We are God’s Children NOW
A sermon preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Port Chester, NY on Sunday, November 5th, 2017 (All Saints’ Day)
Readings: Revelation 7:9-17, 1 John 3:1-3, Matthew 5:1-12
If you think of the major feast days and observances of the Church – Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension – most of them are rooted in things that happened to Jesus a long time ago. Sure, those events continue to be relevant and life-giving for us today, but, at their core, they’re commemorations of things that happened to someone else in the past. But All Saints’ Day is different. All Saints; is about us. Yes, we remember famous saints who lived a long time ago, but the whole point of the Communion of Saints that we celebrate today is that it extends into the present. Saints aren’t fictional creatures like unicorns or extinct ones like dinosaurs. When we talk about saints, we are also talking about us. The Communion of All the Saints is present right here, right now.
On All Saints’ Day, the veil between heaven and earth feels particularly thin. As we celebrate and remember the great cloud of witnesses who went before us – apostles and martyrs, prophets and reformers, grandmothers, artists, Civil Rights leaders, teachers, healers, visionaries and dreamers of all kinds – we can feel their presence with us here today. The boundaries of time, past, present, and future, soften a little bit, bleed into each other. And so does the boundary that usually seems to separate the holy from the earthly, the boundary that separates us from God. On All Saints’ Day, heaven and earth kiss each other and we are swept up in God’s holiness, not in some future paradise, but right now.
So let’s dive into the great holy now. Let’s set aside, just for a moment, as a thought experiment, our nostalgia or grief for the past and our anxiety and dreams for the future and really sink our teeth into this moment, this now. I love these words from 1 John that call our wandering attention back to the present: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” We are God’s children now. What if that were enough?
We are God’s children and God calls each one of us blessed. Our Gospel reading today is not some great and glorious miracle, or a dramatic prophecy, but nothing other than the Beatitudes, from the Sermon on the Mount. It is a list of ways in which ordinary human beings are blessed, holy, and beloved. Think of who was gathered at Jesus’ feet as he preached this sermon: not kings, not high level officials, not celebrities, but a crowd of normal men and women, beautiful in their brokenness, hungry for words of life and healing. It is a crowd we can easily imagine ourselves in, leaning on a rock, feeling the bodies of our friends and neighbors pressed up against us, hearing Jesus’ refrain, “Blessed are you, blessed are you, blessed are you.” The Beatitudes are a reminder that we are not excluded from God’s vision, that we too can be wrapped in holiness, that we too are blessed, that we too are part of the Communion of Saints. And notice that Jesus doesn’t say we will be blessed at some later date, but insists that we – meek, merciful, poor in spirit, mourning, and persecuted – are blessed right now.
We are God’s children now. Later today, this community will have the joy of welcoming two new children of God into the Communion of All the Saints in the sacrament of Baptism. Baptism is always a beautiful and joyful thing but today it feels especially poignant and powerful. Our community has been living in a state of mounting fear of the threat of deportation. Just in the past month, more and more cases of Port Chester residents fighting with everything they have to protect their lives and those of their families have reached the media and captured public attention. More and more people are coming to us at the church and asking for help. The fear is real. Its effects are palpable. This is happening.
And it is right in the midst of this fear and terror that we welcome new Christians into the Communion of Saints. Where ICE agents sow fear, we sow hope. Where the government tells our fellow human beings, “you are illegal. You are an alien. You do not matter. You are not welcome,” today we get to offer an alternative proclamation. Today, we will trace chrism crosses on fragile foreheads and say, “you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” What we are really saying is: “your value and worth as a human being does not depend on where you were born or what your immigration status is. You are beloved. You are Christ’s. And no power in heaven or on earth can ever change that.”
By virtue of our very existence, we are all children of God. By virtue of our Baptism, we are living members of the Communion of Saints, the Body of Christ. In Baptism, there is no legal or illegal, there is no citizen or alien, there is no US-born or immigrant; there is only equality. Around this font and this altar, we are all equally blessed, equally holy, equally much God’s children. And these days, more than ever, we need to publicly celebrate, proclaim, and remember that truth. Because the world is trying to sell us a different story, a story of division and hate an enmity.
We are God’s children now. In the book of Revelation, in this beautiful and strange vision of heaven and earth melting into each other, we hear the question, “Who are these robed in white, and where have they come from?” They are the saints. The baptized. Those who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. They are Ingrid and Luis Alejandro, who will be baptized in a few hours. Who are these robed in white? Look around you. They’re each one of us.
So today, rejoice in your holiness. Rejoice in this thin space, where we get to see and taste and touch heaven, here and now. Let us claim our place in that great fellowship of Saints, remembering that, no matter what persecution may befall us, no matter what messages of hate and exclusion the world offers us, we are God’s children now. And nothing can ever change that. Amen.
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