Sermon - All Saints Sunday (11/1/2020)

Rev. 7:9-17; Ps. 34:1-10, 22; 1 Jn. 3:1-3; Mt. 5:1-12

In our first reading today, John the Revelator describes a vision of what heaven is like.  He sees “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” all of them lost in wonder and awe and praise of the God who creates and redeems and loves.  It is a vision of all the saints, all of those who have been caught up in the Love that made the universe and all that is in it, all of those who have come through the great ordeal and now will hunger and thirst no more, from whose eyes God has wiped away every tear.

I’ve often heard people say, only half joking, that heaven sounds dull. Just sitting around on clouds all day playing harps, kissing up to the Big Guy and telling him how great he is, every day forever and ever – how boring.  But one of the saints from whom I’ve learned a lot, Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey who played a significant role in developing the Nicene Creed, is that because God is infinite, God is actually endlessly fascinating.  The more we know about God and what God is really like, the more we realize we don’t yet know.  The more we experience God’s love, a love that reaches even to enemies, the love that produced an inconceivably vast and diverse universe, full of all kinds of creatures and all kinds of people, and then gathers each one back in by name – the more deeply we will want to know more, and to love more, and even in all eternity we will never reach the bottom of this love.

And so the inspired picture of heaven we see in the book of Revelation, or even our modern caricature of clouds and harps, is only a glimpse of what God has ready for those whom God loves. John the Evangelist says this in our second reading today: We are God’s children now, but what we will be has not yet been revealed.  But what we do know is this: when God is revealed, we will be like God, for we will see God as God is.

We don’t know what heaven is really like – what the life of the saints in heaven is really like.  But if John is right in what he says in his letter, and if Gregory of Nyssa is right that God is an endlessly fascinating and captivating mystery, we know that we will never be bored – we will be drawn ever closer to the mystery of love, we will be transformed ever more deeply into the image of Christ, we will love and be loved more intensely and more passionately than we could ever imagine.

And for all of us who have begun to be transformed into the image of Christ by our baptism and our faith, this immersion in the mystery of God’s life and love is not something that has to wait until we die and go to a better place.  That better place, the kingdom of heaven, has already come near to us here on earth, we are already invited to begin to live within it, we are already saints even if we are still sinners and fall short of God’s love and justice – we still experience God’s mercy and grace, even now. The great Puritan hymn writer Isaac Watts, in the hymn that we will sing in a few minutes as our hymn of the day, celebrates the promised future New Jerusalem on Mount Zion to which we are traveling, but also says that this future kingdom of heaven on Mount Zion “yields a thousand sacred sweets before we reach the heavenly fields.”

And this is what Jesus shows us in today’s gospel reading.  At the beginning of his ministry a huge crowd comes to Jesus, people of every tribe and nation and language, people suffering all kinds of illnesses of mind and of body, people hunkered down and turned in on themselves in their pain and in the injustice of this world, and Jesus heals them all.  Jesus frees them all from the burdens they have brought to him.  And then he begins to teach them that the mercy they have just experienced is just the beginning of the blessings God has in store for everyone.

You may think, Jesus says, that God blesses the powerful, who impose their will on others. But I tell you, blessed are the merciful, for they will know what mercy is when it is given to them.  You may think that God blessed those who have it all, who have everything they could possible want.  But I tell you, blessed are those who mourn, who are acutely aware of what they have lost, for they will be comforted.

You may think that God blesses those who grab whatever and whomever they want.  But I tell you, blessed are the meek, they are the ones who will inherit the earth that God has made.  You may think, blessed are the spiritually advanced, those who have read Gregory of Nyssa and read Greek and studied theology.  But I tell you, God blesses the poor in spirit, the spiritually destitute, the people who know that they don’t know a thing about God – because the kingdom of heaven is for those who still have more to learn and discover about God, and that is everybody, whether they realize it or not.

Jesus teaches that the kingdom of heaven, God’s blessings, are not for the select few.  They are not even reserved for “religious” people, and they are not the exclusive domain of those considered successful by this world’s terms.  God’s blessings can be for them too; God does not discriminate.

But the kingdom of heaven is not like a fine wine that can only be truly appreciated by a connoisseur with a well-trained palate.  The kingdom of heaven is for the poor in spirit, and the meek, and those who mourn, and those who hunger and thirst for justice, even if they don’t realize that God is the name for what they are looking for.  The kingdom of God is best appreciated not by those who have trained themselves on the higher things and earned their right to divine insight by discipline and hard work.  It’s actually best appreciated by those who are like children, discovering a world that is far beyond their understanding, held by love that provides for them in ways they cannot begin to comprehend but are just beginning to discover, with joy and wonder and playfulness.

I mentioned earlier that the text of our hymn of the day was written by an old 17-th century English Puritan.  But the melody is not the original melody, which was a much more stately and formal type of hymn.  The melody was written during the revivals after the U.S. Civil War, and while the text describes all the saints of God marching upward to Zion, to the heavenly city of God described in Revelation, the melody is anything but a march.  You cannot imagine a well-trained group of soldiers marching to this tune with military precision, but you can imagine a group of children running and skipping with joy and wonder.  And that is the image of the communion of saints that is offered to us today – one that we receive like children, with curiosity and free of adult cares and troubles.  We are all on this journey together, those who have completed their baptism and now rest in God, and those who are still on the road.  It is the same love, the same joy, the same God who calls each of us, and invites us to wonder and happiness without limit or end.

Hymn of the Day follows - ELW 625, Come We That Love the Lord (We’re Marching to Zion) - text by Isaac Watts, tune by Robert Lowrey