Dearly beloved. I am going to take a page out today’s reading from John’s letter and address you as ‘beloved’. For you are beloved of God, and of St John’s Hyde Park. God loves you, and we love you.
The darkness is drawing in, the sun is going down at half four. It’s disconcerting even though it happens every year! After last night’s Downing Street briefing, I think we’re all likely to be feeling that a more a metaphorical darkness is drawing in as well. The news of a month long national lockdown from Thursday provokes a lot of dark feelings. The shadows creeping on our lives right now are likely to be things like anxiety, stress, sadness, fear, and despair.
But, beloved, a question for you, this Sunday, while the sun is up and we are still here, together - are you feeling saintly today? For today is the feast of the all saints, the blessed people, the hallowed people, or just the hallows for short. All Hallows Eve was possibly a bit quieter for you last night than in previous years, and for some I’m sure that was quite a relief! I myself watched the film ‘Hocus Pocus’ for the first time.
All Hallows. I am going to use that term instead of All Saints otherwise I might sound like I’m talking about a fashion label or a 90s girl group; also the Church of England gets a little uncomfortable with the notion that a ‘saint’ is an official thing canonised by the Vatican. You know how touchy we get about the Pope – give us time, it’s only been… 500 years.
All Hallows is a Principal Feast, which means it’s one of the biggies, and why I want to talk about it today. We’re celebrating people in whose lives the Church has seen the grace of God at work powerfully. Yes, celebrating. I believe we can keep this feast, a light to overcome the darkness. We are also celebrating that we are part of the same company.
Do you hear that, beloved? You belong with The Hallows. Oh no, that’s starting to sound like a 90s girl group as well. Anyway, we thank God for the hallows, and we thank God for you. God loves you, and we love you. There are a lot of famous hallows – our St John the Evangelist and St Michael the Archangel for example. Their stories of bringing light to the lives of others, and of overcoming the powers of darkness, have been passed down to stir us up with courage. Their stories are part of our stories, because our stories are part of the story of God.
John, in his letter today, calls us the children of God, because of the love that God has given to us. John talks a lot about love – if you haven’t read his letters, they’re quite short, I would recommend them. Beloved, I could call you Blesséd, for to be loved by God is to be blessed, to be hallowed. It might not feel like it right now, but let’s look at our gospel reading which might help.
If you look at the Beatitudes, the list from our reading, being hallowed/being blessed is not what you might at first expect. It is hard to hear the Beatitudes these days and not let them just wash over us, while we giggle quietly as we remember the Monty Python ‘Blesséd are the cheesemakers’ gag. Sure, we all thought it. We know them too well, is my point, so they need to be properly dug into to hear to what are we being called.
Now, Matthew isn’t giving us a verbatim script of a historical speech that Jesus gave. The Sermon on the Mount, from which this passage comes, is a constructed piece of the gospel account, expanding Matthew’s headline statement a few verses earlier. For Matthew, the gospel, the good news is summed up by 4.17 – “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Now we hear of what we should repent and what ‘the kingdom of heaven’ may be. The key, beloved, the key is the kingdom is a community. One layer to pull back from the Beatitudes is to not hear every blessing as referring to nine individual groups. The poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, etc. This is not a checklist for individuals to aspire to; there will not be a clipboard Bob at the pearly gates saying “Er, sorry there but you have not reached the quota for any of the categories” before pulling a lever for the trap door.
No, beloved, these are not nine different types of disciple. This is the collective identity of the authentic community of disciples. All nine are true of the whole community, not necessarily of the members.
Another way I could put it, beloved, is that the community of the kingdom is a mix of saints and sinners, and it’s not a clear-cut divide. We’re all a muddle of sin and sanctity. And that is okay. We are not like Jesus, not yet. John writes of how we will be like him, and this, this is the hope that blesses us. This is the hope that blesses us. The hope that shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.
This community, this kingdom of heaven that Jesus is building, then and now - we have this hope, for we are beloved children of God.
We do not have to do anything to deserve the love and hope that we have been given, but we have been enabled to respond. And that’s another layer of the Beatitudes, found in this surprise reversal of what blessing, being hallowed, looks like. Jesus radically reverses the whole value system that comes naturally to us. We naturally want to live as though ‘Blesséd are the rich, the happy, the confident, the sated, the movers and shakers’. Or perhaps ‘blesséd are those who are allowed to sing, and hug, and travel’. Because we want ‘being blessed’ to mean getting what we want because we think it will make us happy.
But being hallowed is in fact to be loved and to live in hope. And God loves you, and we love you. In response, beloved, we mourn for the way the world is and we thirst for righteousness, for the world to be put right. The good news is that this radical value system of gratitude and not greed will one day be established throughout all creation. One day.
To live that life according that value system of gratitude not greed, to live that life now before the kingdom comes can seem foolish; to be merciful and make peace in a cruel and unjust world can seem foolish, and it will lead us to persecution. To follow the rules that restrict our lives to the point of despair might seem foolish. But in doing so, we will become agents of blessing to others, reciprocating the love that gives us hope of the world to come. By living out a radical reversed value system, we show people the love of God that we know, and the hope of God’s kingdom.
Beloved, ours is a faith that knows this paradox of the good news, that we are called to do the seemingly foolish, right thing now, against our natural inclination, for ours is a future hope. Jesus is risen. God will make things right. It does not make our mourning or our persecution hurt any less. I wish I could tell you otherwise. It does not pull us out of despair on its own, but our hope in the God who loves us holds us firm through the darkness.
The season of All Hallows is the time in the northern hemisphere when the darkness draws in and the days get shorter. But God loves you, and we love you. The writer of today’s letter might have been the same writer as the gospel of John, and it is the words that begin that gospel, that good news of God to God’s beloved children, that I want to hold to as the shadows creep in.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Sermon preached on 1st November 2020 at St John’s Hyde Park by the Rev’d Georgina Elsey
