Everybody has a pet peeve. Some people can’t
stand waiting in line. Others are driven crazy by those unopenable plastic
packages that electronic gadgets come wrapped in. Lines and hard plastic
packages do annoy me, as do people writing checks for one item at the drug
store and folks with extremely complicated drink orders at Starbucks. I mean, a
half-caff no foam percent vanilla cream latte? Please, people! It’s just a cup
of coffee! Nevertheless, I do nurse one particular pet peeve, and it is one I
have pretty much all to myself: Daylight Saving Time.
I hate Daylight Saving Time. Chances are,
you don’t and will agree with my wife, Kathy (who greets the arrival of Daylight
Saving Time in spring with regular joyous observations that it’s 8 o’clock and
still light out) that this is a weird pet peeve for a rational adult person to
have. Whenever we turn our clocks ahead, I stomp around muttering, “The
government just took an hour of my life!” She and the dogs cower in the corner
until the spring clock-setting ritual is done. So you can see, Daylight Saving
Time drives me crazy. As an early to bed and early to rise kind of guy, I want
it to be dark when I lie down and light when I get up. Is that too much to ask?
Luckily, for us Daylight Saving Time
resisters there is good news: today we’re on the other side of the best night
of the year. Last night, the government gave us back the hour of our lives they
took from us last spring. We have restored the cosmic balance the universe so
desperately craves. Sure, it will turn to night sometime around noon, but it
will actually be light when we’re on our way to work and school. For a few
brief shining months we will all live together in the shared Camelot of Eastern
Standard Time.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I
want to say something about All Saints Day, which always occurs right around
this autumnal transition. All Saints Day celebrates the fullness of the
community that gathers around Jesus. It proclaims that all of us who follow
him—and that includes those present, those who have gone before, and those who
are yet to come—are “saints”, that is, we’ve been sanctified by being together with
Jesus in this fellowship. Let’s think
together about what today’s Gospel says to us this morning. .
The opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew
5:1-12] are commonly called "The Beatitudes" because of the repeated
use of the word we translate as "blessed". That same word can also
mean something like "happy". For many of us Christians, The
Beatitudes serve as a warrant for faithful action. When Jesus says that the
poor, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, and those who hunger and thirst
for righteousness are "blessed" or "happy", many of us hear
those words as a to-do list for our ministries. If we want to follow Jesus, we
need to be about serving the poor, being peacemakers, and hungering for
righteousness.
That understanding is true as
far as it goes. But let me suggest another that might stand beside it. Jesus's
Beatitudes are not only, or even primarily, a set of marching orders for
setting the world right. They are an announcement of what Christians have
always called “the Gospel”. They are a proclamation of the good news. In the
Beatitudes Jesus is not so much telling us what we ought to do as he is telling
us what God is already doing. These verses are an announcement of what God is
up to in the world. This "kingdom of heaven" that Jesus talks about
is not some future blessed state up in the clouds someplace. The kingdom of
heaven is breaking in even now in the ministry of Jesus and in the community
that gathers around him.
In Jesus’s day as now, human
culture and human values were massively messed up. The ruler of the Western
world—Caesar—pretended to a kind of authority that was only appropriate to God.
That same ruler oppressed and taxed and starved subject peoples like the Palestinian
Jews of whom Jesus was one. In Jesus’s day as in ours many suffered because of
harsh political, economic, and social conditions. We first world, educated
Christians need to remember that people followed Jesus in those days not so
much because he was a great teacher but because he was a healer who embodied
the freedom and generosity of God.
So Jesus gathered a community
around himself, and in stepping into the Jesus community, you stepped into a
space or place or zone where life is lived as God intends that it be. Jesus did
not come to found an institution called "the church". In fact, the
word we render as church—ekklesia—is
a Greek term which means "the called". It's a newly coined word for
the New Testament because the older words-synagogue, assembly, temple— couldn't
quite name the reality of what the Jesus movement was about. The church, the ekklesia, is the body of those called
into the Jesus community to make real in their lives and in the world what
Jesus calls the reign of heaven. The church is the gathering of those who want
to live life on God's, not Caesar's, terms.
Living life on God’s terms
means, of course, that we will try to live out those Beatitude values in the
world. Living life on God's terms means standing with the people Jesus names in
these verses—the poor, the peacemakers, the persecuted, the mourners. Living
life on God's terms means naming Caesar and all Caesar's successors as
impostors whose pomp and pretensions are only a parody of real divine authority.
But we will be neither authentic advocates for those up against it nor credible
critics of empire if we can't love and accept and forgive and celebrate each
other first.
Jesus's Beatitudes call us always
to rekindle our awareness of what it is we're actually doing when we gather in
church. We are coming together, as did those gathered around Jesus, to step
into that zone where life is lived on God's terms. We are coming together, as
did those gathered around Jesus, to share in the good news that we can critique
and change the world only to the extent that we can love it and each other
first.
You
and I are, together, the church. We are the ekklesia,
the called. We are, together, those who have been invited into the zone which
Jesus calls the reign of heaven and we might call the place where life is lived
on God's terms. We occupy the space where Jesus, not Caesar is in charge. We
are, together, those who can find such depth and fulfillment of relationship
inside these walls that we can reach out to extend God's reign of love and
justice and peace to everyone else.
One
of the most interesting translations of Jesus’s Beatitudes occurs in the New
English Bible. Here is how that Bible
renders the third verse:
How blest are those who know their
need of God;
the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
[Matthew 5:3 NEB]
The
Jesus community--the church, the communion of saints, whatever we call it—is
the group of people who know their need of God.
Caesar does not know his need of God, nor do those who organize their
lives around power, accomplishment, success, or money. You might say there are two kinds of people
in the world: those who believe they are
self-sufficient, and those who know they are not. The most pervasive lie our culture promotes
is the idea that you are or should be totally independent of others. The countervailing truth of the Jesus
movement is that we all finally need each other. Those who make their way into the Jesus
movement are united in the knowledge that they need God. We are finite, mortal, limited
creatures. True wisdom lies in owning
and celebrating our finite humanness, not in projecting a fantasy of
invulnerability.
The
Jesus movement—the church, the ekklesia,
the community of the called—extends through time and space. Tonight at the Requiem we will remember those
who have gone before us. Today we
welcome those who come next. In Baptism
we admit the newest group of those who know their need of God. In renewing our own Baptismal Covenant, we
acknowledge that we need each other to live our lives on God’s, not Caesar’s,
terms.
Today
is All Saints Day. How blest are those
who know their need of God. Welcome one and all to the Jesus movement. This communion of saints is big enough to
include everyone—even those who love Daylight Saving and Standard Time. We are united not by ideas or positions but
by a shared acknowledgment of our own dependence on each other and the one in
whose name we gather. For that one—and
for the fellowship to which that one calls us—we proceed in both Baptism and
Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.
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