As the posters around the church have been advertising, next Sunday is Consecration Sunday. Which means this morning is the morning I am supposed to say something insightful about stewardship. In addition, of course, to saints and the beatitudes. At first, I was not terribly excited about this combination of events. In fact, I will admit to Gloria that this sermon I am about to give is actually the second sermon I wrote for this weekend. In the first I ignored stewardship completely. And it was a pretty decent sermon. But then I went for a run, and as so often happens to me, I think it has something to do with not getting enough oxygen, the Holy Spirit proved to have a different plan for this morning’s sermon. In fact, the Holy Spirit seemed convinced that All Saints and the beatitudes have pretty important wisdom to share with us as we think about stewardship. So, against my initial desire but at the Holy Spirit’s urging, here is my sermon on All Saints, the beatitudes, and stewardship, and why all three are good news for us.
This sermon took the Holy Spirit’s urging because I don’t really like to preach about stewardship. And that really has more to do with my own struggles with the concept than it does about God. I am at a place in my life now where I can tithe, that has not always been the case. But I still wonder if I’m being generous enough, or too generous, am I managing the gifts God has given me the best I can? And while I frequently preach on things I don’t fully understand, that’s sort of the story of faith, money feels like a more complicated issue. I feel like how can I tell you about what is and is not faithful giving when I’m really not sure what that looks like in my own life. So I have to sort of get over myself in sermons about stewardship, and trust that somehow God finds my trying to be enough. I think this is where the saints really help us out.
I’d guess on any other day, if I asked you what a saint was, you would probably say a holy person, a Godly person, maybe a really good person. You might give Mother Teresa as an example, or Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe you’d think of one of the classics, like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Paul. But today invites us to remember ordinary saints, people who, when you think back on their lives of faith, you remember the ways they taught you, guided you, mentored you, challenged you, but you can also think back and, with that wry smile you only have toward someone you truly love, you can think, yes, he or she was truly a saint, but maybe not all the time…
One such saint who I remember this All Saints day is my grandmother Charlotte who passed away this past March. My grandmother is really the person who taught me how to worship. Every Sunday I would sit next to her in worship because she would rest the hymnal on the back of the pew in front of her, low enough so I could follow along. And when the offering plate came down the row, she would open her purse and hand me a dollar to put in the plate. I don’t know what my grandparents giving habits were, but I know they were faithful. After I put my dollar in the plate was passed to my grandfather, who put in their offering envelope. Theirs was a very traditional marriage, until he died my grandfather wrote the checks and my grandfather placed them in the plate. That was his job as head of the family. But my grandmother opened her wallet every week also, quietly teaching me about stewardship even though we never talked about it. I wish we’d talked about it. I wish I’d asked her why she so faithfully gave to the church, why she passed me a dollar to do the same. But she wasn’t much of a talker. It was one of the things that used to drive me crazy about her. She wasn’t perfect, my grandmother, but for me she was, she is, a saint. One of the people who led me to God.
One of the defining features of saints is not that they were these great, perfect, worker of miracles, but that they were people. They were good, honest, hard-working people who didn’t get it right every time, but who taught the value of trying again, of keeping on, people who remind us that God loves us no matter what.
The beatitudes is a great text for us this All Saints day because I think we sometimes hear the beatitudes with similar struggles that we hear the word saints. On this All Saint Sunday, we hear the story of how Jesus went up a mountain, followed by his disciples to teach them. A very important image in Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus as the new Moses, so we are very intentionally supposed to relate Jesus going up the mountain to give the Sermon on the Mount to Moses going up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. But remember what we talked about last week, how human beings love laws. And how the Ten Commandments have so often become not guidelines for how to deepen inclusion, but checklists for creating exclusion.
And so, on a mountain, looking and sounding for all the world like Moses, Jesus gives what on this All Saints Sunday sounds deceptively like a checklist for sainthood. “Blessed are those who mourn, 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.” A nice little list, the pure in heart, the merciful, these all sounds like good saintlike qualities. We might be tempted to add “blessed are the stewards…” But it’s also kind of an intimidating list. What does it mean to be pure in heart, merciful, or thirst for justice? Am I doing enough? Does Jesus call me blessed?
But just as the Ten Commandments are not rules for exclusion, the Beatitudes are not a checklist for holiness. They are not practical advice; they are prophetic declaration. Jesus doesn’t say, if you are meek, you are blessed, if you mourn, you are blessed, if you seek justice, you are blessed. No Jesus says “Blessed are” each of these groups. What Jesus is doing here at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount is to say no matter who you are, and no matter how you find yourself, this one fact about you is true, you are blessed.
The beatitudes offer the range of the human experience, from mourning and meek to hunger for righteousness, from peacemaking to persecution, and in the face of each of these experiences Jesus says you are blessed. The beatitudes are not goals to check off a list, they are options of ways we might find ourselves. We are never all of them at any time, but through our lifetimes we experience all of them. And in any gathered community all of them are experienced by someone.
And what’s more, Jesus assures us that these experiences are not the end of the story. Each of these blessings is followed by a promise. 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 the merciful for they will receive mercy, and so on. Jesus knows that following the Christian life is not a magic shield that will protect you from harm. In the walk of faith you will still be meek, you will still mourn, you will still hunger and thirst for righteousness. But Jesus promises that in those times, in those places, in those moments of fear and doubt and pain, you are blessed and Jesus will lead you through them, will always be with you, will never leave you. See Jesus is not in the life insurance business; he is in the life assurance business. Instead of establishing criteria that must be met, Jesus outlines the attributes where blessings are found. Instead of promising freedom from suffering, Jesus promises to be with us in suffering and to lead us through that suffering to a future reality. Jesus promises that no matter what happens, we are blessed and our future will be different than our present.
The beatitudes promise that wherever we find ourselves in our journey through sainthood, we are blessed, we are loved, we are claimed by God. Which brings me back to my grandmother and stewardship. See what my grandmother taught me by putting that dollar in the plate every week was that every gift mattered to God. That even I, six years old and clutching someone else’s dollar, had something to contribute to the gathered community. And that’s a really powerful thing for us to remember. When we look at the budget next month, the top item on it is benevolence. This church gives ten percent right off the top back to the church. We don’t have a lot, but we give of what we’re able. And we’re only able to do that, because of what this community does together. This benevolence is not one person’s gift, it’s a portion of all of our contributions. Maybe you’re not in a place right now where you can tithe. Maybe your job situation is tight, or your health has changed, or whatever, but you give what you can. Or maybe you can give more than ten percent. Maybe you’ve been tithing and this is a year you really feel in a place to challenge yourself. We as a church give ten percent away because each of us together gives what we can, and the sum of us is better than our parts. And that ten percent we give? It goes to help others in their mission. Some congregations are in even tighter financial straits than we are and they cannot afford to give ten percent. Others are doing really well and they can support more. And all of us congregations together support the synod, and all the synods support the wider church, and the wider church supports mission and ministry across the nation and across the world. We don’t as a church, as a synod, as individuals get it right all the time. But we try, and we learn, and we go at it again. All of us. All the saints. Together. Whoever, wherever, blessed by God and blessing others. Amen.
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