I Mean to Be One Too!
All Saints Day. We do not tend to think of ourselves as saints. And yet, in the early church everyone who chose to follow The Way of Jesus were often referred to as “the saints.” All were seeking to repent – literally turn their lives around – and accept Jesus’s invitation to live one’s life “as if” the kingdom of heaven could become a reality as the kingdom of God here and now.
We read the opening passage of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, chapters 5-7 of Matthew’s gospel, for it is this teaching that forms what Amy Jill Levine calls “A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven.” [i] Jesus begins with a series of blessings which we call The Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12. A resource I used to use in leading Youth Groups called these blessings Be-Attitudes – Attitudes of Being – how to be a follower of the Christ in this world. How to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth – as later in Mathew Jesus teaches us to pray, “on Earth as it is in heaven.”
I have long found it curious that certain people who identify as Christians insist on posting the Ten Commandments all over the place, rather than these core principles of kingdom living, these Be-Attitudes, in which Jesus calls us to be merciful, to be peacemakers, to be humble and meek, to be pure in heart, to be righteous. Most of all, to feel blessed and rejoice, even in the most difficult of times. For even the prophets, often faced the most difficult of times, found time to rejoice and be glad. Most of us can agree, the times have become difficult no matter how and from what perspective we might look at things. The first thing we neglect to do is to rejoice and be glad that despite how dark things may appear, we have these Attitudes of Being to fall back on, no matter what.
First of all, these opening words of the sermon seek to remind us of the most fundamental dimension of being human: we are created in the image – the eikon, or icon – of God. That is, we are placed on “this fragile earth, our island home” as something like a marker one uses to spot one’s ball on the green of a golf course. We have been placed here as a reminder that this planet comes from a force, an energy, a life-giving source greater than ourselves – beyond our tiny selves in the vastness of this seemingly endless universe! At the same time, we are placed here as those beings who have been blessed with memory, reason and the skills to be the caretakers of the planet and all the creatures that inhabit it.
Second of all, these Attitudes of Being mirror the very characteristics of the God, the Source, the Energy that has placed us here as caretakers: humility, which comes from a root meaning “of the earth;” purity of heart and mind; mercy; righteousness; joy and gladness. Yes, even when things are at their worst, as when they threw the prophet Jeremiah into the bottom of a well to shut him up from telling the truth no one wanted to hear, even then we are to be glad that we have lived up to these Attitudes of Being with faithfulness and righteousness, talking truth to power.
AJ, as Amy Jill Levine likes to be called, points out something I would never have noticed on my own. This word “righteousness” in the Sermon on the Mount points back to the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel and the inclusion of four women in a long list of patriarchs: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. These four women, each in her own peculiar way sometimes, represent what righteousness is all about – putting the needs of someone else ahead of your own. Which, as we know, is the basis of the kind of agape love of neighbor the Bible always reminds us that we are to practice.
Judah, Tamar’s father-in-law, by whom she conceives twins, is the one who says that she “is more righteous than I.” Rahab, a Canaanite woman in Jericho, not only deceives her king to save the lives of two Israelite spies, but also strikes a deal with them to save her family after the walls come tumbling down. Ruth, a Moabite widow, does the hard work of harvesting a field to save and protect the life of her widowed mother-in-law Naomi, as the two of them are refugees seeking asylum in Israel. And Bathsheba reminds us also of her husband, Uriah the Hittite, a faithful foreign soldier who refuses to leave his forward unit despite the danger that ultimately takes his life. And of course, the genealogy tells us of Joseph, who refuses to dismiss his betrothed Mary who is pregnant, he knows not how; refuses to humiliate her; but rather marries her, and protects her and her son by fleeing as refugees to seek asylum in Egypt when Herod threatens to kill her child and all other infants in Bethlehem. These otherwise ordinary people are icons of God and icons of righteousness. People who put the needs of others ahead of their own – and even beyond generally accepted norms! [ii]
In honor of the four righteousness women, we do well to honor the first woman listed in our calendar of saints in the Book of Common Prayer: January 9, Julia Chester Emery, Missionary, whose life spanned from 1852-1922. One of eleven children of Sea Captain, and devout Episcopalian, Charles Emery and his wife Susan. Like most of her siblings, Juila devoted herself to religious service to others. [iii] At the age of 24, like her sister Mary before her, Julia became National Secretary of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Board of Missions for forty years. This lay woman, visited every diocese in our church to raise money and support for missionaries around the world, and started the United Thank Offering in which people throughout the church would have a small blue box with a slit on the top. One is to put a few coins or bills in the box each time you feel thankful. These offerings are collected to this day to support mission efforts at home and abroad. Under her guidance, women received canonical status to become deaconesses in the church, and were granted special status at our church’s General Convention. Each year on January 9, we are to remember the righteousness of Julia Chester Emery, a laywoman, who worked tirelessly on behalf of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
We sing, “for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.” A hymn first published in 1929, authored by another woman, Lesbia Scott. Ms. Scott composed a number of hymns and tunes for her own children, and published them in a collection, Everyday Hymns for Little Children. As we sing this song, we are to remember, not all the saints were martyred or performed heroic deeds, but folks like you and me. Ordinary people who live faithful lives according to the principles outlined in the Beatitudes, Attitudes of Being.
All Saints Day. A time to remember just who we are and whose we are. We are all of us saints created in the image of God, to bring forward these Attitudes of Blessing and Being: humility, righteousness, peacemaking, courage, and mercy. Being merciful, wrote Kurt Vonnegut, is the one good idea we have been given so far. As we seek to embody the kind of life Jesus announces in his first public teaching, we are promised a life for which we and others can all rejoice and be glad! We are God’s beloved. God is well pleased with us! Amen.
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