Who are the saints that we commemorate on this day, All Saints Sunday?
If you were raised in another tradition, or attended confirmation class some years ago, you might think of saints as people marked and named as special by the church. Krister Stendahl, Lutheran pastor, scholar, one-time bishop of Sweden, and former dean of Harvard Divinity School, once was a guest preacher at a church on Nantucket. It was the feast of Peter and Paul. But his wife, he told us at the time, had had to remind him that in the Episcopal church, in which he was preaching, it was the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul.
His point was that it was rare for Lutherans to give our church heroes saintly titles freely bestowed by other traditions. The feast days on which we celebrate them are named for their accomplishments rather than their saintliness. Thus we say the feast of Andrew, Apostle, rather than the feast of St. Andrew. The Confession of Peter, rather than the feast of St. Peter. The Conversion of Paul, rather than the feast of St. Paul. Mark, Evangelist, rather than St. Mark.
This is not just iconoclasm. Not just the Lutheran reformers’ queasiness with ecclesiastical ornamentation. The Lutheran practice reflects a theological prejudice: There is no basic distinction between spiritual performance that is excellent and that which is merely mediocre or even poor. We are, as the formula goes, all both saints and sinners. There is in fact no such thing as spiritual performance. We are only creatures, all in the same boat, all struggling as best we can—or maybe not even that hard—but struggling nonetheless. Our hearts are with Jesus, but that hardly makes us perfect. We suffer. We rejoice. We praise God. We fight with God. We forget God. So none of us deserve special gold stars. Or, as we celebrate today, we all do.
When it comes to sinning and sainthood, we are all in this together. But we need to be reminded of that over and over. We are brothers and sisters of all people. That is hard enough to remember. Even more demanding and hard to admit: we are all equally commendable and disgraceful.
Blessed, Jesus says in Luke, are the ones who are poor. And those who are hungry, who weep, who are hated. This seems impossible. To be blessed means to be fortunate, or favored; lucky, we might say these days. A blessing is a hope (or a small petition to God) that all things will go well, that you will thrive and prosper, that your life will be good.
The beatitudes—which is what this list of blessings is called—are ferocious in Luke. They are not wimpy good wishes. The word “poor” means someone reduced to begging, who has no other way to survive. It means wretched, miserable. The word “weep” means to wail, mourning in tears and with one’s whole body. To be excluded means to be put aside, cut off as in prison or a camp.
We cannot sentimentalize what Jesus is talking about, and we cannot spiritualize it, as the list in Matthew does: blessed are the poor in spirit, it says there; blessed are those who hunger for righteousness. In Luke, the blessings go to those who are really poor, really hungry, really treated as less than human.
The beatitudes in Luke and Matthew are similar, but they are not the same thing. They are each a list of blessings, but they are about two different things altogether.
The blessings given in Luke’s list to the poor and hungry make people uncomfortable. For four reasons.
First, it does not seem like the poor are blessed. It seems like they are not.
Second, people want to be blessed but they do not want to have to be poor to do that. They want to be blessed and rich, too. Which seems to make sense, but which is contradicted by today’s reading.
Third, they do not want to admit that God makes a special claim for the poor. God is supposed to be neutral in this, even though the prophets and the Gospels often say otherwise.
And fourth, and most germane on this day, they have a stake in considering certain people as essentially different from them.
We just spent, as most of you know, some time in Australia. We learned a little about the Aborigines, the indigenous people who lived there when the Europeans arrived. As in this hemisphere, those who lived there were displaced, conquered, captured, enslaved, and murdered. In some places, Aboriginal people were classified by the occupiers as “fauna,” so that they could be hunted legally and without shame.
To its credit, Australia is trying to undo a tiny bit of what can be undone, and is spending lots of time, money, and energy facing its history. We who have a similar history here regarding both Native Americans and especially slavery, and other people and nations who do, too, could take a page from their book.
If all people are saints and sinners, we cannot make cosmic distinctions between one whole class of people—the poor, say—and another. We cannot consider a kind of people to be virtuous and another kind to be wicked. We cannot use words like primitive and advanced to describe whole cultures. We cannot justify creating wealth on the foundation of the suffering of other people. We cannot, as much as it is in our power, to deprive certain others the blessings we have.
By specifying the wretched, hungry, incarcerated, oppressed people as the ones who are blessed, Jesus is more than making some strange and disturbing observation. He is instructing his disciples—his students; us—concerning the nature of the world about which he preaches. The distinctions that seem so obvious and inevitable are nothing. And should be nothing. And can be nothing.
Purity is not a Christian value.
Sainthood is not something we earn or deserve or nominate. It is God’s work, not ours. We are saints because God claims us.
Today we light candles, remembering and honoring those who have died. Not because they were so great. Like all of us, they were a complicated mixture of one thing and another. But because like us they have a place in God’s heart that is not in jeopardy. They were all sinners. All saints.
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