Saints of God

All Saint's Sunday Year C

A Sermon based on Ephesians 1:11-23 and Luke 6 20-31

In the name of Jesus; amen.

This past Monday I had lunch with my mother, husband, and another pastor who happens to be my mother’s best friend. The three of us met my mom for lunch after attending a meeting together. As we read our menus we got to talking politics and complaining about the things in the world we felt were unjust.

Deep into our conversation the waitress approached and asked if we knew what we wanted. I popped my head up from behind the menu and said yes. “Ok, what would you like?” she asked and without thinking, I said, “A just world.”

From the confused look on her face I could tell that she wasn’t expecting that particular answer.

Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, a holy day to remember those who have gone before us into heaven. But the Feast of All Saints is also a day to remember, as Paul says, “that in Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will.”

Today we remember that we are baptized and as such we are inheritors of a great promise: that we are God’s children, redeemed, and marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit.

This is no small matter; in fact, it is a great thing, an awesome amazing thing. We have been given a gift: “the immeasurable greatness of God’s power.”

My brother is a geek. I say that with all love, affection, and pride. As a geek, my brother has an affinity for super heroes; one of his favorites is Spider Man. If you don’t know the story of Spider Man it goes something like this. One day a teenaged boy named Peter Parker was bit by a radioactive spider which gave him super powers that mimicked the abilities of spiders. He could crawl up walls, shoot webbing out of his wrists, and he even had a special “spider sense” that warned him of danger.

At first Peter used his abilities for his own gain until one day he had an opportunity to use his power to stop a crime and didn’t. Later that same criminal killed his beloved Uncle Ben. From that moment on Peter Parker took on a second identity: Spider Man. In everything he did he remembered something his Uncle Ben told him, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

We aren’t super heroes, but we are children of God. We have been given this awesome gift of God’s love. We have been made into saints and as such we, like Spiderman have been given great power and great responsibility.

But I wonder, do you feel powerful?

In today’s gospel Jesus gives us a new way of understanding blessing and curse. He tells his disciples that those who are poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed are actually blessed.

It’s a reversal of fortune in the eyes of the people who were listening and perhaps in our eyes too. I do not feel powerful when I am hungry or in mourning. I feel weak and powerless at exactly those times when I have the least and yet Jesus tells us that those who undergo these sufferings are blessed.

It is a new perspective on faith and God that God would bless us when we are at our weakest.

But this is exactly how God operates. We, who are sinners, are granted sainthood; a complete and total reversal of our status as men and women in this world. There is great power in that, power that is stronger than Superman’s ability to leap tall buildings with a single bound, stronger than Spiderman’s spider sense.

We are not superheroes, but we are children of God. We have been given the power of forgiveness and commanded to “do to others as you would have them do to you.”

We have power and that power is meant to be used for good, to work for justice, to care for our neighbor in need, to rejoice when we are blessed with good things by sharing with others. To speak out for those who have no voice and to speak out about our faith, faith that tells us that God redeems us and loves us and never leaves us.

I do want a just world, but I don’t need to be a superhero to work towards justice because I am a child of God. This is the Gospel message for today; the good news that is meant to give us power and strength… we have been gifted with it. God gave it to us; we have been marked with it, and filled with it to go out into the world to love our neighbor and to work for righteousness.

Amen.