Sermon for the Feast of All Saints
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
In the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering. In the greyness of the year comes Christ the King striding across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into glory (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). It is the glory of the Communion of Saints.
All Saints’ Day recalls us to the vocation of our humanity. We are not called to heroic pretension and presumption but to holiness. We are called to the Communion of Saints. An article of Faith, the lovely vision of the City of God is nothing less than a vision of our redeemed humanity. It signals what God seeks and wills for us and reminds us that our life in Faith always places us in a community. But what kind of community?
The Gospel reading for All Saints shows us. It is a spiritual community defined by blessedness, the blessedness that comes from God to us and is about nothing less than the grace of God at work in human hearts. There is at once diversity and unity to our life in the Communion of Saints. Nowhere is that signaled more profoundly perhaps than in the Sermon on the Mount, in what is known as well as the Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes are counter-culture both with respect to the ancient and the contemporary world. They counter our self-absorption, the narcissism and the nihilism that surround us and defeat us. They challenge us precisely because the Beatitudes place our lives upon the foundation of heavenly grace. They do so in the awareness of the limits of human life and experience considered simply in itself.
