Happy Feast of All Saints.
Thank you for inviting me to be here with you on this Feast of All Saints and Consecration Sunday, and on behalf of Episcopal Divinity School at Union, thank you also for welcoming our seminarian Brendan Nee into your community. Brendan speaks so highly of Fr. Matt and of all the people at St. James and how important this congregation is in their formation.
Today we celebrate all the saints, the saints known and unknown, who gave their lives to God and to the building up of God’s Kingdom. As I’m sure many of you know, there are many, many saints and there are many categories of saints. There are biblical saints like Peter, Andrew, and Mary the Mother of God. There are mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. There are the prophetic saints like Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, and Oscar Romero. But my favorite category of saints are “the saints unknown” - faithful Christians whose names did not quite make it into the history books, people who did not produce writings that we still have, but who lived lives of quiet witness and whose love of God and neighbor are known to God alone.
If your congregation is anything like mine, there are probably a couple of saints who have graced St. James Fordham, and All Saints is a day for remembering their witness too. As the hymn For All the Saints states, we honor these saints - known and unknown - because throughout their lives God was “their rock, their fortress, and their might; (God was) their captain in the well-fought fight; (and Christ’s Good News for the Poor) in the darkness dread, was their one true light.”
In today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 6:20-31), we hear Jesus’s Good News for the Poor. We hear, in other words, the vision these saints gave their lives to.
In that passage, Jesus is preaching to the disciples and to a throng of people who have gathered around him. These people have heard of Jesus the teacher and healer and have gathered on a flat plain to hear what he has to say. In this passage, Jesus lays out a vision of what truly matters in the Kingdom of God.
Jesus begins by blessing whole groups of people that society - then and now - has never particularly cared about. “Blessed are the poor,” Jesus says, and “blessed are the hungry.” “Blessed are those who weep and mourn” and “blessed are those who are ostracized and reviled.”
Two biblical scholars who read the New Testament through the lens of social sciences say that in the honor and shame-obsessed society of the Roman Empire in the first century, another way of translating “blessed” here is to say “honorable.”[1] That is, “honorable are the poor, honorable are the hungry, honorable are those pushed to the margins.” These groups that society doesn’t particularly care about: they have honor; they have dignity.
Just a bit later, Jesus goes on to state a series of woes and he aims them at those in society - both then and now - who are regularly applauded, adored, and excused. “Woe to the rich,” Jesus says. Jesus really does say that. “And woe to those whose bellies are full today.” He says this to a crowd that likely experienced hunger regularly. “Woe to those who are laughing now” and “woe to those who are praised and adulated everywhere they go.”
The same biblical scholars I mentioned just a moment ago say “shameless” is another way of translating the word ‘woe’ here. “Shameless are the rich,” Jesus says, and “shameless are the well-fed amidst hunger”, “shameless are the adulated when so many are marginalized”, and “shameless are those who are laughing when so many are in pain.”
In these blessings and woes, Jesus helps the crowd see the world through God’s eyes. He states that what is honorable and shameful in life and society is the exact opposite of what we typically think. And in doing so, one begins to see the way that Jesus inverts the world’s priorities.
Jesus turns our world upside down.
These blessings and woes are known to Christians as the beatitudes and for many Christians they are so well-known that their striking strangeness, their powerful peculiarity, has worn away with time. And so I think it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on what is happening when Jesus says “blessed are the poor” and “woe to the rich.” And we can begin doing so by trying to imagine the scene.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is not preaching from on top of a hill or a mountain. He is not standing in a pulpit looking down, the way I am today. Rather, Luke’s Gospel is careful to say that Jesus is preaching on a level plain. Jesus is speaking “on the level” with the gathered throng of people. In fact, in the translation I used, it says Jesus “looks up” at the people when he delivers this message, so Jesus was either very short or he positioned himself at the bottom of a gentle slope. This matters because immediately we know that Jesus - God incarnate - is teaching from a place of humility and equality with all who have gathered around him.
Secondly, these beatitudes are emphatically about material things.[2] They are about physical hunger, societal poverty, and the lives of people pushed to the margins. Our Christian tradition believes that the Gospel writer Luke was a physician, and so throughout the Gospel of Luke, including in this passage, we hear concern about the bodily realities of poverty, hunger, sickness and healing. There are other Gospels - Matthew and John - that tend to be more transcendent and spiritual. But when Jesus says “Blessed are the poor” in the Gospel of Luke, he is talking about the kind of poverty that results in lowered lifespans. When Jesus says “Blessed are the hungry”, he is talking about the kind of hunger that drove people to wait in long lines for a box of groceries in the pandemic.
Luke was a physician writing within an urban context, and his Gospel insists that Jesus is Good News for the bodily lives of the poor.
Another way - perhaps a more fun way - of thinking about Jesus’s message here is to think about movies and who the cameras typically focus on.
Now, we live in New York. I have lived in New York for 18 years and I’m sure there are many people here who have lived in New York for a lot longer. And so you well know that New York is constantly being featured in television shows and movies. And yet, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, most of these movies focus on just a few neighborhoods, typically in Manhattan, and mostly on a particular social class. And how should I say this? The people who are at the center of these movies - well, they’re constantly at brunch.
Have you ever noticed that? I actually don’t know a single person who goes to brunch. But in all these movies about New York, the main characters, the people whose stories the world gets to hear, they are constantly having big, boozy brunches. Sometimes multiple times a week.
What I want to suggest is that through the Beatitudes, Jesus is taking the camera and shifting it just slightly. Suddenly the camera is no longer focusing on the people having brunch but rather on the busboy who was previously not in the scene at all.
When Jesus shifts the camera, we learn that this busboy is not a boy, in fact. He’s a man. He has a name. He also has a story. Several months ago he fled Venezuela and crossed into the United States, was bused from Texas to New York as part of a political ploy by the Governor of Texas, and has just found this job and is trying to piece some semblance of a life together. This man is now one of the sixty two thousand people living in New York’s homeless shelter system.
In Jesus’s eyes, this person has a name, a story, and an experience of God. He is no longer in the background. Jesus insists that he has dignity and his life is honorable.
I should mention here that this notion of a shift in who gets focused on in God’s story, this is not just me and my particular interpretation of the Gospels. Diarmaid MacCullough, an eminent historian of Christianity -- teaches at Oxford and all that -- says that this different focus is peculiar to the Gospels as ancient texts. He writes that the Gospels are “unusually ‘down-market’” kind of ancient biography, in that they are ones “in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful people generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is the poor, the ill-educated, and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.”[3]
God’s story, the God-Spell, the Gospel, is a different kind of story than the ones we are used to hearing. It is one in which the poor, the hungry, the mourning, and those who are reviled, take center stage.
And so on this Feast of All Saints and on Consecration Sunday, I would like to end with a prayer of dedication to this vision.
Loving God, we give you thanks for all the saints, those known and unknown, who surround us and who have blessed the life of St. James Fordham. We give you thanks for the many saints who have graced this place and whose lives of faith and service still imbue this church with love and grace.
Help us to set apart - to consecrate, in other words - our time, talent, and treasure for the building up of your Kingdom, a reign where the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, the mourning are consoled, and where no group is reviled. Help us also to begin to see the world through your eyes and to tell a different story.
We ask all this in the name of your Son Jesus, who came as a poor and humble man to preach Good News to the poor, the hungry, those in mourning, and the reviled, a man so loving that we have come to know him as the Truth, the Source, and the Salvation of the world. Amen.
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[1] Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbach. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. See commentary on Luke 6:20-31. 2003.
[2] Oxford Annotated Bible, see notes on Luke 6:20-31
[3] Diarmaid MacCullough, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, page 77
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