I’m cognizant as I preach this morning that there are a lot of factors at play in our worship this morning. First, of course, it is All Saints Sunday, the day in the church year that we set aside to remember all of the saints, both the living and the dead, though we do tend to give special focus on our dearly departed saints. As Lutherans, we celebrate All Saints Day the Sunday after Reformation Day, and our Lutheran heritage reminds us that all of us are both saint and sinner, one hundred percent of both, all of the time. Outside of the church, of course, it is the Sunday before Election Day, a day that has been built up as the time when we vote for the candidate who is the saint and reject the candidate who is the sinner. Of course the most well-known of these races is the Presidential election, where a hearty case for sainthood is being pushed by the two major party candidates, but also the two most well known independent party candidates, and a host of write-in candidates. All willing to tell you why their person is the saint and the other is the absolute worst thing to ever happen to our country in the history of countries. But, as anyone who’s been coming to the local forums on Thursdays knows, the Presidential campaign is not the only race attempting to set up this saint/sinner dichotomy between one side and the other. This is human nature, we like order, we like clarity, we like good and bad, right and wrong, one side or the other, we like clear cut choices. And here’s the thing, the American political system is not the first system to realize and exploit this flaw in our human nature. Exalting one side and demonizing the other is as old as time itself. Remember Adam and Eve in the garden. God called out Adam for eating the forbidden fruit, and Adam said, “the woman made me do it,” and Eve replied, “the serpent tricked me,” as each tried to raise up someone else as the villain instead of recognizing their own cooperation in a broken system. The fact that we have a political system that lifts up some and the expense of others isn’t a modern problem, dear people, it is a fact of our fallen humanity. It is a thing we are going to have to deal with until the coming of the Kingdom of God. We will be divided, as Jesus said in Luke chapter twelve, “father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” until Christ comes again.
So, there’s the bad news. But, here’s the good news. Just because sin and division is a part of our human condition, does not mean that we have to sit back and let it be so. In fact, the readings on this All Saints day remind us that number one, we as the church have been given the promise that our God is always at work on the part of liberation and freedom for the oppressed and unifying of the divided, and number two, God has give us the tools to be God’s hands and feet and hearts and minds in this process of healing the world. We as followers of the resurrected and ascended Christ live in this beautiful already and not yet. Already Christ has come, already we know Christ to be in the midst of us, already we meet Christ in the world, and hear the promise of Christ’s unfolding work and repairing and redeeming us. And yet, because we also know that the Kingdom Christ is bringing has not yet fully come into completion, we get to also live in the hopeful not yet of the promise that there will be a time that is better than this one, and we get to be a part of bringing that time into fruition, a foretaste in this world of the unfolding feast to come. I don’t know about all of you, but in this fractured and frightening time, that promise that Christ is here, with us, that the Kingdom of God is both at hand and yet to be fulfilled, and I get to be a part of that fulfilling, that feels like pretty good news indeed. So, let’s take a look at our scripture readings for this morning, and see the proof in our history, that while division is a reality, so too is God’s providence.
So our Daniel reading this morning is admittedly weird, with its talk of four beasts emerging from the sea. We might, like Daniel, find our “spirits troubled” by what to do with this frightening imagery. The book of Daniel is what is known as apocalyptic literature, the same style of literature found in the book of Revelation. Apocalyptic literature uses images more vividly portray a situation. Dr. Fred Gaiser notes: “One could say, calmly and rationally, that the world is a bleak and dangerous place, or one could make the point more fully and dramatically through apocalyptic fantasy. The latter genre will more quickly trouble and terrify us (as they did for Daniel), which is the point.” The four beasts in Daniel are widely accepted to be the kingdoms of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece, which had dominated and subjugated Israel for five centuries by the time the book of Daniel was written. When Daniel’s audience heard of his dream, they didn’t need it explained to them; they knew what it felt to be terrorized by powerful beasts. So when the interpretation ended with the destruction of the beasts by “the holy ones of the Most High” that felt like hope to Daniel’s audience. What that said to them was yes, you have been terrorized by these four powerful empires, these four beasts, for centuries. But guess what, God’s got this. God is more powerful than the most powerful empire. And the day will come when those four beasts will be destroyed. You don’t have to be afraid; you can stand tall in the midst of all of your terror, because the almighty God is on your side. And the beasts of empire are no match to the glory of God.
We don’t live in the time of Daniel, and the beasts that threaten us are no longer the kingdoms of Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t threatened by our own consuming “beasts.” And what the book of Daniel and stories like it remind us is that when our “spirits are troubled,” we, like Daniel, can hold fast to the promise that the Most High God is in control.
That’s good news number one. Yes, the world feels crazy and divided now, but the world’s felt crazy and divided before, and God has always led God’s people through, so there’s no reason to think that this time will be any different. We don’t have to live in fear, because we have a God who’s bigger than fear. So for good news number two, that we get to be a part of this healing of the world, we turn to Luke.
All Saints Sunday in the year we read Matthew and Luke both give us the beatitudes. In Matthew they are spoken in the passive voice and spiritualized, “blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who hunger for justice.” This distances them, allows us some breathing space. Luke does us no such favors. Jesus looked at his disciples and said, “Blessed are you who are poor... Blessed are you who are hungry… But woe to you who are rich.... Woe to you who are full.” These are concrete realities. For Luke the beatitudes are proof of God’s commitment to the poor. In the same way as the parable of the rich man and Lazarus or the wheat and the chaff, Luke’s beatitudes draw a line in the sand for what it means to be favored of God. Imagine the tension this must have created in the crowd listening to Jesus as he spoke, the puffed up pride of the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the persecuted, as they heard the promise of God’s favor for them, and the building anger in the rich, the full, the laughing, and those who others spoke well of, as Jesus knocked them down. How those in the first group must have preened, for the first time in their lives maybe, to be able to look down their noses as those who had so often been above them. But immediately, before the first group could get too built up, or the second group too filled with anger, Jesus knocked them both down by saying, “But I say to you, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate 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 cloak.” How that must have stung! Jesus was not saying, poor, you now get to lord over the rich, and rich, prepare to be lorded over. Instead, both sides are called to serve the other, to care for the other, to love the other. How is this good news for the poor, you might ask, it seems like Jesus is opening the doors for the poor to get walked over as they have been before? There’s all kinds of really interesting historical reasoning for the subversive nature of what Jesus said here, how this turning of cheeks and giving of coats is really a subtle way of challenging the status quo in a powerful twist of creative non-violent protest. It’s great fodder for sermons, and next time the Beatitudes come around, I’ll probably preach on it. But it wasn’t what caught my attention this week. What caught my attention this week, on this All Saints Sunday, was how impossible it is to draw the rich/poor, hungry/full line at all. Because here’s the thing, like all of Jesus’ parables, the beatitudes seem to be setting up this dichotomy of good and bad, and like all of Jesus’ parables, if we read far enough into them, we find ourselves on both sides of the line. We are, this morning, a mixed group of incomes. Some of us make more, some of us less, so which side are we on? Are we blessed or in woe? I read an article in Living Lutheran this week about refugee camps in South Sudan, compared to the Sudanese, every one of us in this room, regardless of our economic situation, is unthinkably wealthy. I also saw a comparison of the salaries of the richest one percent of Americans, compared to them every one of us in this room is mired in poverty. Are you full now? Maybe, but eventually you will be hungry. Are you laughing? You can think of a time you’ve wept. Are you weeping? At some point you have laughed. Every single one of us is richer than someone and poorer than someone, hungrier than someone, fuller than someone, happier than someone, sadder than someone. We are both, all of us, all the time. The world of the parables forces us to think, so that we can enter the complexities of our own world and be changed, and change it. Jesus modeled for us how we read these parables in the real world when he stood up to the Pharisees, comforted the outsiders, cast out demons, and in the end, in the most powerful contradiction of weakness, turned over his own life in a demonstration of his power over death. We see in the actions of Jesus that the phrase “love your enemies” is not a request for us to be doormats of abuse. Love is both blessing and challenging, so that the lowly can be brought into the Kingdom of God and the high are not able to wander too far from it.
And we, the hearers of Jesus’ blessings and woes, those whom he has challenged to love and pray and bless, we are the ones whom Jesus has chosen to be a part of this great gathering. Because the truth of this election week is that as momentous as Tuesday may feel, there will be a Wednesday. On Wednesday someone will have won and someone will have lost. I know, the Bush/Gore election wasn’t decided for several months, but some races will be over, and anyway, you get the point. There will be a Wednesday, and a Thursday, and a Friday, and days onward from there. And on Wednesday is when the real work begins. Because on Wednesday, we who have been divided, have to find ways to come together again. And we in the church can be the leaders in that effort. Because we have a theology that tells us that just because one won and another lost, doesn’t mean that either was all perfect or all terrible. Regardless of the outcomes, a human was elected to every position. A human who will make good decisions and bad ones, and needs our support and prayers, but also our challenges and holding to accountability so that whoever was elected keeps the raising up of all in mind. And because we know, whoever was elected, that we did not elect a savior, because we already have one, we can reach out to those who think differently than us, who voted differently than us, learn from their differences, hear their concerns, and be about bringing peace and respect and justice.
No matter how out of control things feel, the God of Daniel is in control, dear people of God. And that same God challenges us to look honestly at ourselves and others, our faults and our strengths, with love, so that we can be a part in the great unveiling of the Kingdom of God. On Tuesday and on Wednesday, and on every day to come. Because God possesses the kingdom forever—forever and ever. Amen.
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