All Saints’ Day Matthew 5:1-12
This week’s gospel, the beatitudes, is often read as a sort of conversation with the 10 commandments. Jesus, like Moses, goes up a mountain. He sits among his disciples as a Rabbi would, and teaches. Some read this as a replacement of the 10 commandments, as Christianity getting it right where Judaism didn’t. But that reading, aside from posing dangerous supersessionist ideas that have supported problematic views of the world such as Nazism, that reading is just plain wrong. Jesus, as a Jew, isn’t dismissing the commandments that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. Rather, in ministry, Jesus draws the commandments into conversation with the everyday realities of the crowd that surrounds him. By presenting the Beatitudes in a form that mirrors the receiving of the 10 commandments, the writer of today’s reading places the work of Jesus, the work of the gospel, in a history of believers receiving God’s truth.
Indeed, the book of Matthew begins by linking Jesus to the voices of the Patriarchs and prophets, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Boaz and Ruth and Jesse and David (I skipped a few names), but you get the point. These Beatitudes, Jesus’ teachings, do not come out of thin air, they participate in a history of people listening to God and receiving God’s commandments.
These journeys are not ones of simply hearing God’s commandments, but wrestling with what it means to live out those commandments. These revered characters in the Old Testament that Jesus is following, didn’t always get it right. My sermon is too short to summarize the unheroic, distasteful and violent deeds of these saints of the old testament, but let’s just say there was a lot of doubt, murder, deception, theft, and adultery on the journey to understand and live out God’s commandments. In others words, it’s not easy, it’s not simple to live in truth. And Jesus knew this. He knew this, as he sat on that mountain surrounded by crowds. He knew this, as he offered his own reading of the 10 commandments. He knew this as he participated in a community of believers attempting to understand and articulate God’s truth.
This Sunday, we have another call to remember those that have gone before. Today is All Saint’s day, a day where we commemorate saints, known and unknown. The collect of the day and the scripture readings remind us that we are surrounded by a multitude of Saints who journey with us as we strive to live out God’s truth. This journey we are on is one that others have traveled before. As we seek to live in the way of justice and truth, we are not alone. When we invite one another into a deeper understanding of God, our voices echo those of Saints before us. In other words, the Christian life, the work to understand and live out God’s truth, is not something done alone. God’s truth is not something understood outside the histories of the saints of the Christian faith. It is an ongoing dialogue with believers. God’s commandments can only be understood in conversation, in community. And what a community of Saints we have to be in conversation with.
Friends, today there is another pressing reality that must be acknowledged, the election. I’m sure we all feel the anxiety of this moment, a fear, at times legitimate, pressing in as we approach November 3rd. I am often told that the church is not a place for politics, I’m not sure I agree, but that is a topic for another sermon. Regardless of your thoughts on separation of church and state, the church is a community of people seeking to live in God’s truth and in this light, the current clinging to a false sense of truth that takes place on both sides of this election, is problematic. On both sides there is a tendency to see Tuesday almost as apocalyptic, an either or, a do or die. This sense of absolutes is problematic. One person, one party does not hold the keys to the kingdom. Please do not hear me dismissing the significance of this election. There is a lot at stake, more for some of us than others. But seeing either side of the political spectrum as holding an absolute understanding of justice, as knowing some sort of truth, is a dangerous dismissal of the complexities of God’s commandments, a dangerous dismissal of the work of living faithfully in community with one another. Wrapping oneself in the insular practice of politics risks cutting us off from our communities that are striving together towards an understanding of God’s truth. Christianity is a faith built on community, on working through what it means to believe in conversation with others, with others that might disagree with you, with those whose political choices threaten your own rights, with people who make your blood boil. But Christianity is a faith that acknowledges this ongoing journey towards God’s truth. And it is a faith blessed by voices of saints and prophets, people who have had difficult conversations befores us, people whose imperfect lives we might not agree with, but who inform our current beliefs. Christianity is faith done in community where the messianic son blesses us by retelling the commandments of his father. Christianity is working towards truth in conversation with one another.
Tuesday will come and go. Important things will be decided. And while I do not know who our president will be or which party will control the house and the senate, I do know that there will still be work to do. I know there will be hard conversations that must continue. We are continually working to understand the breadth of God’s truth, the breadth of God’s blessings. And this work must take place in community.
As you journey through a week built on divisions, return to these scriptures, to the son’s journey to grasp the father’s commandments. Remember the Saints, whose imperfect lives speak to our present injustices. And, return to this space. recall these faces, these voices, the names of believers that accompany us on this journey. The work of God’s truth is not red or blue, it is not won or lost. The work of God is here in the ongoing work of community, listening together to the truths spoken in each of our lives.
I pray we will return again and again to the difficult conversations of community as we continue the blessed work of the Saints, the blessed work of God’s kingdom.
Amen