by CCW | 1 November 2012 20:02
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.
The Beatitudes are the Christian manifesto of holiness. Blessedness is something substantial and objective in contrast to the passing forms of happiness which is, as the word itself suggests, all rather haphazard and chancy. Happiness comes and goes on the whims of our emotions and feelings. Blessedness is something else, something secure and sure.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace-makers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. A remarkable parade of qualities, they have a kind of eloquent power and completeness to them. They are all about the qualities of Christ’s grace at work in human lives. The ninth follows as the application of the eighth to us even more directly and intensely. “And blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”
And, yet, at first glance these things might trouble us. The kingdom of heaven is for the poor in spirit? The meek shall inherit the earth? To be sure. The grace of God is always more and other than the machinations of the powers of the world; always more and other than the vain imaginations of our hearts about ourselves. But poor in spirit? Yes. It doesn’t mean low self-esteem. No. It is the counter to the very human tendency to be rather full of ourselves, all puffed up with a sense of our own self-importance whether we are feeling sorry for ourselves or are all swelled up with pride. Being poor in spirit is about the humility which is open to God and to what God seeks for us in our lives; ultimately, that is the kingdom of heaven, the Communion of the Saints. That is about our life with one another and with God rather than being trapped in ourselves. What about the meek? It means being gentle and kind. Surely the qualities of gentleness and kindness are to be commended and encouraged; to be gentle and kind rather than brutal and brutish, don’t you think?
We cannot be naïve about human wickedness, about that strange perversity in our humanity that persecutes what is good and righteous, holy and true. The Beatitudes grant us the freedom to “rejoice and be exceeding glad”, knowing, like those who mourn who shall be comforted, that persecution and evil and the wickedness of the world are not the whole story. They have been overcome by the Cross of Christ.
With each of the Beatitudes there is a blessing which corresponds to each quality of soul. The blessings are about a kind of perfection, the perfection that belongs to the redemption of our humanity; indeed to the redemption of the human community. We are reminded of the conditions of our blessedness. They are found in the quality of our lives in Christ. He is our blessedness and the one who gathers us to himself out of a world of scattered leaves and scattered souls.
Fr. David Curry
Feast of All Saints
November 1st, 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/11/01/sermon-for-the-feast-of-all-saints/
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