Joris Bürmann
06 November 2022: All Saints’ Sunday
Isaiah 65:17-25
Canticle 9
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19
We owe many things to the saints of old.
For us, one of them is this sanctuary itself.
This church was built thanks to the vision of Rev. Robert Jenkins Nevin, but it is not a concoction of his solitary imagination.
The structure, the iconography and everything that makes up this space are heirs to centuries of theological and architectural meditations patiently developed and transmitted by the saints of God, artists, clerics, and lay people.
When you enter this church, you enter into this also. Nothing in this sanctuary is left to chance: everything speaks of the gospel and how the saints participate in God’s salvation.
Everything allows us to enter the rhythm of evangelical life.
In addition to the paintings and mosaics which symbolize the history of salvation, the different levels of elevation of our church are also there to make us move, with our body and our senses, into the mysteries of faith.
In the Bible, in fact, it is often a question of going up and down, up the mountains or down into the
plain.
God plants the Garden of Eden on a mountain, Moses meets God up there in a burning bush, God
chooses to dwell on Mount Zion.
In the Gospel of Luke that we have just heard, our Savior has just descended into the plain after having chosen twelve apostles among his disciples on a mountain.
He comes down from the mountain, just like Moses returned to the unfaithful people of Israel after having received God’s Ten Commandments on mount Horeb.
In our story, the people Jesus addresses are far from being all Jews and neither are they all faithful!
Yet they have come because they are attracted by him, by the miracles he does, in ways they may not be able to explain.
They have come, like you this morning, because Jesus has a charisma, a power of life in which they are hungry to participate.
Unlike many preachers who are screwed into their pulpit, like me this morning, Jesus comes down to
his people from the mountain.
He does not draw his teaching from the top of the mountain, like Moses who received the tablets up there.
Where does he draw it from?
He draws it from your very look, from our faces, from who we are.
“Jesus looked up at his disciples and said”.
Jesus looks up at you and says.
God does not speak to teach you something you’re not able to know, to bring you an experience you don’t have.
Jesus doesn’t Godsplain you.
He doesn’t tell you off from a place of perfection, and even the woes that he proclaims are devoid of any humiliation.
He reads our hearts: our very hearts are the broken tablets of the law where Jesus reads what the Father has prepared for us for our lives to be whole.
The four blessings and the four woes that Jesus reads while looking up at us, are not esoteric teachings.
They are plain and painful considerations of who we are.
He teaches us how to read, how to consider who we truly are.
Jesus invites us to look really, honestly, at who we are, if we want to inherit his life.
What he invites us to look at, on an equal footing with us, is what makes us truly human.
He comes down to show us how broken we are by our illusions about self-reliance, how broken we are by the many ways in which we make ourselves as gods of old, hoarding riches, privilege, self-satisfaction.
He comes down to rise our humanity up and makes us consider that it is precisely when we embrace our baseness and our greatness with more lucidity that we are truly God’s people.
To be a church of saints does not mean to be a perfect, heroic Church but a Church that doesn’t own
itself, that doesn’t build herself up or try to save herself.
A Church of saints is a church wholly poured out for those who do not belong, for those who do not belong to her and who experience suffering where God seems absent.
The saints of God have always poured out God’s blessings generously, and this is why they are called blessed.
Their lives that we can contemplate everyday expand our vision of God, they show us how God is
present everywhere, in everybody, for everybody.
That’s what all the saints show us, they didn’t live for themselves: they didn’t live to protect their social status, to protect a sinful political status quo or a sinful conception of the Church.
Paul, our patron saint, whom we heard today writing to the Ephesians doesn’t liv otherwise.
“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus” he says, “and your love toward all the saints.”
Like Jesus, Paul doesn’t Godsplain or shame us, but encourages the faithful in the faith they want to maintain.
Paul gave himself to be the apostle to people who didn’t share his Jewish background.
He didn’t hoard holiness or privilege: he shared it freely to the point of being poor, of having his own life taken.
Thank God, we don’t learn to become a saint by our own efforts.
We are drawn into sainthood, into God’s glory every time we look up at someone with our whole self, every time we listen, every time we step aside from our greedy and self-sufficient ways: Every time we set out to do everything that is necessary to sustain the pouring out of God’s love into this world.
We are drawn into sainthood very time we walk up to this altar to be received as the poor that we are.
Only then can we become wells of holiness from whom God’s living water can be drawn out to water the dry land around us.
Celebrating the saints and the departed reminds us of one thing: there is no way to live our lives fully
apart from what we have here, apart from what we are, apart from the struggles, the pains, or apart from the love also that we find in our humanity.
We are not the Church because we meet together and expound on some teaching or truth that is out there, or because we can explain our way out of suffering, or because we have found a way to escape this world.
This assembly, this communion of saints, is our crucible, it is the place where we’re transformed to become truly human through Christ who takes on our full humanity in him.
In him, at this altar, the sinfulness we are holding is turned into holiness if we just let go of it, if we are ready to spend it freely, lovingly, humbly.
Our riches are turned into blessings if we give them to the needy; our pride into blessings if we share it for the empowerment of all, our privileges of all sorts are turned into blessings if we sacrifice them.
We are called to deplete the inheritance we have received, personally and with all the saints, and do it liberally and with love.
Living this way, the blessings of Christ will be pronounced over us, we can live into the holiness into which we are welcomed.
The mystery of the Eucharist that we are about to enter allows us in our fleeting time and place, to meet Jesus Christ and ourselves truly.
We are taught here by Christ himself in very intimate ways because here, in love, he gives himself to us so that we can give ourselves like he does.
When you draw near, at the foot of this mountain, he’ll meet you face to face.
Come, behold who you are.
And become what you receive.
Every time you come to the foot of this mountain, look up at yourself, look around you at others, look
after them, look up to them, with your holiness and sinfulness, just like Jesus did.
Look up and you will be drawn into an everlasting happiness that only being truly human conveys.
If you come to receive God’s seed of love from this altar, and share in God’s death and life, the plain will bloom with flowers of many colors, big and small.
Each of you will be one of these.
You will bloom beyond the boundaries of the garden, beyond what you think possible of yourself, of your neighbors, of this church, of this world.
You will be these flowers that could never have never bloomed in the garden of Eden.
These most beautiful flowers are the saints we contemplate today and amongst whom you are planted for the blessing of the world.