Saints in a Messy World
Gratitude to Michael and Hunter for their work over the past two Sundays to share a word.
When I left Maryland on October 14, I was launching headlong into 10 days of family celebrations, with weddings book-ending some tourism, leaf peeping, and a visit with my mom. And as my plane landed in Nashville that first Friday, while switching off the notorious airplane mode, my screen came to life with messages and missed calls.
A friend, someone I’ve only been with via ZOOM but with whom I shared a deep connection, had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. Her family, in keeping with her wishes, would withdraw life-sustaining treatment later that evening.
The small online group that we shared tried to gather that evening – and I was tied up in wedding rehearsals and all of the light-hearted public efforts at reconnection that happen in big families. Maybe you know the feeling – tugged by a really hard thing in the midst of many other things, mostly joyous, even if complicated.
And while the weddings themselves were beautiful and mark good unions and bright futures, my visit with my mom was a different story. Her mind is failing. It was difficult for her to form sentences. While she remembers positions in the family, names are gone from her lips. And while we were there, she was seeing cats and dogs wander about her room.
As I sat with the hard things that were bubbling around me, I wondered where God is in the midst of it all.
You know that is ok, right? To say – God, what is going on here? Where are you?
I was literally swinging from pronouncing at a funeral earlier in the week, “where, o death is your victory” to a heart aching with an enormous sense of loss and loneliness and then to “you may now kiss as husband and wife.”
In a strange way, all of the loss I was experiencing was somehow vague – my mother still lives and breathes. My friend Margie and I never sat in the same physical space, but had only ever connected in ZOOM, her in Delaware, me here in Maryland.
Maybe you’ve encountered something similar, wondering where God is in the midst of it all, whatever “it all” might be at the moment.
Today, we honor the lives of the saints of God – not saints with a capital “S” but the ordinary lives of many who make up the fabric of our lives, the lives of our churches and our families. These people were imperfect, flawed, they struggled. They probably asked from time to time where God was in the midst of life’s ups and downs. Maybe our memories cast a golden halo of our loved one, but in reality, they were human. And thanks be to God, still they are the saints of God. And we are on that path too. Even in our times of doubt and distraction.
John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, appreciated the feast of All Saints, journaling about it specifically on a few occasions. He took heart in the way God’s love and grace and mercy embraced the most ordinary folks, elevating everyone in God’s sight to sainthood. It wasn’t a station for the exceptional, it was the inclusion of all who sought God’s love that made up “the cloud of witnesses.”
So then, in light of an expectation of God’s wide embrace, particularly among those of us who claim Jesus as our Lord and Savior, our gospel text may feel especially hard this week. The language feels familiar and yet it is not the spiritualized beatitudes that we often see printed on posters or plaques or greeting cards. (Those are found in Matthew’s gospel.) This is not about blessing the poor in spirit or those hungry for righteousness.
No - Luke has Jesus outwardly blessing the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the hated. No vague allusions here.
Opposite those blessings in Luke’s gospel are a litany of woes, or curses. Woe to the rich, those with full bellies, those who are laughing in this lifetime. Woe to those who are generally well received by their communities.
Woe in this context means that there is something not so pleasant coming into your life because of these circumstances…it is a threat of misery, if you will.
Then, Jesus follows up with a list of commands for those that will listen – and I have to imagine that there are ears tuned in after those blessings and curses.
Here’s how you should live: love your enemies, do good to those who don’t do right by you, pray for your abuser. Turn the other cheek and give more than is asked of you. And then he ends with that golden rule, a version of which is found in most global faith teachings – do to others as you would have done to you.
This is hard teaching. For most of us sitting in this room today, for most of us connecting via the internet in real time or at our convenience later the week, there is not much room for smugness here.
I mean… I’m not poor. I’m not hungry. I’m not persecuted.
What about you?
For most of us, this is hard to hear.
And I don’t want shy away from that.
It is intended to sting a bit.
It is easy (and I am guilty of doing it) to try to contextualize our way out of Jesus’ proclamation about God’s upside down Kin-dom. But throughout Luke, the message remains the same. In the Kin-dom of God that Jesus proclaims, the poor are exalted and the broken-hearted are eventually bound to rejoice.
I don’t really strive to be poor or broken-hearted most of the time.
What about you?
I am an experiential learner – I have to live through things in order to fully comprehend what is expected of me. I get burned and understand that fire is hot. I say the wrong thing to someone and learn that relationships are valuable, hard, and worth working for. I wait for the next new car or the new furniture or the next vacation, and discover that it doesn’t actually make the world a better place or me a better person. I watch an idea languish before realizing that I have to do something to bring it to life.
And so, wrestling with this text this week, the nudge I get is that I have to actually sit with the discomfort of hearing that I will not be first in God’s Kin-dom.
And yet…
And yet…
Even as I sit with the discomfort of knowing I fall short, it is right and a good thing always and everywhere to celebrate the lives of the saints of God that we have loved – many of whom had to sit throughout their lives with the same discomfort – for as we proclaim eternal life, they are now counted among the saints with a lower case “s.” They are part of the cloud of witnesses – and I was reminded this week that witnesses are a tangible demonstration of God’s grace and mercy and love and creative power.
I don’t really know how it all works sometimes. How’s that for the end of the sermon. What I do know, because I feel it in my soul, is that my God is real. And God is bigger than my mistakes or the foibles and failings of humanity. I feel that in my bones, God whispers that assurance in a way that relaxes my shoulders and softens my heart.
And because that is true, and because God is good, I find myself wanting to do better, to be better. I want to be part of how the poor are blessed, the broken-hearted are comforted. Maybe that isn’t enough. But it is what I have. And I feel God assuring me it is enough for right now.
Maybe it is what you have too. A desire to love people, to demonstrate by your life with others God’s grace and mercy and love.
It is a road we walk together, following in the footsteps of the saints that have gone before us in all of their beloved imperfection.
May it be so.
Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment