Everybody likes the Beatitudes from the gospel of Matthew. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That’s how they begin and what follows is one beautiful blessing after another. “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.” “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.” I have heard the Beatitudes from Matthew read at funerals and weddings; I have seen them printed on posters and cards. I have looked at them framed in church lobbies and chapels. But I have never ever seen the Beatitudes according to Luke, the passage we heard this morning, anywhere in the public arena. That’s because Luke’s version is so much more disturbing and edgy. In Luke’s text, Jesus takes a cue from the Old Testament prophets, doling out not only blessings but also woes, warnings and curses, speaking about rich and poor in ways that makes most people uncomfortable. The difference between these twin texts couldn’t be more stark. The Beatitudes according to Matthew are part of Jesus’ sermon on the mount. They are high, majestic and gorgeous. The Beatitudes according to Luke are part of Jesus’ sermon on then plain – and plain they are, getting right into the meat of the matter.
So now this is the gospel lesson for All Saints Day and frankly, I ran out of excuses to avoid it. I wanted to pick a different text like I sometimes do, but I felt that God was nudging me to take another look at this controversial passage. Sometimes, the Holy Spirit whispered, the most uncomfortable texts of the Holy Scriptures are also the most important ones. Listen to them! And the most beautiful texts – tend to be misunderstood, trivialized or sentimentalized. What Jesus is pointing at here is anything but sentimental: he is pointing at poverty – ugly, desperate poverty, one of the most vicious cycles anyone can be caught up in.
Apparently, I needed a reminder of the poverty some people suffer in our community. God sent me a reminder in the form of a young mother who patiently waited for me here at church as I came in on Friday morning. She asked for help. Let me be upfront: I cannot say that I really helped her. Her situation, like those of many people who struggle to keep a roof over their head, was complicated and layered. And, like many people who are poor, she dreaded going to the shelter system, was suspicious of social workers and phone numbers of aid organizations. Like many people, rich or poor, her story had some contradictions. Like many people, rich or poor, she was stubborn, proud and she may be suffering from a mental disorder. I was trying to get her to speak with someone at Manna on Main Street and she refused. I spent about an hour listening to her and trying to help in some way beyond the immediate need. I finally ended up giving her a prayer and $ 20, really the least I could do. Poverty is so complicated and so frustrating, because so many things come together, lining up against a person and a person’s fate and future. I am tempted to say, “Only God can help you!” – And while that is true, it would also be cheap on my part.
Friday morning is the time when I usually concentrate on scripture and write my sermon for Sunday. This Friday it was noon by the time I could focus on that. But as I looked at this text again and the raw emotion that our Lord unleashes with his blessings and woes, I felt that God is asking us through this text to be more emotionally connected to the fate of the poorest in our community. I compare what Jesus says here to an unfiltered cigarette. I know, I am not supposed to talk about smoking in church, except maybe for incense. Through a cigarette people take in all kinds of unhealthy fumes that can cause cancer and make them sick. But an unfiltered cigarette is even worse. It literally brings poison into your lungs. This passage from Luke is like an unfiltered cigarette. We get the raw emotion and poison of God’s anger over the plight of some members of our community and people’s unwillingness or inability to help and share and value justice. It’s not a pretty text and it makes very generalizing judgments; but in this case, it’s not so much the words that we need to pay attention to, but the emotion. God, Jesus says, is deeply disturbed when people suffer. Let us not turn our eyes away from them!
We are celebrating All Saints today. Let me tell you, in Jesus’ view we are all saints, all of us capable of growing beyond our natural limitations, all of us able to rise above selfishness, learning to share and to give. Can we find that core in us that God has planted in our souls? It is by no means incidental that so many of the official saints of the church, the ones that you find in books and calendars, the ones that we sometimes remember in our readings on Sundays, were people who cared for the poor. Who was Francis of Assisi? A crazy person! He threw away a life of affluence and comfort for what? Being close to the poor and, he would have said, being closer to God! Who was Mother Theresa? A crazy woman! It seemed like she was taking on the city of Calcutta in India by herself, a poverty metropolis at the time – to serve the poor. And be closer to God. No, we cannot celebrate All Saints Day just by singing nice hymns. We have to remember what the saints that walked in faith before us did and what they gave up and how they found God – in most cases by acts of kindness and compassion and generosity and unselfishness towards the least of our brothers and sisters.
I think it’s fair to say that our church has experienced a little bit of anxiety over our budget for next year. Probably for good reasons. Maybe for a lack of faith, I don’t know. And some people have expressed concern that other, competing drives that happen to support poor people – like the Farm for Haiti – may get in the way. We have raised $ 7500 so far this year for a farm that will be built in Haiti next year to support the poorest of the poor in that country. We have not asked people from our congregation for donations, deliberately; the crowd funding link has been quietly sitting on our website, drawing not a lot of attention. Now I wonder whether Jesus agrees with my cautious approach. I wonder whether Jesus thinks that that’s all we can do as God’s saints. Let us take a few lessons from the saints of the church and not just adore them, but learn from them! And seek God where God is most likely to be: among those who need our help!
Amen.