Sermon on Matthew 5:1-12

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

All Saints Day is a mixed bag when it comes to church holy days.

Most holy days are celebratory: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost. We belted out “A Mighty Fortress” last week for Reformation. Some churches do a blessing of the animals to mark St. Francis Day. Even quieter festivals like Holy Trinity and Baptism of our Lord evoke a hopeful reverence.

And though Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are solemn, at least they’re decidedly so. There’s no question that they’resomber, weighty holy days.

But All Saints Day is, at the same time,joyful as we remember the great cloud of witnesses cheering us on and sad as we grieve those who are no longer with us physically. It’s a bittersweet holy day when we hold grief and hope together.

It comes right after the significant secular holiday Halloween. Amid the costumes and candy, there’s also an undercurrent of discomfort. It’s as much as the dominant culture in the US is willing toacknowledge death.

As we’ve moved tonursing our sick at the hospital instead of at home and having our deceased loved ones at funeral parlors instead of in our houses’parlors, our society has become increasingly uncomfortable with the realities of mortality.

There are good reasons why we outsource these parts of our lives and deaths, but now we can ignore the inevitable until the last possible moment, which makes it harder to process and accept.

We glorify youth, reject any sign of aging, and hide away sickness and death. At best, we dress up as zombies and ghouls once a year, making truth into make-believe.

But All Saints confronts us with the reality that we will all dieand we are never fully parted from our loved ones and all our ancestors in faith.

Those are challenging truths to confront at the same time.

The Beatitudes also are comprised of difficult truths to hold at the same time.

Based on how the world generally works—now and back then—we would expect Jesus’ blessings to go to rich people, powerful people, lucky people, ruthless people who are willing to take decisive action at others’ expense, and warriors who show strength through violence.

But that’s not what Jesus said. After Jesus had been going around curing people of all kinds of illnesses and pains and freeing them from demons, he felt compassion for those who were following him, and he sat down on a mountain to teach.

And instead of describing the hierarchy of society the way they understood it, he turned everything on its head, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are those who mourn…blessed are the meek…” and so on.

These are, of course, the types of people who were following Jesus around. People who were rich, powerful, fortunate, and ruthless aren’t as likely to feel the need for healing.

But the least, the last, and the lost? Those left behind by society—marginalized, stigmatized, ostracized? That’s exactly who felt compelled by Jesus’ message. That’s who Jesus was collecting—the nobodies.

But why would Jesus want to collect people like that?

He couldn’t become influential among the religious leaders with followers like that. He couldn’t gain political power with followers like that. He couldn’t build an army with followers like that.

But that’s exactly who he collected throughout his ministry. He got criticized for eating with tax collectors and sex workers and sinners—the nobodies of the first century.

He didn’t seek the favor of the influential or the charismatic or the well-resourced. He sought out the hurting, the heart-broken, the oppressed, and the down-trodden.

He didn’t make grand promises that they would get rich by following his investment plan or that they could manifest a better life by paying for his twelve-week course or that they could win friends and influence people if they read his book.

He welcomed people as they were and named them as blessed.

He did warn them, though, that if they followed him, they might be treated even worse by those in power. They might be persecuted, reviled, and spoken about negatively and untruthfully.

But, so were the prophets—ancestors in faith who God chose to speak difficult truths to God’s people, inviting them back into the way of life God gave them after freeing them from Egypt.

God doesn’t abide by the hierarchies we humanshonor. Instead, God turns them on their heads. After all, the “first will be last, and the last will be first.”

And those least, last, and lost people make up the great cloud of witnesses the writer of Hebrews talks about.

We celebrate All Saints Day today, and the word “saints” can evoke the “great” people of faith, the biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses and David and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Peter and Paul.

It can evoke the people the Roman Catholic Church has actually named  as saints,like St. Francis, St. Patrick, St. Oscar Romero, St. Joan of Arc, St. Theresa of Avila, and St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Or even non-official saints who we might view as personal heroes who accomplished great things or suffered unjust untimely deaths: Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Oskar Schindler, Matthew Shepard, Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many others.

And those are great people to look up to and learn about and be inspired by.But the great cloud of witnesses is mostly comprised of the least, the last, and the lost—the nobodies of every age—the flawed and human people like us—those who feel poor in spirit, who are meek, who, on this All Saints Day, mourn.

Grief is another thing our culture doesn’t make much room for. We’re expected to get on with our lives, to move on, even after the most significant people in our lives die. It’s not fair. It’s not realistic. It’s not compassionate or kind. It’s downright inhumane and inhuman not to make space for grief, as uncomfortable as it can be.

On this mixed bag of a holy day, we’re allowed to mourn, and we’re blessed for it. We’re encouraged to remember also that our loved ones and all our ancestors in faith—the greats and the nobodies—are cheering us on as the cloud of witnesses.

I’d like to close with a reminder from one of those who have gone before us: Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish author who died in Auschwitz, who left us this beautiful reminder about grief and its capacity to heal:

“Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.

“But if you do instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge — from which new sorrows will be born for others — then sorrow will never cease in this world. And if you have given sorrow the space it demands, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich.”

Today and always, may you be encouraged by the great cloud of blessed nobodiesas they cheer us on until we join them.