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The Kingdom of the Blessed is at hand
Move in and start a new life there
Reflections on the lessons for All Saints Day
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10,13-14
Psalm 149
Revelation 7:2-4,9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
Halloween has come a long way.
Children are more likely to dress up as Pokemon or Tinkerbell these days.
Centuries ago, people dressed up like ghosts so that the spirits of the restless dead they believed were stirring on the night before All Saints' Day wouldn't attack them out of sheer jealousy of the living.
Pretty gruesome!
But it reminds me that All Saints' Day is not kid's stuff.
It's about living life in a defiant way.
Living a life that refuses the concept of passivity and victimhood.
No saint was a whiner.
Life may deal us all kinds of different hands, but to be a saint, you pick up your cards and play them.
That's what I thought of while reading the Beatitudes.
Jesus is declaring a series of blessings.
Like the ten commandments, they are declarations of how God's graciousness shows up in the world:
Pointing out places where God's goodness can be observed and emulated.
But, unlike the commandments (Of course its more godly not to kill people or steal. Who would contradict that?), Jesus' Beatitudes throw a real twist.
The blessings themselves are straightforward:
- happiness,
comfort,
inheritance
and the like.
But the recipients are downright troubling:
Poor people,
The "poor in spirit" can also be those who aren't very imaginative or outspoken.
The sad, those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness"
The downtrodden. --As a general rule, folks at the top of society and power feel that they are well-enough supplied with righteous treatment.
All of Jesus' teachings(nowhere shown more strongly than in Matthew's version) boil down to the coming of a new Kingdom of God:
a new place to live where things don't have to be the way the world tries to insist is the only way.
It is very near at hand, Jesus says.
Just decide to start living in it yourself, and there it is: Presto!
Want to be free?
Want to be blessed?
Well, have at it!
I grew up in the Ozarks in the 60s, in Arkansas, no more than 15 miles south of the Missouri border. This was a time of change, and mobility was on the rise. New people were actually moving to my town for the first time ever for jobs. Highways replaced railways and changed the destination of our travels. Television was shifting our focus from Memphis to the south to St. Louis, the north. This was before cable and mountains blocked reception from Memphis. It was a time and a place where you could live right next door to someone who would say they lived in the Midwest. But we thought we were living in the south. It led to extreme behavior: We talked more southern, ate more southern, and probably even voted more southern to emphasize who and what we were.
I think that way about the Kingdom of God.
Two people can be living in the very same house at the very same time.
One can be living in the Kingdom of God.
The other still struggling who-knows-where.
The newness of God,
the new life in the Kingdom of God that Jesus says is
available to everyone,
shows especially in the lives of the blessed,
of the saints known and unknown,
great ones and small ones,
who turn out to be the people gone before
and living here with us now,who don't let riches or poverty blind their vision of God,
who overturn the values of the ordinary world and live as though justice and mercy were the law of the land,
who make peace,
who cherish the gifts of grace laid before them,
who mourn the evidence of evil and unfairness the other world displays on every side.
The Kingdom of the Blessed is at hand, Jesus declared on earth and declares still in the lives of the saints.
All you have to do is move in and start a new life there.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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