known to sing a few choruses of the Four-Letter Serenade … to unleash a volcanic cantata of rage in the key of F. I have been known to plunge into a mood so foul that it can only be dispelled by prayer, fasting, and the music of the Proclaimers.
St John’s first letter proclaims: “We are God’s children now.” Now! Yes, right now, with all our unwashed laundry of body and soul. We are God’s children now, in the face of our lingering reluctance to love our difficult neighbor. We are God’s children now, amid our heavy groans of exasperation that we’re hoping to alchemize into gratitudes. We are God’s children now, with our wide and cumbrous array of vexations, awkward habits, stubborn sins, and perennial imperfections.
The poet Julia Fehrenbacher addresses some verses “to the hurting ones”; that is, to those of us
… who keep trying to stitch and fix
and scrub away your humanness,
rather than knitting it a nest
to rest inside ...
Fehrenbacher reminds us that to be human is to inherit an all-pervasive Love. A Love which comes before any response on our part. A Love which beckons us to rest in a nest of blessed assurance.
“We are God’s children now.” And St John goes much further: “What we will be has not yet been revealed. But when it is revealed, we will be like God, for we will see God as is.”
There’s a famous saying of the early church: “God became one of us so that we might become God.” Adventurous phrasing! Can it possibly be true? Can we see ourselves—all of us, from every race and nation—as part of this God-thing, this mystical body, this living communion of life and love that continues past death into a shining bright eternity?
Show of hands: How many of you have read Jesus’s autobiography? You heard it a few minutes ago! A priest I knew years ago once referred to today’s Gospel, the Beatitudes, as “the autobiography of Jesus.” We hear the verses so often that they might lose their sharpness, their stringency. Blessed are those who mourn … when everyone else is laughing. Blessed are those who keep their hearts gentle … in the face of bellicose behavior and militant mockery. Blessed, those who not only dream of peace, but take steps to make peace in the midst of rancor, intolerance, and all manner of aggression, both micro- and macro-. Blessed, those who are persecuted: cursed, maligned, othered, devalued, hated.
Hard sayings. Painfully counter-intuitive. In sermons such as this, we often hear the word “challenging.” Jesus is challenging us, and so on. The Beatitudes go far beyond challenging: they seem to demand an almost superhuman spiritual fortitude. Surely, certainly, with reliable regularity, we will fall out of alignment with this divine ideal.
So what do we do? How do we get closer to it? Do we take up our spiritual Brillo pads and start scrubbing away at our humanness? Do we get to the beatific vision through fretful, fearful adherence to moral rules and ecclesial regulations? Do we lacerate ourselves with despair over our shortcomings, actual and perceived? Or worse! Do we think we’re fine and dandy because we’re in Club God, and the rest of the world (you know, those people, over there…!)—THEY need to shape up, they need to get THEIR act together, or else!
In reckoning with the Beatitudes and their challenging demands, we must begin with the unwavering certitude that God loves us and blesses us, especially when we falter, unremittingly when we fail.
Can we please stop believing in any god who hates us for being ourselves? Can we please dethrone any deity who does not leave us free to be our fully human selves; our weird and wacky selves, our fallible mortal selves—living breathing vessels of grace! Can we look to a God who, as the song says, shepherds us beyond our fears? Can we let our faces be radiant with the reality of God’s love, here, now, regardless of our report card, regardless of our grade in conduct, regardless of our “spiritual condition”? Can we taste and see that God is good? that God is our delight? that God is our truest True Love? Not the inflexible martinet. Not the overzealous traffic-cop. Not, not, not the toxic and emotionally abusive parent.
Can we worship a God of joy, and not one of grim-faced “rightness”? Can we celebrate God, adore God, embrace God, where God can be found: in our kindred far and near; in our gloriously motley squad of wounded and precious humans?
Elsewhere in her poem, Julia Fehrenbacher speaks to any of us who may have forgotten that:
your words are not a lost thing to find, but
a song tucked into the patient pockets
of your beautiful, hurting heart.
Your words are a song! The saint takes that quavering, tender, ineffably lovely song out of her pocket, and sings from the depths of her suffering, exultant, God-fashioned heart.
And so! Whether we’re laughing or crying, whether we’re celebrating or lamenting, whether we’re high or low, let us now sing, dear family of saints. Amen.
Thomas DeFreitas 