All Saints Day, 2023  Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Revelation 7: 9–17
1 John 3: 1–3
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.
I sing a song of the saints of God, faithful and brave and true, Who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew. . .
Though I hardly understood everything those words meant, they are the words I grew up singing.  They are the words I understood pointed to my own future, my future as a Christian.  To be sure, this was a hymn about holy saints, but always, in the refrain, were the words, “and I mean to be one too.”  So, to my child’s mind these were words of mysterious hope and promise that somehow applied to me.  It seemed that even I, however ordinary, could hope to become a saint of God.
And one year, when I was ten or eleven, that remote possibility suddenly became much more real when we had something like a pageant – at least, a procession in costume — down the center aisle of the church, as the adults around us sang this same hymn.  One of my friends was dressed as a shepherdess, complete with a staff, a shepherd’s crook.  Another, whose father was a doctor, wore scrubs and had a stethoscope around his neck.  And I was awed and honored to be cast as the queen, Elizabeth of Bohemia, in a long purple velvet dress.  Suddenly, I understood something.  Becoming a Christian was about transformation.
John the Revelator sketches a different kind of transformation in the scene we get this morning from the Book of Revelation.  He sees a great throng of saints around the throne of God.  No matter what they have been through in life – and they have been through a lot – now they are joyful.  Now they are singing together, united in their praise of God.  For no matter where they came from – black or white, Palestinian or Jew, Pilgrim or native American – now they have found their way home.
But these are not the only images of the saints of God we get this morning.  Jesus, in Matthew’s Beatitudes, offers us yet another view of who those saints are and how they have been transformed.  And his is a disorienting view, for at first glance there’s nothing joyful, nothing we thought we wantedin his view of their godly lives.  We thought we knew what the good life looked like – that hard work and a good education, applying yourself, saving money where you could – would lead to a life of security, a life we could enjoy as we shared with those we love.  But here, in Matthew’s account, Jesus is calling “blessed” everything we’d hoped to avoid – poverty, mourning, hunger and thirst, suffering and death.¹  And yet these Beatitudes, these unlikely blessings Jesus is naming, show us the contours of Christ’s own face.  And thereby show us where we ourselves must begin.
So, in the face of the One who became poor for our sake, who had no place to lay his head, we find our security.  In the face of the One who mourned for his friend Lazarus, we find comfort and joy.  And in the face of the One who destroyed enmity in his own flesh, as he suffered for our sake, we find our peace.  It’s hardly the life we expected, but every time we glimpse his face we are reassured – He is the Way, the Way we ourselves are meant to follow.
The Beatitudes, you see, offer us Jesus’ self–portrait.²  As we read them and think about what they mean, we see his face.  And as we keep his face before us, as we learn by heart the outlines of his humble ways, we also see what Christ is making us to be.  We see how we are being transformed into his likeness, how we, too, are becoming saints of God.  For that’s what we were created to do.  We were created to reflect the beauty of the Lord in our lives.
So yes, as a child I did catch something important about becoming a saint of God.  It does involve a process of transformation.  But it’s hardly the kind of transformation I thought it might be when I dressed up as Elizabeth of Bohemia in that procession at Trinity Episcopal Church.  That process involved putting on a regal–looking velvet dress and carrying a scepter – outward things, at best.  But the process of transformation Christ has for me is a process that goes on inside me, as I ever–so–slowly learn his ways – giving rather than receiving, forgiving others rather than thinking I must be right all the time, offering praise to Him instead of seeking it myself, and confessing to him the sin in my life – all the ways I–ve messed up.  Small offerings, to be sure.  Meagre ones.  But these are the elements he uses to transform me – from the inside out, into what he always knew I could be.  And he does the same for you.
It’s nothing short of miraculous.  Soren Kierkegaard once put it this way:
[We all know that] God creates out of nothing.  Wonderful you say.  Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
That is what we are celebrating today on this feast of All Saints – God’s achievement, not ours.  His triumph in the lives of people who loved us – ordinary people he had transformed — by his love — into saints.  People who then made a significant difference in our lives.
I got a graphic illustration of his way of doing things this week as I decorated my house at the last minute for Halloween.  I was late getting our decorations up this year – hanging the big, black–feathered crows we usually hang in our covered front porch and running the string of orange mini lights up the lamp post beside our front walkway.  But this year I wasn’t so sure I wanted to perch precariously on top of the ladder to hang those decorations.  Maybe, just maybe, I thought, I could do something different this year — on ground level.  But what did I have?
Then it came to me.  I could set up some luminaria – paper bags filled with enough sand to hold a lighted candle in place.  Surely, I had enough half–used candles and a package of paper lunch sacks.  And surely, Loew’s would have the sand.
Lowe’s did have bags of sand, and I quickly put enough of it into a dozen paper sacks so each one would hold a candle upright.  Then I stepped back to gauge the effect.  While it was still daylight, my display didn’t look very impressive ’ ordinary paper sacks grouped together on the porch steps.  But oh – when darkness had fallen – and I lit those candles – everything changed.  Suddenly, against the darkness, those ordinary paper bags were suddenly transformed – now softly luminous with golden light shining from within.  Transfigured by that light, they were bright and beautiful against the dark night.
You and I, I think, are something like those paper sacks, those ordinary lunch sacks.  From the outside, we do look ordinary.  Fairly drab and inconsequential.  But oh – when the light of Christ illumines us from within – we shine forth His holy beauty to a very dark world.
Saints of God – let your light shine!
Amen.
¹  The Rev. Christopher Yoder “Wayfinding”  (The Living Church, All Saints Sunday, 2023)

²  Ibid.
 
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