Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
All Saints Sunday
November 4, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 6:20-31
Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
One of the first places I went during my trip to Deer Isle, Maine, a week ago was to the town dump. Famous all over the state for abandoned items that local sculptors find and turn into funky artwork, I had gone there to unload the first of many bags of garbage and recycling needed to clean out our house for its closing in November, a financial closing to be sure, but also the closing of a segment of my life.
I had stopped on the west end of the dump to look at a towering pile of old lobster traps and tangled nets left by local fishermen and women at the end of their fishing season, when a figure right out of the Old Testament prophets came up to me. His facial features were asymmetrical: one eye higher than another, one ear higher than another. His hair, unwashed for many days, stood straight up on one side. His clothes were torn and patched. And he was trying to tell me a joke.
It was a joke about a little boy who calls someone on the phone and who is telling the person called about a series of disturbing things happening in his home, all described in terms of the sounds they make—an ambulance has arrived, a fire truck is there, the police have arrived. But try as the listener might, he cannot get any information from the boy abut exactly what is going on in the home. Finally, we find out why in the punch line of the joke. The little boy cannot describe what has happened in that he is calling from a dark closet into which he has shut himself.
As I drove away from the dump, I thought, what was that guy trying to tell me? Is he telling me that he’s in a dark closet? Is he telling me that he knows that I’m feeling as if I’m in a dark closet? Or is he just trying to tell me a not-so-funny joke?
And so all week I thought about him: his odd face, his eyes and his mouth already smiling a bit in anticipation of the punch line; the image of the little boy all alone in the dark closet unable to tell the person he’s called that he’s afraid, and against the backdrop of these two, the towering mass of lobster traps and tangled nets, tools of the trade for those who make their living from a sea that teems with life and danger.
When I was in seminary I had a homiletics professor who was a prophet of a different sort. He liked to challenge the theology we had in our sermons asking us embarrassingly pointed questions about what we really stood by, what we really staked our life on.
One person in the class had preached a sermon on our gospel for today, Luke’s version of what we call the Beatitudes. The preacher, probably out of perplexity about what to do with the Beatitudes had decided to focus on the last section of the passage, the one about desirable and outrageous Christian behaviors. And so the sermon focused on all the things we each need to do as Christian people, hard things like loving our enemies, praying for those who abuse us, and turning the other cheek.
After listening respectfully, and offering our comments to our classmate, our homiletics professor couldn’t contain himself any longer. “Listen, people,” he said, “This is not a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps religion. The purpose of a sermon is not to exhort others to earn their way into a relationship with God even through laudable behavior. No, the love of our God in Christ is like a net stretching across the universe, and in our baptism, no, even before that, at our conception, we are gathered into that net. It isn’t possible, no matter what we do, to earn our way into that net and, I believe, it isn’t possible, no matter what we do, to fall our way out of that net.”
“Blessed are you,” he said, “and blessed are they. Do you get it? If you do, go and preach that and let any comments about your and their behavior come out of that net!”
At the time I had thought—how rude, how mean, but at other times, when I felt like a child in a dark closet trying to make contact with someone, anyone, I have clung to those words. The love of our God in Christ is like a net strung across the universe. It is impossible to earn our way into that net. It is impossible to fall out of that net. And so we are blessed even when poor, when in mourning, when afraid in a dark closet, when unwashed and funny-looking and intercepting strangers trying to tell them jokes that they will not understand, when at the many dumps of our lives disposing of the precious things of the past, not because we want to, but because we have to. We are blessed.
Today is the Feast of All Saints, the day when we celebrate our profound and saving connection to one another in Christ. Today is also a day that the church baptizes new Christians, extending the communion of the Saints. This morning we will be baptizing an adult, Neil Snyder and a child, Katja Albert.
In this baptism, God and we are tying two new knots in the net that is God’s love in the world—two new knots in the net that is the communion of Saints. This act binds them to God and to us, and binds us to them. It also extends the net of God’s love more fully across this world of ours, a net which is never abstract or theoretical, but is made up of the specific concrete presence we as a people bring to the world and the specific actions we as a people take in the world—those difficult, even outrageous actions our gospel speaks of. Neil and Katja will now become a part of this net, and in doing so, will find themselves caught and held and catching and holding others.
On Saturday of the week I was in Maine, Byron Gross, a 64-year old Deer Isle fisherman, took his boat out into the water off Little Deer Isle to haul in his lobster traps for the season. That morning the weather turned unexpectedly windy, the water unexpectedly choppy. By late that night he had not returned home. In the morning his boat was found, run aground with his traps aboard, but with no trace of Byron.
On Sunday morning, I was at St. Brendan the Navigator, the Episcopal Church on Deer Isle. During the Prayers of the People, Skip Greenlaw, a member at St. Brendan’s who is connected to the fishing community, asked that we offer prayers for Byron, a fisherman lost at sea, for his family, and for all fishermen and women. The congregation, who for the most part had not heard the news, let out a slight gasp or was it one great sigh together? But then, in silence, what I seemed to see was that each person reached out his or her hand to the person standing next to him or her. And what formed, it seemed to me, was a net—a net that Byron, lost at sea, was held in, a net that Byron’s family would be caught in, a net both of prayer and of compassionate acts that would flow towards them in the coming days and weeks and, months, and probably, years.
And so blessed are you, blessed are all you Saints: those who are weeping and those who are poor; those who continue to try to earn the love of God and those who are trying to escape it; those who love their enemies and turn the other cheek; those lost at sea and those found this morning in the waters of baptism. Blessed are you for you are all held in the net of the love of God in Christ.
