Matthew 5:1-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

When I first came to St. Paul’s, a parishioner who had non-profit experience offered to figure out the specifications needed for my new computer and to set up said computer along with a printer in my office. As a part of this, he had chosen a password for my computer, one that I could, of course, change later.

After I‘d been in the job for about a week, he and I met to go through all the information about my new machine. He was delighted to do this with me. But what delighted him even more was telling me the password he had chosen.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’re really going to like it,” he said.

“Oh, cool. What is it?” I asked.

“It’s Photina,” he said. “a saint of the Church. Photina,” he repeated.

Try as I might, I could not recall who Photina was. Later I would find out that “Photina,” a name derived from the Greek word for “light,” is the name Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions give to the unnamed Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel who meets Jesus at the well and after one conversation with him, takes her life in a new direction.

I tell you this little story because it’s a tiny window onto the Catholic sensibility, a sensibility alive here in this parish, that surrounds itself with the Saints—statues of the saints, medallions bearing images of the saints, icons of the saints, computer passwords that are the names of the saints and prayer lives that readily and without embarrassment call upon the saints.

This sensibility was not a part of my background, and I was shocked the first time I encountered it. I was a teenager, spending the night at a friend’s house whose mother was a devout Roman Catholic and robust lover of the saints. Everywhere I turned were prayer cards with pictures of St. Jude or St. Michael or some other more contemporary saint, rosary beads, crucifixes and framed pictures of the Virgin Mary, with little votives burning in front of them.

“What IS all this stuff?” I asked myself. “Why are perfectly reasonable people living in the middle of all these other people, who for the most part, appear to be dead?”

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, one of the major feasts of the Church. What we celebrate in this feast is that the love of God in Christ did not stay put but became manifest in the lives of men and women down through the ages. These men and women were not perfect, were not paragons of “spirituality” but were bold enough or humble enough, maybe even crazy enough, to live out the Gospel in their specific context. Often this put them at odds with their culture, an idea expressed in what we call “the Beatitudes:” Jesus declaration to his disciples about the counter-cultural, upside nature of who and what is blessed in kingdom.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are those who mourn…(he says). Blessed are the meek…Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness….Blessed are the merciful…Blessed are the pure in heart…Blessed are the peacemakers…Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake.”

This is the world of the Saints of God. Living in that world or out of that world view can get the Saints, and I might add, us, into a lot of trouble because it means we will run into our own and the world’s dishonoring of these people, these same efforts and energies.

Which brings me to us—to us, here and now, to you and to me. just trying to get through the many economic, vocational and personal challenges of our lives these days. All Saints is not just about the Saints in ages past, those in whose lives the love of God in Christ became manifest. All Saints is about us. All Saints is about our struggling with the same kind of challenges that they did, finding the same kind of trouble they did and living lives of blessing in the face of those challenges and that trouble. And the Feast of All Saints is about our not having to do any of these things alone—about living our lives surrounded, supported and inspired by a web of relationships, a community of Saints.

This change in the way we see who we are and what we are do and who we are in relationship with is a tremendous shift in our sensibility, for it involves not only internalizing that we live and move within a great web of relationships but it also means something important on a more fundamental level:

Roman Catholic author Andrew Greeley describes it this way. He is speaking here about Roman Catholicism, but, in doing so, he’s also describing something true about our Anglo-Catholic sensibility:

“Catholics,” he says, “live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads, and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hits of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.”

The object, events and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.

I wonder in what way you are being invited or prodded or buffeted into being a walking revelation of God’s grace. I wonder where you’re being asked to bless those who are poor in spirit or to bless your own poverty of spirit, to comfort to those who are mourning, to fill those who are hungry and to offer drink to those who thirst for a right relationship with God or with their neighbor. I wonder where you might be a peacemaker or where you might even be called to suffer some persecution for the sake of revealing God’s grace in the specific context of your life.

This, then, is what the statues and prayer cards and votive candles are really all about—God and the Church’s way of helping to shape us into the image of Christ—Christ who depends on us to continue his incarnation in the world.

Thomas Merton put it this way in words spoken to young men who were preparing to become monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani:

“There is only one thing for anybody to become in life. There is no point in becoming spiritual. It’s a waste of time—the whole thing, trying to make yourself spiritual. You’re not; it’s a waste of time. What you came here for, what you came anywhere for, is to become yourself, to discover your complete identity, to be you! But the catch to that, of course, is that our full identity as monks and as Christians is Christ. It is Christ in each one of us …I’ve got to become me in such a way that I am the Christ that can only be Christ in me.”

Works cited or consulted

Jon Sweeney: The Lure of the Saints: A Protestant Experience of Catholic Tradition.

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