Sermons

Blessing Comes First

All Saints’ Day: Blessings Come First

Last Sunday was a family Eucharist, and at the 9 a.m. service, we had a familiar, lovely moment when Lisa Ramish, during her children’s reflection, asked if any of her friends wanted to come up and sit with her. And the kids came. From all four corners of the church, they made their way up, sat with Lisa, and together, practiced theology.

Lisa asked them about being told something they already knew or had already done.  She asked them to ask her if she had done her homework, or brushed her teeth, or taken out the trash, and then each time she flopped over and said, in the most exasperated tone, she had already done it. This went on for a while; as you might imagine, children loved getting to ask the question and watching Ms. Lisa act. 

This week, I was thinking about how much of what we are doing today is the same. We are being told something we already know. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers. We have heard these words before. We know them. And yet, sometimes we need someone to remind us.

Today is All Saints’ Day, and the Gospel gives us the Beatitudes. It’s easy to hear them as a list of instructions, a kind of spiritual to-do list. Be merciful. Be humble. Make peace. Work for justice. And if you manage to do all those things, perhaps you will earn a blessing. But that is not what Jesus is doing here. Listen to how Jesus speaks. He does not begin by telling people what they must do. He begins by telling them who is blessed.

Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are those who mourn; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. These are declarations, not commandments. Jesus describes the world as God sees it. He is telling people where Good is already present, where blessing is already at work, even in places where the world might not think to look. We should see this as Blessing comes first, always.  

God’s blessing is already here. It is already among us, sometimes in the most surprising places and in the people we might overlook. And on All Saints’ Day, I think we are invited to remember that we have been blessed by the people who came before us, by the people who have loved us, and by the people who are still here, loving us now. Because the saints are not just the people whose names we find in stained glass windows or on the church calendar. They are not simply the people who managed to live unusually holy lives, whatever that means.

The saints are the people through whom we have glimpsed something of God’s love. They are the people who have helped us become who we are. They taught us how to love, showed us what courage looks like, made us laugh when we needed it, and sometimes told us things we did not want to hear.

Some of them were extraordinary. Some of them were difficult. Some of them were both. And some of them would be absolutely astonished to discover that we are talking about them in church today. That is part of the beauty of All Saints’ Day. We remember that holiness is not always obvious while it is happening. Sometimes we recognize a blessing only when we look back.

Processing out with Annemarie Quigley last week, and all the children were ahead of us. They were moving along together, doing what children do, even trying to lift their cross above each other, and the danger factor was, as always, very high, and I remember saying how blessed I felt.

I do not take this place for granted. I really don’t. I know that there are clergy who would feel incredibly lucky to have the placement I have. And I am aware of that. I am grateful for this congregation, for the work we do together, for the children who fill our building with noise and energy, for the people who show up to feed our neighbors and work for justice, for the people who ask difficult questions, and for the people who keep showing up even when the world feels like an awful lot.

I am blessed by you, and I don’t mean that as a polite thing a rector says to a congregation on a Sunday morning. I mean it.

I look at the life of this place, and I see blessing. I see it in the people who have been here for decades and the people who walked through our doors last week. I see it in the people who make the coffee, teach the children, sing in the choir, sit with someone who is grieving, and do the quiet work that makes a community possible.

I see it in the people who have gone before us, whose labor, generosity, and faith made it possible for us to be here today. We did not build this place from scratch. We inherited it. We inherited a community, a tradition, a building, a faith, and a set of responsibilities. We inherited the work of people whose names we know and people whose names we may never know. And we are beneficiaries of their blessing.

That is part of what All Saints’ Day asks us to remember.

The Church marks time in a way I find particularly helpful at this time of year. We move through All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. Together, these days are sometimes called Allhallowtide. They give us a little space to think about holiness, about the saints, and about all the people we have loved and lost.

We live in a culture that is not particularly comfortable with death. We are often encouraged to keep moving, to stay busy, to look on the bright side, and to get back to normal as quickly as possible. The Church gives us permission to stop. To remember. To say the names.

To acknowledge that we miss people. That our lives have been changed by their absence. That love does not simply disappear because someone has died.

All Souls’ Day reminds us that remembrance is not reserved for the famous or the officially holy. It is for all those people who have mattered to us. Our parents, our siblings, our partners, our friends, our teachers, our colleagues, the people who took us seriously when we were young, the people who helped us through a difficult time, and the people whose presence we still feel even though we can no longer reach out and touch them.

Sometimes the people who have gone before us are complicated. We may carry gratitude and hurt, affection and regret, good memories and difficult ones. We do not have to pretend that every relationship was easy in order to acknowledge that it shaped us. Remembering is not the same as pretending everything was wonderful. It is allowing the truth of a life, and the truth of our love, to have its place.

I have been thinking about this a lot. About the people who have gone before us, about the people who shaped us, and about the ways we carry them with us. The people who came before us live on in our stories, in the expressions we use, in the food we make, in the habits we have inherited, and in the ways we care for one another. Sometimes we discover that we have become rather like the very people we swore we would never become. Sometimes we hear a phrase come out of our mouths and suddenly recognize a parent or grandparent standing right there.

We can be grateful for a life and still ache at its absence. We can celebrate those who have gone before us and still wish they were sitting beside us. Both things can be true.

The Beatitudes remind us that God’s kingdom is already breaking through into this world. We glimpse it in mercy, peacemaking, the pursuit of justice, and the ordinary acts of love that rarely make the news. We see it in the saints who came before us and in the saints who are still here.

Because today we are not only remembering. We are deciding what we will carry forward. We have been loved, taught, challenged, and sometimes rescued by people whose influence continues long after their lives have ended. What will we do with that blessing?

Jesus isn’t giving us another list of things to accomplish before we can call ourselves people of the way, G.O.D., or seeking a higher mindness. We have quite enough lists already. He begins by telling us that God’s blessing is already at work, and that blessing changes how we live. We show mercy because we have received mercy. We work for peace and justice because we believe every person’s dignity matters. We live because we have been blessed, not in order to earn a blessing.

And that is true of this congregation, too. We are part of a community larger than any one of us, stretching across generations. Some who helped build St. Mark’s are remembered on memorial plaques or in our stories; others are remembered only by those who loved them. Their lives helped make ours possible.

And now it is our turn. Our turn to care for this place, make room for the next generation, welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, seek justice, and leave something worth inheriting.

I think about Lisa sitting with those children last Sunday, asking questions and helping them discover what they already know. Nothing grand or complicated. Just children gathered around someone who loves them, learning to pay attention to the world and to one another. And there is something holy about that.

Perhaps years from now, those children will find themselves doing something kind or wise and realize they learned it from someone here. We may never know all the ways we bless one another. So today, remember those who have gone before you. The ones whose names you speak often and the ones you haven’t said aloud in years. Remember those who made you laugh, taught you something important, loved you well, or left you with questions still unanswered. Give thanks, if you can. Grieve, if you need to. Say their names. Carry their stories.

And then look around you. Look at the children learning what it means to belong here, at the people doing the quiet work of sustaining this community, and at those you know well and those you have yet to meet.

These are the people with whom we are making the next part of the story. We are blessed by those who came before us, blessed by those who are here now, and given the opportunity to bless those who will come after us.

All Saints’ Day reminds us that we have never been doing this alone. And so we remember. We give thanks. We grieve. We laugh. We keep going, not because we are certain we will get everything right, but because we have received more love than we can account for, and there is still so much love to give. Blessing comes first. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.