St.
Alban's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas
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Austin, Texas
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From the Pulpit:
Good morning, Saints! How does that feel, to be addressed as saints? A little odd? Like I might not call you a saint if I really knew you? Like if we claim to be saints we’re setting ourselves above other people? Well, I hope we’re going to get over that today and that we’ll march out of here singing, “I sing a song of the saints of God and I mean to be one, too!” And that not only will we really mean it, but we’ll feel good about it, too. Just as we do every year on the Feast of All Saints we read the words of Jesus we know as the Beatitudes. Beatitude is simply the Latin word for blessed. Last year we read them in Matthew’s version, which are not quite as hard to swallow as Luke’s. Matthew says ‘blessed are the poor in spirit,’ but Luke is more straightforward and simply says ‘blessed are the poor.’ Either way, today’s reading is so familiar that it is one we are likely not to hear very deeply. It doesn’t shake us up, all those ‘blessed are’s.’ We’re likely to hear them as unconsciously as a poem we were forced to memorize in fifth grade. One of my teachers, as I was learning to preach, said always to begin with the place in the scripture where you stub your toe. When I read this passage carefully, though, that’s not much help to me as I open up the Pandora’s box of the Beatitudes because I stub my toe everywhere I turn. “Wait a second,” I want to say, “this doesn’t make any sense.” And then I look at what it actually says, and it stops me in my tracks. This is not the way the world works. I’ve seen what happens to the meek, the poor, the merciful, the pure in heart, and it is not pretty. It’s a tough world, and these folks get beat up all the time. I imagine the people who listened to Jesus as he preached to them on a flat plain said pretty much the same thing. This simply is not the way the world works. And I can see Jesus taking a pregnant pause and responding, “That’s the whole point.” That’s not the way this world works. One way to listen to the Beatitudes with fresh ears is to hear the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases them in The Message. For those of you who are not familiar with it, The Message is a rendering of the Bible in which Peterson is faithful to the meaning of scripture without sticking to a word for word translation. He uses very contemporary idiom. In less responsible hands that would be a bad idea, but Peterson’s work is both user friendly and faithful. He gives us the Beatitudes in these words: You’re blessed when you come to the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are – no more, no less. That’s the moment when you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat. You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being care-full, you’ll find yourselves cared for. You’re blessed when you get your inside world put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family. You’re blessed, dear saints. We’re all blessed. That alone gives us pause. What does it mean to be blessed? It means to be happy, happy in the sense that I hope each of us experiences from time to time when we stop in our busy lives and become aware of what we have been given. This is not happiness according to the marketplace, and no matter what Thomas Jefferson said, it is not something that can be pursued. This happiness has nothing to do with our appetites or keeping up with trends or the Joneses. True happiness is the by-product of living well, of living authentically, as who we are as the beloved children of God. More than anything else it has to do with gratitude. Think of all the things we are grateful for. The crisp air of an autumn morning. The sparkle in the eyes of someone who is delighted to see you. The sound of our voices raised in song, the greetings we share in Christ’s name when we pass the peace, the thin white wafer pressed into our palm and the red wine in the shiny silver chalice. We are grateful to God and to the saints who went before us and who gave us the gift of our precious parish and all the appointments we need in order to worship here. Many of you can picture in your mind’s eye the faces of saints who have passed on and feel their presence as if they were here today. I love hearing the stories of these people whom I will never meet in this world but who are such integral members of this parish as it is today and as it will be when the last one of us is gone as well. I spent a lot of this week in airports and on airplanes. For somebody who likes to read as much as I do that is not a bad thing at all. As I was dashing out the door to leave I grabbed a book that had been sitting on the shelf for a year or two and that I had been meaning to get around to. Obviously I was meant to read it this week. It is called Becoming a Blessed Church, and the author spends quite a bit of time talking about what he means by the words blessed and blessing. I could give you a long lecture now, but I’m not going to. I imagine that you’ll be hearing more about this book because it is quite meaningful and encouraging to me. What I want to share with you this morning, at this very special time in the life of our parish, is something that gets lost in the shuffle in many churches as they track their growth and worry over their budgets, as they let themselves get consumed over what the megachurch down the street is doing and what new programs need to be offered, or as they let themselves take sides on the kinds of debates that stir up news. What I want to share with you this morning is that it is all about those little candles that we give to our baptismal candidates. We light them directly from our Paschal candle, that is the candle that shines as the symbol of resurrection. It is something we can look at and know that Christ is among us, and when I hand the newly baptized person their candle I say, “This is the light of Christ that shines in your heart.” Can you find that light of Christ in your heart? If you’ve been baptized it is there, and there is nothing in this world that can extinguish it. We have received it from the God who created us, and when we shine it to the world, we are doing God’s work. The thing about blessing is that it is about the flow of God’s goodness, and each and every one of us is called to share all the blessing that God has given us, to shine our portion of that light to the world. We’ll do it next Sunday when we worship together – and please, please remember that we’re all worshiping at 10:00, just one service – and when we bring our offerings of gratitude to God and our commitment to this parish family and place our pledges on the altar. That will be a picture of what blessing looks like. Some of the saints were larger than life. We know their names – Peter and Paul, Augustine, Benedict, Francis, Catherine, Theresa, Clare. But there are more saints whose names we don’t know, who don’t have individual feast days set aside, but lived lives that exemplified what the light of Christ looks like. Today is their day. There’s an old Methodist hymn that expresses to me what that kind of sainthood means. It goes like this: Brightly beams our
Father’s mercy I know you’ve heard me talk about the summer camp I went to when I was a child. It was in Vermont, and the nights were darker there than just about anywhere else I have been on earth. We slept in tents on the hillside, and swam in the cold water of Lake Fairlee, desperately trying not to put our toes down on the slimy bottom, but it was not a dangerous place. There were no rocky shores for ships to run aground, but at night, from my cot as I looked out the tent-flaps I took comfort in the little lights of summer cabins and campsites that gave shape to the shore of the lake. They showed me the places where people were awake, and knowing that people out there were still watching, I felt safe to go to sleep. I think we are all like that, little lights that shine in the darkness for each other. None of us has to be the megawatt searchlight or the piercing strobe light. All that is asked of us saints is to let our light shine, to take it out from under the bushel basket, to tend it and be grateful for it and to be true to the source from which it comes. We are called by love to receive God’s blessing and to let it flow through us, not to grasp it and try to keep it to ourselves. We are called to be true to the source from which it comes and open to receive the blessings God still has to give us. As the saints of God we define the shape of the kingdom as it is being fulfilled on our own hillside, in our own lives, and in the world. Amen.
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05/16/2008 | ||||||
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The
Rev. Margaret Waters