Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints’ and we have a Gospel lesson from Luke that is perhaps the best known collection of sayings from Jesus. The best known and perhaps the least understood and the most misused. The setting, Luke’s Gospel says, is a level place. Jesus has come down from the mountain where he’s been praying (in Biblical literature, mountains are places for dialogue with the Divine). Jesus has come down to where the regular people are – down to their level – in fact, a little lower, because our text begins, “he looked up at his disciples.” He lifted up his eyes to his learners – his students. This is a teaching for his disciples. Jesus has a lot to teach them. This is how it’s going to be for you, he wants them to know. And notice how he starts. He starts with blessings. Jesus declares God’s blessing on you who are destitute, you who are hungry now, you who weep now, you who are hated and excluded and rejected because of your humanity and because of the Son of humanity. Jesus starts with blessings, honoring people who are shamed by poverty, hunger, grief and exclusion, and tells them that in the community of his followers they will find some relief.

This rag-tag group of disciples is actually blessed many times over, he says. “Rejoice and leap for joy,” Jesus says, “for you are incredibly blessed.” Do you hear the good news in that? Rejoice and leap for joy, for you are abundantly blessed. You who are poor, who are hungry, who are weeping, who are rejected are indiscriminately and generously blessed by God and you’re going to be filled and you’re going to laugh and you’re going to be a part of God’s common wealth in Jesus’ community.

I need to say something about the idea of a reward being great in heaven. I don’t think Jesus is talking about the “sweet by and by” here because I don’t think he ever talked about some after-death future goodness that somehow compensates for and might even be encouraging present misery. Jesus was always teaching about finding life before death, not life after death. Remember, it is in Luke that Jesus says, “the kingdom of God is among you.” In New Testament Greek, heaven can mean the sky (where the birds, the clouds and the stars are all equally out of reach). Heaven can refer to the transcendent. And heaven can be a commonly used indirect reference to God, which was typical in Ancient Judaism, and is still polite discourse today: as in “oh my heavens.” (1) Here, I think it’s shorthand for teaching that contrary to popular belief, wealth is not a sure sign of God’s favor and poverty is not a sure sign of God’s punishment. That’s just not how God is, according to Jesus.

What comes next was scandalous – and it’s still scandalous. Jesus says: “Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are full now. Woe to you who laugh now. Woe to you when people speak well of you.” Ouch. That last one always gets me. Again, I don’t think that Jesus is predicting what life after death is going to be for rich, well-fed, happy and popular people. He’s talking about how it’s going to be for such people to be his disciples. It is going to be rough going. We have received our compensation and now we are going to have to give it away. We’re going to have to get a lot closer to the edge than we feel comfortable. We’re going to come to know in a deep way that it’s not all ours, we are not entitled to hold on to it, that it will not protect us. If we are going to follow Jesus, it will mean sacrifices and feeling hunger and feeling immense sorrow and we will be excluded and mocked as we live more and more into the community of Jesus followers. We will.

The word woe can also be translated alas – as in how terrible or how horrible or how hard it will be to stop sheltering with wealth, protecting from hunger and sadness and start telling truths that are hard to hear, it’s going to hurt. It will be hard. It will break your heart. But get this! As soon as you stop sheltering yourselves with wealth, protecting yourselves from want and sadness and start telling truths, you are going to experience blessings like you’ve never experienced them before. There is, in this teaching, a flow that is tidal. (2)

This teaching of Jesus is not about retribution, although our ears are so conditioned to hear retributive justice. This teaching of Jesus is about a God Whose justice is relational, and restorative. I know that because every teaching of Jesus is about a God Whose justice is relational and restorative. And Jesus was teaching about God of the Torah, about Hebrew law which is relational and restorative, which is Shalom.

And then Jesus tells those disciples who are still listening – who haven’t walked away yet -- what discipleship looks like. It’s incredibly subversive of the dominant paradigm. “Love your enemies, he says. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on the cheek, turn your head so that they cannot strike you again. Turn your head so that they cannot strike you again. It will stop them in their tracks. If someone takes away your coat, give your shirt also so that in your nakedness, that person realizes their own shame. Give to everyone who begs from you. Lend and expect nothing in return. Don’t ask for your stuff back if it’s taken from you. Be merciful just as God is merciful.” Jesus is saying, “Remember: you are incredibly and abundantly blessed. So act like it. Live as if you are indiscriminately and generously blessed because you are. Live as if you have a great deal of dignity because you do – even when all signs are to the contrary. And live as if every other person has a great deal of dignity too – even when all signs are to the contrary. Assume that everyone, in their heart of hearts, wants to be loved and cared for.” (3)

Now I don’t know about you, but I find discipleship instructions like these attractive and unbelievably difficult, especially in a week like this last one. At the same time, I am not so interested in a Jesus who is always teaching me about what I already know how to do well. I do want to be challenged. I’m not so interested in goals that are puny or easily accomplished. So I find that a church holiday like All Saints’ Day comes in very handy.

All Saints’ Day calls us to reflect on those faithful disciples of Jesus who have gone before us and who are all around us. We celebrate and give thanks for the communion of saints – known and unknown. In an All Saints’ celebration, past, present and future become much less of a straight line and much more circular or spiralling. And we pray for grace to follow the examples of the saints, because Lord knows, sometimes it’s just too hard to follow Jesus directly. 

• Take a minute right now and think about some of the people who have modeled faithful discipleship in Christian community for you. They might have been aware that they were modeling discipleship for you – and they might have been totally unaware.
• Name their names in the silence of your hearts.  
• Call the spirit of those people into this place, into this time.
• Feel how much fuller this sanctuary is now.
• Give thanks for this amazing cloud of witnesses. Give thanks for the richness that they have brought to your life.
• I also want to give thanks for whoever it was that brought you here – who invited you or encouraged you to come to or stay at Emmanuel Church. (Either for the first time, whenever that was, or perhaps today.) I want us to give thanks for those people. If you found this place all by yourself, say a little thank you to yourself for knowing just what to do.

Remember: you are incredibly, abundantly blessed. Live a life of incredible generosity – more generosity than you can possibly manage alone. Live as if you have a great deal of dignity, but not so much that you don’t need community. This Gospel message applies to us as a faith community too, of course. This message reminds us as a gathered community us to count our many blessings wherever we are poor and hungry, weeping and excluded; and warns us wherever we are rich, well fed, laughing and highly regarded, that Jesus is calling us to live much closer to the edge, leaning away from self-sufficiency and leaning toward dependence on one another.

You know, when I break the bread at Communion and say, “Behold who you are.” And you respond, “May we become what we see,” what we are saying to one another in that exchange is a mystical reminder that in our brokenness we are blessed beyond measure and that we want to become blessing beyond measure for a broken world. It is a prayer that in spite of and because of our brokenness, we might embody the blessing – the bread – the redeeming love of God – the Christ. We already are and we want to become more – not just for ourselves, but for all who are desperate for tangible evidence of the Love of God in shelter and food, in healing and compassion, in bold generosity and dignity.

As a postscript to this sermon, I want to add the names of the women whose bold generosity and dignity brought us to this moment and who are commemorated on the altar screen in the Lindsey Chapel. Three of those women (Theresa, Eulalia, and Genevieve) have been restored, and during our closing hymn today, we are going to proceed into the chapel to give thanks for their return to the amazing group of female witnesses to the scandalous and indiscriminate love of God in Christ. Listen to a litany of the names of these beautiful women and give thanks that they stand before us and with us:

Mary, the mother of Jesus
Ann, the mother of Mary
Elizabeth, the mother of John
Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the resurrection
Mary Clopas
Mary Salome
Veronica
Petronilla
Cecilia of Rome, the patron saint of music
Agnes of Rome
Helena
Margaret of Antioch
Barbara
Apollonia of Alexandria
Dorothy of Cappadocia
Euphemia of Chalcedon
Perpetua and Felicitas, on whose shared feast day I was instituted as your rector
Blandina of Lyons
Joan of Arc, the only one wearing pants
Gertrude of Belgium
Margaret of Scotland
Hilda of Whitby
Ethelreda of Ely
Ursula of Cologne and her 11 companions protected by her cloak
Bridget of Sweden
Christina of Bolsena
Clare of Assisi
Catherine of Siena
Agatha of Cantania
Lucy of Syracuse
Monica of Hippo
Julia of Corsica
Gudule of Brussels
Genevieve of Paris*
Eulalia of Merida*
Theresa of Avila.*

Thanks be to God.

*The three restored. I’d love to add a row with Julian of Norwich, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sojourner Truth, Evelyn Underhill, Edith Stein, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks, and my beloved professor Suzanne Hiatt.