Year A: November 1, 2020 | All Saints’ Day
All Saints Day, Year A: Matthew 5:1-12
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
November 1, 2020
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 20:05 in).
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” – I John 3:1[1]
Long before I ever thought about being a priest, I remember hearing someone say, “The best sermons are the ones you preach to yourself.” That’s some pretty solid advice. Preaching at a person or problem almost always creates more trouble than it fixes. But if you target your message toward yourself, you can assume (hopefully) that at least one person is listening. And often what’s true for one will prove true for others as well.
Two weeks ago[2] we talked about the “currency of the Kingdom,” how people, rather than money or possessions, are what God values and invests in. That turned out to be one of those “preach to yourself” sermons, and the idea continues to keep swirling around my brain. It certainly hasn’t been the case my whole life, but for years now I thought I had already established for myself that people are more important than things. I assumed that was a basic tenet to how I approach life. Boiled down, my little internal philosophy was essentially “people over property.”
While I’ve been repeating that to myself for ages and making my best effort to put “people first” in both my words and my actions, the statement suddenly feels inadequate. Or rather, what I prided myself on as solid efforts now appear so underwhelming that I almost feel ashamed about them, like I’m waking up from some sort of massive delusion.
Knowing how ubiquitous and important any form of money is to our world, viewing people as God’s cosmic coinage—divinity’s image and mark of ownership indelibly stamped into one of the most genuinely scarce and fleeting resources in the universe—human life; God’s immutable claim on humanity not just as a generic whole but all the way down to each individual person, no matter how insignificant the rest of us may think they are—has really upended my understanding of the world.
“People over property” wasn’t a bad catchphrase, but the way I approached the statement turned out to be treating the two things like rough equivalents: people have value, and property has value; if a situation pits one against the other, I know I should choose people as more valuable in that instance—but not for any particularly important reason. It just seems like the polite thing to do.
However, identifying this “currency of the Kingdom” concept exposes a completely different level of reality. “People” and “property” aren’t rough equivalents in value. They turn out to be massively different, completely unrelatable categories, with people being on such a scale of importance and uniqueness that property can’t really even register. It’s like comparing the value, potential, and opportunities of a billionaire’s fortune against that of a banana peel rotting in the compost bin. Banana peels do have a use: protecting the flesh growing inside them. But once you’ve eaten the fruit, the peel really isn’t good for much other than turning back into dirt. Likewise, property is useful for a time, but ultimately, every single one of us will end up casting all our possessions aside.
People, on the other hand, have an entirely distinct, God-given value such that even if the whole world’s economy implodes, if every means of commerce is instantly eliminated with no hope of return, if gold and money lose all their value right now, your investment in a person will still continue to bring ongoing returns, ones that could last long beyond your own lifetime.
My brain is still grappling with these ideas, so I’m sorry if this feels rambly or overworked. My private motto seems to be morphing from “people over property” to sometime more like “People. Only people.” And I’m barely starting to work through the most basic implications of that revelation.
“People. Only people.” is rewiring a lot about what I’ve understood Jesus to say, too. Statements I always viewed as a little bit hyperbolic or needlessly expository have taken on a completely new significance. For example, when I hear “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”[3] or “store up for yourself treasures in heaven,”[4] how do I approach that goal when those treasures turn out to be fellow human lives, not just the ephemeral and intangible (though still important) acts of service to God I might bring to the world?
It also started me rethinking what Jesus might be saying in today’s Gospel reading. Last All Saints’ Day I talked a little about my discomfort with the word “bless.” I always hear it as Christian jargon, one of those terms church people frequently use even though no one is exactly sure what it means. You might remember that the word Jesus uses here literally translates as something more like “happy” or “blissful” and that it often refers to the spirits of the peaceful dead, those truly and permanently at rest.
But these past two weeks I’ve started to wonder if we haven’t been missing out on a subtle connotation or colloquial usage with this word. After all, in our world, many who mourn rarely receive comfort, and the meek almost never inherit anything, much less the earth. I can’t imagine it was all that much better in Jesus’ day. So the question for me becomes, what if the word for “blessing” holds more of a suggestion of value or desirability than simply that of happiness?
There is some evidence to corroborate my hypothesis. It turns out that this “blessed” word— μακάριος (Latinized spelling: makarios)—can indeed carry different shades of meaning, especially when it appears in writing. If you picked up a personal letter back in Jesus’ era, makarios was often the first word you would see. It was a kind of honorific. An author would have used makarios like someone today might start their message with “dearest Steve” or “most beloved Sally.”
While I can’t guarantee that Matthew is using the word in the sense of esteem or relational valuation rather than a descriptor of happiness, it’s certainly a valid consideration. And to me, thinking about Jesus talking in a way that brings honor to people living under dehumanizing circumstances—making declarations that emphasize their inherent dignity—feels a lot kinder and opens up a deeper sensibility to the passage than just telling the poverty-stricken, starving, and abused to be happy in their current misery because, if they just hold on a little longer, something nice might happen to them later. Reading this familiar passage through a “People. Only people.” lens, listen to how the tone shifts:
“Dearly treasured are those who can’t breathe:[5]
the Reign of the Heavens is already theirs.
“Dearly treasured are the miserable:
they will be attended to.
“Dearly treasured are the gentle:
they will inherit this land.
“Dearly treasured are those who crave and yearn for justice:
they will be satisfied.
“Dearly treasured are the pitiful:
they will be pitied.
“Dearly treasured are the open hearted:
they will receive God into their presence.
“Dearly treasured are those who work toward peace:
they will be summoned as godly children.
“Dearly treasured are those who are pursued because of justice:
the Reign of the Heavens is already theirs.
“Dearly treasured are all of you whenever others might disgrace you or pursue you or, lying to themselves, call you completely useless because of me. Since they pursued the prophets in the same way before you, you can all be cheerful and even celebrate yourselves: your substantial settlement rests among the Heavens.”[6]
All of a sudden, the Beatitudes really do turn the world upside down. Hearing Jesus declare the worthiness of the least respected in this way makes me rethink my own values and how I might approach another person, even one I think of as “lesser.” Even an enemy. And what sounded like hopeful but, if we’re being honest with ourselves, empty promises truly becomes “Good News.”
So why am I getting into this now—why go all in on this new mantra for All Saints’ Day?
We often assume the saints were remarkable followers of Christ from the past. If you look at the idea in a slightly more technical vein, you might say every Christian is a saint—past, present, and future. But what if a saint isn’t “saintly” because of their faithfulness and service to God? What if it isn’t because of some incredible commitment to God’s Kingdom? What if that’s just what people are? What if a saint is a saint solely because they’re “dearly treasured”? Could that really be how God views every single one of us? If people really are the currency of the Kingdom, stamped with the loving Creator’s eternal seal of ownership, that makes every single human—every individual who ever has or ever will live—a saint.
How would you treat a saint? If you’re like me, you probably imagine that you would show them respect and do everything in your power to support them and help them on their way. But how would you react if it were Francis who cut you off without using his turn signal? How impatient would you be if you knew that Paul was the one fumbling with all his coupons and digging for exact change at the register? What would you think of Mary when you see her pitching her tent in that encampment under the I-90 interchange?
How would you react? What would you say? What would you do?
What would happen if we recognized every single person we encounter as a real live saint? How would that affect our relationships, our interactions—even our spending habits? How might the world itself transform if all of Christ’s followers could grasp the reality that, in truth, we are all saints?
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version unless differently noted.
[2] http://www.slouchingdog.com/sermons/2020/10/18/year-a-october-18-2020-proper-24
[3] Matthew 6:21
[4] Matthew 6:20a
[5] A more literal translation of “poor in spirit” would be “indigent [or severely lacking] within the breath”
[6] Matthew 5:3-6 | my translation