Sermon for All Saints Day – Matthew 5:1-12

Anyone ready for this election to be over already? In two days we won’t have to see any more political ads or rallies, right? So, it bugs me how we hear a lot of conflicting messages from all sides. I know my own leanings, but at the same time I find myself wanting to dig deeper to find out what’s actually true. Because you can always interpret things in radically different ways. Maybe helpful. Maybe not so helpful. Like with today’s gospel reading – the beatitudes. Which just means “blessings” or sometimes “happiness”. A lot of folks call these the “Be Attitudes”. Their gist is that this is Jesus telling his disciples how to be better people. Like accept your helplessness to trust God more. Or work on your pride so that you can be pure in heart. A whole laundry list of spiritual disciplines. Not that I’m anti-discipline or anything. But what’s so great about being reviled and persecuted? I could just act like a jerk and check that one off my list real quick. So maybe there’s a better way to hear this.

Let’s start with what Jesus has been doing. He was going throughout Galilee. He was teaching in the synagogues. He was preaching repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near – world’s shortest sermon! He was curing every disease or sickness among the people. Now, miracles will make you famous, so word spreads and folks scramble from everywhere to bring him all the sick. Those afflicted with diseases, pains, evil spirits, epilepsy, paralysis – he cures them all, and they see it. So they become this crowd that follows him everywhere. I would. So would you. But Jesus doesn’t love all this attention. Crowds are noisy and chaotic. Their demands are endless. You fix one thing and five more pop up. Maybe kind of like being in an ICU full of Covid patients these days, God help us. It’s overwhelming and discouraging, and maybe it’s finally too much for Jesus. Sure, he’s the Son of God, but he’s also human just like us. So Jesus runs up this mountain to get away from it all. But even then he doesn’t get any down time because here come his disciples. Surely Jesus is a little frustrated.

Yet, somehow Jesus finds the wherewithall to say something to the disciples. “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.” It’s a laundry list. Scripture calls it a teaching. But when you stop and consider all the crowds and suffering and avalanche of need, it doesn’t feel so much like a teaching. It feels more like Jesus reaching deep down and letting out to these disciples what drives him to keep going in spite of the odds. Jesus is thinking of all these folks who have run out of options or hope. Folks who are stuck in their suffering. Folks who hunger and thirst for righeousness because they have nothing left in themselves. Jesus will do something about all of this. No wonder that the crowd brings in these poor souls from far and wide to the one who does what no one else can do.

So far this all sounds like gospel, like good news. Except Jesus keeps going. Blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. Lots to unpack there. On the one hand, who would have enough chutzpah to declare themselves truly merciful or pure in heart or a peacemaker? We all WANT to be those things, but our track records fall a little flat. The pandemic and the election have taught us a lot. We’re militant about personal rights. We’re fed up with safety restrictions. We judge and demonize others. We throw a ton of expectations upon each other and just keep pushing the issue. Families are splitting apart because of all this and more. We’re SO divisive. But on the other hand, Jesus isn’t really talking about how to be better people here. He’s still talking about suffering.

I know this is hard to understand, but here’s the thing. How can we be merciful unless we’ve hit bottom and needed mercy? Which will also make you very aware of how little mercy there is in the world. A pure heart sees heartbreaking suffering and injustice everywhere we look. True peacemakers know the deadly cost of hatred and violence that strikes too close to home or worse. There is suffering in all of these, and who honestly wants that? We don’t, though we like to imagine ourselves in these ways. So Jesus goes one step further. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Jesus warns we’ll be rejected as hypocrites and fakes. Yet, God’s demands remain the same. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It’s like one way or the other we will be cut off. We’re stuck, and a reward in heaven isn’t much consolation for that.

But, the good news is that Jesus is not stuck, and we don’t have to wait until heaven to see him. He was reviled, persecuted, slandered, and even crucified for everything he said and did. Yet after 3 days he was raised from the dead, because God demands that the world will see righteousness, mercy, and peace. He comes to all of us exactly as we are, both persecuted and persecutors, and he wraps us with his own righteousness, so that we would be reconciled with him and with each other. Not someday, not just our heavenly reward, but right here and now, because folks are dying to know it’s real.

This matters, because there’s so much we don’t know. So much anger, and mourning, and hunger, and thirst in the world. More than any of us can bear. But Jesus won’t let these be the last word, so he grants us his own faith by the Holy Spirit. It’s the kind of faith that shows through us in ways we don’t realize, because hope really is that powerful. We don’t have to act like we have all the answers, or pretend like things aren’t dire. Because of Jesus we can confess the truth, that regardless of anything we’re all in this together, and that’s really what’s important here. What the Holy Spirit loves best is to draw us into community, and its perfectly happy to use a computer if it needs to. I mean, we’re all still curtailing our lives either way, but what’s dangerous is that the isolation tricks us into thinking that we’re going it alone. When we’re reminded that we’re all facing the same thing, the same isolation, the same fears, the same frustrations, it changes everything, even if it doesn’t make them go away. And that kind of thinking about other folks is how the Holy Spirit sort of shoves us into caring for them, even in the middle of a pandemic. And by the way, this is an amazing way to forget about our own struggles. That’s not a coincidence.

Which is kind of the whole point of Jesus’ beatitudes. It’s not about being better people. It’s about being together people in spite of the hardships. The beloved community. That’s what Jesus means about the kingdom of heaven. Not in the future. Not in the sky. But right here and now, just as he said from the beginning. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near, and we see it. Thanks be to God.