My Sermon for All Saints Sunday

I feel like my All Saints Sunday sermon was a good one, so I'm going to post it here.  This line came to me late, as I was about to print the sermon.  It's my favorite part:   "We live in a culture that tells us it’s better to be a Kardashian than a Christian, better to be a celebrity than a saint. And so many of us make the same mistake of seeing ourselves with the eyes of our culture rather than the way that God sees us."

Here's the whole sermon:

The Sermon for Sunday, November 5, 2023

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott

 

 

Matthew 5:1-12

 

 

I know that for many of us, All Saints Sunday isn’t our favorite church day; it can be painful, whether we’ve lost a loved one in the last year or long ago.  I’ve talked to more than one person who avoided this service the first year after a loved one died, and one member of my quilt group says she avoids this service every year because the loss of her mother still hurts, 19 years later.

 

And it’s been a tough year in terms of other losses.  For those of us who thought that human history was on a trajectory away from prejudice, hatred and war, this year has been a challenge.  It can be hard to believe the words of the Gospel that those who mourn will be comforted.

 

Or maybe we want to know when—when will we be comforted?  Maybe instead of a worship service of remembrance, we’d prefer a time of lament.  Maybe lament scares us, because some part of us believes that a vengeful God or a version of fate will take away the good parts of our lives that are left.  But dip in and out of the Psalms, and you’ll see that lament has always been part of the spiritual journey—for a more bracing experience, read the book of Lamentations.

 

We may also dislike this festival day because we focus too much on the saints who have gone before us, saints who were less than saintly, many of them, it not most of them.

 

We tend to forget that all the saints that came before us were flesh and blood humans (including Jesus). We think of people like Martin Luther as perfect people who had no faults who launched a revolution. In fact, you could make the argument that many revolutions are launched precisely because of people's faults: they're bullheaded, so they're not likely to make nice and be quiet and ignore injustice. They're hopelessly naive and idealistic, so they stick to their views of how people of faith should live--and they expect the rest of us to conform to their visions. They refuse to bow to authority because they answer to a higher power--and so, they translate the Bible into native languages, fund colleges, rescue people in danger, insist on soup kitchens, write poems, and build affordable housing.

The world changes (for the better and the worse) because of the visions of perfectly ordinary people--and because their faith moves them into actions that support that vision. If we're lucky, those people are working towards the same vision of the inclusive Kingdom that Jesus came to show us.

 

I realize that for some of us, this day that celebrates saints both ancient and modern can make us feel inadequate.  We might think about our relatives of just a few generations ago who built things that are still here—I’m thinking of literal buildings, like the ones built at the church camp, Lutheridge.  The original buildings need much less maintenance than the newer buildings, that’s the kind of strong foundation that past generations left behind.

 

But sometimes, it’s not always clear what we’re creating at the time or what we’re building, what will be left behind when we’re gone.

 

We might think of a man like Fred Rogers, known to generations of children as Mr. Rogers.  He was ordained a Presbyterian minister.  But instead of going the route of traditional ministry, which might have won him more respect at the time, he wanted to see if he could harness the power of this new medium, television, to teach children.  After many decades of success, it might be hard to remember how much of a risk Fred Rogers took with this path.  Indeed, he had to periodically go back to his church elders to justify and maintain his ordination.

 

This All Saints Day, I’m also thinking of my brother in law, Carl’s younger brother, who had a massive heart attack and died in June.  He didn’t see himself as anything special.  I remember a conversation I had with him in January of 2022.  I asked him when he was scheduled to graduate.  He said, “Next May.  Unless I flunk out.”

 

He was likely far from flunking out, but that’s not how he saw himself.  I wish he could have heard the tributes in the days after his death, how his daily life was such a blessing to so many, in his work with the seminary, his work with neighborhood churches, his work with underserved children.

 

He would not have seen himself as a saint, in part because we live in a larger culture that tells us that working with just 10 children is not nearly as impressive as being Mr. Rogers.  We live in a culture that tells us it’s better to be a Kardashian than a Christian, better to be a celebrity than a saint.  And so many of us make the same mistake of seeing ourselves with the eyes of our culture rather than the way that God sees us.

 

We don’t always know the full extent of the good that we are manifesting in the world.  We don’t have to nail our 95 theses on the Wittenberg door to bring good into the world.  We can put our loose change into cans for noisy offering, and a month later, we’ve been part of raising hundreds of dollars for a pet shelter.

 

Dream a little on this All Saints Sunday. If you could create a new life out of the threads that you have, what would you weave? Or would you start again, with different yarns and textures? What is your dream of a renewed life, a resurrected life?

Jesus invites us to be part of a Resurrection Culture. We may not always understand how that will work. Some years the taste of ash and salt water seem so pervasive that we may despair of ever tending fruitful gardens of our lives again. But Jesus promises that death will not have the final word.  Today, as we remember the saints that have gone before us, let us give thanks for their witness, and a prayer that our own witness will similarly nourish generations to come.