A sermon for the Sunday after All Saints’ and All Souls’

 I don’t know how many of you are Beatles fans, but I watched the video of their new release, Now and Then, this week, recorded decades after half of them have died, and the intertwining of old and recent footage, present and past, creating something new and integrated reminded me somehow of this interplay of saints and souls, this life and eternity, blessing and the brutal hard work sometimes of being human.

The day will come, the Revelation says, the day will come when all of humanity, every aspect of every facet of the fractured image of God, will be reunited in awe and wonder around the throne of heaven. On that day, as at the beginning, humanity will be as one. As it was before we were divided, first in two, then into billions of scattered pieces, torn apart by deception and violence and held together by scraps of love; the day will come, the vision tells us, when all will know the glory of God, the mercy of the Lamb, the breath of the Spirit that unites us all, whether we see it or not.

In the meantime, says Jesus, there will be those who mourn. There will be those who are persecuted. There will be hunger, thirst, and suffering, in the meantime, but that doesn’t mean, that never means that God has abandoned us. To the contrary, God is never reaching closer than when we are most in need of God’s help, whether we see it or not.

Jesus preached this sermon, these Beatitudes, at the beginning of his ministry in Galilee. He preached to people hungry and thirsty for some good news. They came to him from all over: from Syria, Jerusalem, Jordan, the west bank and the east and the south. They came because they were drawn to him, who told the truth about God, and about mercy, and about mourning; because he didn’t pretend that all was well in the world, but neither did he leave them without hope.

Imagine the mother whose son had been forcibly conscripted by the Romans to make their crosses. She had little hope of seeing him again, and if she did, how would she recognize those hands that had become calloused by oppression and death? Jesus told her, “Blessed are you who mourn, for you will be comforted.” How did she hear that: Blessed to mourn?

What about the Israeli mother whose son has been missing for a month now, a month since the terror attacks befell, taking him hostage? Is there hope for her in the blessing of mourning?

What about the father in Gaza who told the world that it is a curse to be a parent there now, where thousands of children have perished in bombed out homes, hospitals, churches, and refugee camps.^[i] Thousands. How can Jesus say to him, “Blessed are you who mourn now, for you will be comforted”?

You have seen the meme, taken from a sermon by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, the ELCA pastor of the Christmas Church in Bethlehem, saying, “God is under the rubble.”^[ii]

Jesus told the people, his people, “Blessed are you because God mourns with you; blessed are you because in your sorrow you have come close to the heart of God, which is sorely grieved by oppression and death; the God who weeps with you beneath the rubble.”

And, blessed are you, because you will see your child again, at the resurrection.

Blessedness is not about material success nor even the absence of suffering in this life: it is about walking ever more closely with God. The closer we come, the greater our understanding of the rewards of mercy, the heights of humility, the purity of love, the power of peace. So yes, blessed are those who mourn when God Themself is weeping.

We have a Saviour who doesn’t downplay the enormity of suffering in the world, nor the existence of evil, of persecution, of the downright denial of righteousness and truth. Instead, he insists that the way of blessing is the way of God, no matter what the world might tell us. That mercy is stronger than murder, and humility more worthy than pride, that love endures even death, and that peace, peace is a more desirable goal than power.

You know, for all of its good news, the Gospel is a hard sell sometimes. The saints who came before us were not without their own troubles. I think of the martyrs of the early church, of Ignatius who was eager for the teeth of the lions, who saw blessedness in becoming one with Christ in the giving of his body, writing, 

Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body….^[iii]

Few of us, I suspect, would see blessedness that way, but as mad as Ignatius might have been, he understood that our blessedness, our satisfaction, our wholeness and our humanity are made fuller the closer we stand to Christ.

Not all of the people we remember today in our prayers are venerated as saints. We tend to conflate on this Sunday All Saints’ and All Soul’s Days; we remember the saints and angels who have shown us the way of the Cross in the footsteps of Jesus, and we remember those whom we have loved, who have taught us something about what it is for love to endure beyond death, what it is to believe in eternity, what it is to be comforted by the grace of God in our mourning. And for that, we call them saints, as well.

Because they are now in the closer presence of Jesus. They are blessed by the clear vision of God. They are gathered as one around the throne of heaven, and they know the peace that passes our understanding. This we believe, and we are comforted.

Like that Beatles video that remembers old collaborations and makes them new, I imagine them standing around the throne of God. Mary is still seated at Jesus’ feet; Martha is rushing around making sure everyone has a palm branch. My mother is there; although she wasn’t a saint, only a good woman who always did love children, close to the throne she has set up a nursery for the little ones lost to war, the new pogrom of the innocents in the Holy Land. Closer still to the heart of God, they are comforted. 

^[i] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/a-curse-to-be-a-parent-in-gaza-more-than-3600-palestinian-children-killed-in-just-3-weeks-of-war

^[ii] https://sojo.net/articles/god-under-rubble-gaza ; https://x.com/ShaneClaiborne/status/1719552240229269763?s=20

^[iii] The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0107.htm