October 29, 2023; All Saints Sunday

The Rev’d. Dr. Gretchen Sanders Grimshaw


Trinity Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, CT

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:”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. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.  “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

                                                                                                                        -Matthew 5:1-12 , NRSV

Happy All Saints Sunday!

My friend Mark Bozutti Jones says that the difference between Jewish Saints and Christian Saints is that Christian saints are perfect and Jewish Saints are people. But according to St. Paul, every one of us was called by God to be a saint.

The feast of All Souls is among my very favorite celebrations. It is, in fact, the third most important feast day in our liturgical calendar, after Easter and Pentecost. Like Easter, the liturgical color is white. White is the color of all celebrations of the resurrection, all celebrations of new life. Everlasting life.

This morning we celebrate the saints who have gone before us. And who live among us here and now. And who are being born as we speak. We celebrate the current and future members of the cloud of witnesses who have died to the flesh, but live on in God’s Kindom. And too, we celebrate the saint in each one of us.The saint that we were each called to BE!…. a God-given attitude, according to the Apostle Paul.

Every one of us is a bonafide saint on layaway!

This morning’s familiar reading from Matthew’s Gospel gives us an idea, from the lips of Jesus, of what saintliness looks like in the mind of God. It is the portion of the Sermon on the Mount that we call the Beatitudes. Latin for blessed. It is among the most familiar pieces of scripture in our canon. But I think we often mishear this recipe of sainthood as a list of do-attitudes rather than be-attitudes.Things we must do to qualify to inherit the earth…to receive the mercy…to see God…to be called children of God.

And maybe because we do not think these attitudes describe us, sometimes I think we hear these beatitudes as descriptions of other people. Meeker people. Poorer people. More marginalized-in-this-world people. And not…successful people. Not popular people. Not powerful people. Not productive people. Not the people we want to be, necessarily. And so we don’t necessarily want these beatitudes to describe us.

Maybe because these beatitudes don’t sound like blessings, at least not in this world. In this world where we value productivity and acquisition and winning, seemingly above all else. In fact, we so value competition and conquest that we excuse even the most vulgar behavior and the most spirit-squelching conduct in our so-called winners. Winning is the ticket that seems to absolve us of even our human decency. And so who in this competitive, blue ribbon world would consider it a blessing to be poor or meek or persecuted, even for righteousness? 

But that is precisely the difference between the Kindom of God and the Empires of…..Us. When Jesus talks about the radical order that is God’s realm, the mind-blowing paradigm that is God’s creation – that extravagance of love can only flourish when we are free of our delusions of grandeur.And so Jesus, God in the flesh, assures us that the poor among us are indeed blessed.

Blessed are the poor. It is an utter reversal of our hierarchy. Jesus is turning our understanding of the world and its hierarchy of value on its head. I think one of the things that trips us up with these beatitudes is that we do not want them to describe us. We do not want to be the poor. Holy cow, who does?! Poor is not a choice most of us would willingly make. And so we sooth ourselves by rationalizing that Jesus is talking about a select group of people who….are not us. Maybe even placating a select group of people who…..are not us….by the grace of God. Don’t worry you unfortunate lot of unpowerful folks, blessed are the poor.

Interestingly, the verb in this sentence is not articulated in the Greek. The Greek just reads blessed the poor, but our English vernacular requires a verb, and so we add the are. As the English majors among us will know, are is a to be verb. To be verbs represent states of being. Unlike other sorts of verbs like imperatives or action verbs, to be verbs speak to who we are rather than what we are doing. Blessed are the poor speaks to an existential state.

But Jesus is not just speaking just to those who are poor now. To those who are living in a state of poverty at the moment. Because there may not be a verb in the Greek, blessed are the poor. But there IS a definite article.  THE poor. And that definite article tells us that Jesus is talking to the existentially poor, not the socio-economically poor. Get the difference?

Jesus cannot just be speaking to those who are living in poverty, because if they suddenly found themselves out of that poverty, lifted to a life of not-poverty, like if they hit the lottery – then would they no longer be blessed? Because that would mean that the bless-edness of which Jesus speaks depends on a particular socio-economic status. Jesus’ beatitudes would be completely contingent on a human construct.

If Jesus were speaking only to those who are living in poverty, then their blessedness would be as fluid as a crap game. And the holy monitor in my gut tells me that this is balderdash.

So we may not want to resemble these beatitudes. But we do.

Jesus must be speaking to those who are poor at the core of their humanity. And that my friends is all of us, you and me and every member of congress and every priest and parishioner on earth. Every saint in the book. Underneath whatever we have acquired in our lifetimes, we are still and always poor in spirit. Every one of us. We are still completely contingent, completely dependent. Existentially poor.

The Jesus who came that we all might have life and have it abundantly is not just talking to a temporary culturally cast-out subset of humanity in his Sermon on the Mount. He is talking to every one of us. We are all the poor in spirit, all of us, whether we realize it or not. We are all one breath away from catastrophe. One breath away from losing everything we love the most. One breath away from the mournful, meek, pure hearted peacemakers of which Jesus speaks. We are hungry and thirsty for right  relationships, every one of us at our core.

As your priest I have seen this truth in living color over and over and over again. There is not one of us who will not know these beatitudes in the core of our own being at some point in our lives, if we do not know them already.

I myself never really got these beatitudes…until all of sudden I did. Our first golden retriever was named Rosie. Dame Rosalind of Big Bug Creek to be exact. Rosie entered my life just as I was discerning a call to the priesthood. Rosie was my spirit-guide, my companion, my therapist. And I loved her from my toe bottoms.  But at age 6 she was diagnosed with a brain tumor that required surgery.  Apparently, the surgery went well, but the recovery did not. When Thalia and I got to Angell Memorial Animal Hospital on that rainy Saturday morning, we found our sweet Rosie in a plexiglass cubicle in the recovery room looking like….well, death warmed over would be a euphemism. The very sorry surgeon was just about to put her out of her earthly pain.And so I sat on the floor of that critical care unit at Angell Memorial Hosptial and held that precious creature in my arms as her life slipped away.

And through my river of tears glancing up through the plexiglas window of her recovery bay, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. I saw in that window the most gentle…most grieving…most poverty stricken spirit I had ever seen. I saw a hunger for mercy, and a thirst for peace, and a pureness of heart that were, to my very great surprise, embodied in the reflection of…me. It was my hunger and my meekness and my mourning that stopped me in my tracks. I was/am THE poor.

And so although we sometimes hear this passage as a litany of “virtues” that we must achieve, a sort of job description  for sainthood – It is really instead an assurance thereof. That is, I think we sometimes hear this passage – Blessed are the poor, and the meek and the thirsty for righteousness – as a set of instructions calling for our obedience. But they are really a description of the blessings that we have already been given.

Somewhere in our lifespan, each of us will be stripped of our competitive, boastful, power-grabbing selves and left only with God. And that will be the moment when the blessing that is each of us, at our essence, will be revealed. It will also be the moment when we take our place at the margins of our world, with Jesus. Because let us not forget that our God is a marginalized God. 

Jesus is nothing if not marginalized. Always standing on the outside looking in. Our God has always challenged the status quo, always confronted those who dominate and fragment and oppress others. Our God has always been rejected as a threat to those who wield and hide behind power and privilege. Our God was the immigrant, the one bearing a frightening new religion that was not to be accepted. The one who was different from the cultural norms,  and challenged the existential status quo of the general population.  The one who challenged every oppression order, crossed every border, and stood with every detainee. Ours is a God who would have gone to the cross to stand with just one poor, meek, mournful soul.

If we are to follow Jesus, we too must take pour place at the margins.  Because at the margin is where we are most fully with the God who created us. The margins are not where we may one day find ourselves if we are among the un-preferred or the unlucky. The margins are where we belong if we are Christian.

The margins are where we let go of our hoarding. Our hoarding of wealth and power and sensible stewardship of all of our possessions. The margins are where we drop our pompous pretense and embrace our human dignity. The margins are where we repair the breach caused by our transgressions. Reparation can only happen when we are bold enough to let go of the pretense. that we are the source of our own success.

These are not the to do attitudes, these are the to be attitudes.

And so on this All Saints Sunday we celebrate the blessings that we are, at our core. And too the new life that happens when we let go of all that keeps us from God and each other. When we have only the dignity of God that is etched on our hearts to keep us afloat. When we allow ourselves to become the saints that we were each called to BE!

Alleluia! The other be-attitude.

Amen.

© October, 2023 The Rev’d. Dr. Gretchen Sanders Grimshaw