All Saints’Sunday

The Sermon for the Eucharist at St Bene’t’s

on 5th November 2023, All Saints’ Sunday

The Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

In all the news coverage of the war between Israel and Gaza, one item especially caught my attention. It was about two activists from a Jewish-Arab peace movement called “Standing Together.” They were recently detained in Jerusalem for putting up posters with a message that police deemed to be offensive. The message was: “Jews and Arabs, we will get through this together.” But in war, one of the casualties is Free Speech. The posters were confiscated, as well as T-shirts printed with peace slogans in Hebrew and Arabic. For, to express a sentiment like this, Jews and Arabs working together, is interpreted as showing sympathy for Hamas after its murderous attack on 7th October.

It is also poignantly ironic that so many of the Israeli kibbutz dwellers who were victims of that attack were also peace activists and had been living near the Gaza border in order to foster peaceful relations with their Palestinian neighbours. It’s easy to say, but whatever the outcome of the war, Jews and Palestinians will go on having to live together and recover an understanding of our shared humanity, something of human love. This must be our hope and prayer. I hold onto the image of the released hostage Yosheved Lifshitz shaking the hand of her Hamas captor, and speaking the word “Shalom”.

Another thing which I am finding really difficult about this war is the fact that it is happening in the land of the Bible, the Holy Land, the Land of the Holy One. That so many of the places we hear about, Askelon, Gaza and Jerusalem of course, are biblical places, which, even if he did not visit them, Jesus would have known about. It is truly terrible that the place from which our faith has sprung, with the peace which passes all understanding, the Shalom of Jesus himself, the Prince of Peace, should be the theatre of such war and such killing. What can God be making of all this? Can it be that we are going to discover something new about the nature of God and humanity through all of this?

Today the church celebrates All Saints Sunday when we are bidden to do two things. One is to celebrate the host of unnamed Christian saints who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ, men and women in whose lives the Church has seen the grace of God at work; and the other is to observe a liturgical shift from summer, with its celebration of the Sundays after Trinity, into autumn with the season known as the Kingdom Season, looking ahead to Advent. It is a poignant season which incorporates both joy in the beauty of holiness and sorrow in the remembrance of war.

So our gospel reading today takes us to Matthew chapter 5, Jesus’s teaching known as the Beatitudes. It seems terribly appropriate to our ears today: blessed are the poor in spirit; 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; blessed are those who are persecuted.

In the coming Kingdon, each of these eight beatitudes will see a reversal: the poor will enter the kingdom; the mourners will be comforted; the meek will inherit the earth; the hungry and thirsty will be filled; the merciful will receive mercy; the pure in heart will see God; the peacemakers will be called children of God; the persecuted will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

St Matthew has gathered together a collection of the teachings of Jesus and presented them together in chapters 5, 6 and 7, in what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, The Beatitudes are a kind of preface to this, and some commentators have even suggested that they are like a contents page indicating the teachings to come. Another possibility, which I rather like, is that the Beatitudes were a hymn being sung at the time, which Matthew has incorporated.

We can be pretty sure that Jesus did not deliver the teachings straight as we read them and that Matthew has done some careful editing, for he had a particular agenda. Writing for a primarily Jewish audience, he wants to present Jesus as the New Moses. His whole Gospel is arranged with this aim. It’s divided into five sections, recapitulating the five Old Testament books of Moses. And today’s section, the first, is quite deliberately referencing Moses’ giving of the Law in the book of Exodus. So, for example, it begins with the statement “when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain,” recalling Moses climbing up on Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the Law from God. The Beatitudes can be seen, then, as Jesus’s equivalent of the Ten Commandments. But, distinct from the following a book of laws, Jesus’s teaching is about taking on qualities of life to fit us for the Kingdom of God – being poor in spirit, being meek, being merciful, hungering for righteousness and so on.

The question is, do we expect the qualities of the Kingdom only at some point in the future or has the Kingdom already arrived? This was the question which the disciples put to Jesus way back at the beginning. Are the qualities of the Kingdom for us now or do we wait?

This is where the Saints give us inspiration. Saints are those following Christ who have caught something of the reversed values of the Beatitudes. And here I don’t just mean the named saints of the New Testament or the great heroes of church history, but the ordinary people, the countless number, living and departed, who have caught something of the upside-down world of faith in Jesus.

So here are some thoughts about the Saints which may bring comfort and encouragement to us in these dark times.

First, I would like to suggest that each of us has encountered a saint. For each of us there has been a person, possibly more than one, who by loving us has shown us humanity and opened for us the way of faith. A person whose connection with the living Jesus has been so transparent, whose embodiment of the values of the Beatitudes has been so clear, that we have been compelled to follow Jesus. If each of us can name one such person, then there are a lot of saints and there is a lot of love represented here.

Secondly, of all these saints some may be alive and some may have died, but here the difference between the living and the departed is not very great. Their love transcends the grave, and this is because they are somehow incorporated into the risen Christ. In this they lead the way for us also to be incorporated, so that when we say the words “We are the body of Christ” we proclaim something mystical which we share with them.

Finally, the communion of saints, living and departed, is a foretaste of heaven, just as the Eucharist which we share today is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. We are in the presence now of this countless company. And if heaven is anything, it is a source of continuous prayer, an outpouring of praise, thanksgiving and lament, offered through Jesus Christ.

We join our prayers with all the saints in an endless cry for peace, shalom, salaam, both in the heavenly Jerusalem and in the Jerusalem on earth, now.