Blessing, Voting, Giving, and All the Saints

All Saints Sunday, Year A
Sermon for November 1, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Church of the Epiphany. Happy All Saints’ Day, happy Halloween weekend, happy November, happy Stewardship season, happy Native American Heritage month, happy last Sunday before the midterm, almost there. There’s a lot to celebrate this weekend, this morning. Thank you for choosing to be here after your extra hour of sleep.

This morning’s gospel is maybe the most well-known passage of the entire New Testament, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes. If you haven’t heard these before, I’m thrilled to introduce you to the Christian tradition summed up in 12 short verses; combine these with “Love God” and “Love your Neighbor” and you’ve got the core of it, I’d think. But we read these out of order in the lectionary on All Saints’ Sunday, we come back to the Beatitudes after spending the last few weeks on Jesus’s parables and commands after entering Jerusalem. We do that, we read these, because they talk about what it is to truly be blessed, not “hashtag blessed”, not the popular American framing of being “blessed” with a new car or a new house, a new material blessing. No. Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the persecuted. This does not sound like a list of blessings, but those who are truly saints, officially recognized or not… this is where they often landed.

In an age of “Toxic Empathy,” when Christians of certain stripes are arguing that too much empathy is a bad thing, we have Christ’s Beatitudes. Thanks be to God. This confounding list of whom are blessed brings us into conversation with the rest of Jesus’s many parables, those that celebrate the prodigal son’s return, those that argue seeking after one lost sheep, those that argue the Samaritan – not the priest, not the Levite – the Samaritan is good, because he cares for the beaten traveler. The Beatitudes remind us that there is a different way of seeing the world than that of our own supposedly “common sense” in a capitalist culture. They tell us that it is not the pretty, the bubbly, the happy, the rich, the strong, the victors in battle that are blessed, but instead, often, the opposite.

The question then may be: “Do we strive for those positions of mourning, of meekness, of being poor in spirit?” Perhaps, depending on your situation, perhaps we do need to let things go, to mourn them, to be humbled, to be poor. I won’t make that judgment for you this morning. But more likely, I think, these Beatitudes help us to see that there is in fact deep blessing only found in mourning, poverty, in humility: there will be comfort, there will be an inheritance of the kingdom, of the earth. These will be the children of God.

You could read this famous passage and think it fosters a sort of earthly victimhood: suffer now, you’ll get some reward later. I know some traditions have read it that way, especially those faced with struggles impossible to escape. But that feels too transactional for our God of amazing grace; we do not suffer in order to be rewarded. No, instead, I believe most of these Beatitudes are a description of the present tense, or at least the near future tense. When we mourn, comfort is close at hand, and in that comfort, we see God in the face of the loving other. When we are meek, we can see the folly of the riches that men crave, we can find God in the breath we breathe and in the beauty of creation all around us, beauty without a price tag, because then, we have truly inherited the earth.

For context here, Jesus was interacting with a Jewish community centered around the law. We have been reading Exodus together (oh so slowly) at Evensong over the last few months, and in October, we read Moses climbing Mount Sinai to see God, receiving the law, most famously the Ten Commandments. There were many, many other laws in Jewish tradition, ways that they were to keep their covenant with God, but the Ten Commandments, etched in stone tablets, carried down the mountain, are the most famous. They are so famous that today, thousands of years later, we have legislators putting the Ten Commandments up in public schools, labeling them as the foundation of American civilization.

Laws often appeal to “common” sense (though not always, of late). Laws are often formed with a “do not do this” command, with a punishment tied in for those who break them. Laws are contractual, not relational; though Israel viewed and claimed them as covenantal, we can see how transactional they are too. Do this, get rewarded. Don’t do this, get punished. You can see where the Jewish people of Jesus’s time might get hung up on the law; it was central to them in their covenant with God. They could not mess up.

But here, today, Jesus breaks that all down. Jesus mirrors Moses in Matthew 5, he climbs the mountain and delivers to the people the fully revealed Word of God. The Beatitudes are not laws but blessings. They are not commandments of restriction to maintain a covenant. They are blessings on those the world might discard or refute, blessings to show how close the mourners, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, how close they are in relationship with God. These are the blessed.

The Greek for “blessed” indicates a form of radiance, of light; like the transfigured saints on another mountain later in Jesus’ story, those who live the Beatitudes shine with the light of God. They will see God, they will be called children of God, they will inherit the kingdom; they shine with the light of God. If we want to see God, thanks to the Beatitudes, we now really know where to look.

The call for us this morning, then, is not to reject the Ten Commandments or the law wholesale, but to see them, to see the law in a different light. Moses climbed a mountain and heard the Word of God for the people of Israel as they left Egypt, and Jesus climbed a mountain to teach the people the true fulfillment of that Word. He lived it, he blessed it, he embodied that Word. Jesus shows us the way to live, he shows us now what it is to be truly blessed.

We do not need our life to be flush with cash and cars and savings accounts and luxuries to be blessed; in fact, those may all get in the way. We do not need to strictly follow ancient purity laws to maintain our relationship with God, to preserve our holiness or our worthiness. We need only to follow Jesus. It is in relationship with the Son of God that we find love, we love others, even our enemies, and we are blessed. Amen?

There’s so much more I want to say today, with our celebration of All Saints’, with the beginning of Native American Heritage month, with the start of our stewardship season, with the midterm election coming on Tuesday. Hang with me for a few more minutes.

On All Saints’, we celebrate those who have gone before us, but especially the saints the church lifts up as exemplars of the faith, those who have lived these Beatitudes and the parables and the two commandments so well. That list of saints is not a complete roll call of the kingdom of heaven: tradition, patriarchy, wars, historical factors and biases, they always get in the way of these things. We are human, not perfect.

But in our saints, we do have people in the church whom we can name as heroes. For my capstone project at my Nazarene seminary, I put together a digital art project of all 271 saints on the Episcopal Church’s list with a friend, Pastor Kirsten. It was a lot of work, but it was so very good. In working on that project, we were able to meet so many saints of the church, to read their stories, and… get ready, prepare yourself for this… the saints are not all white men! 

Our church celebrates a wide range of diverse saints, ancient and modern: Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero, Lydia of Thyatira, Frederick Douglass, Clementine Harris, John Enmegahbowh, Evelyn Underhill, Toyohiko Kagawa, Pauli Murray, Absalom Jones… the list is long. These saints are all lifted up for the way they followed Jesus and for the impact they made on their world, the way they built the kingdom of God here and now.

What the church does, what it has done for centuries, on its best days, is provide a place for the Beatitudes to be embodied, to be learned. The church provides a community in which love can be practiced, not where laws can be followed, where heroes like these can be lifted up, not heroes of sport or Hollywood or Wall Street or Washington. Here, we can point to the saints, to those who lived out Christ’s love, whose relationship with their God formed them not just for heaven but for the present too. We can point to those who were truly blessed, even if spit upon, even if imprisoned, even if martyred. And then, reflecting on these saints or those we meet each Sunday, sitting in the pews around us, then we ourselves can live our lives according to this love, this understanding of blessing.

But living a life of love is not easy; many of the saints show us that by their own struggles. Many of them died because of their commitment to love, their commitment to God and their neighbor. Love may require sacrifice, of our time, of our money, of our lives, of the material things we hold so tightly, assuming they will give us meaning or a sense of blessing. Love may require advocacy, it may require us to vote, or to change how we vote, to be sure that we are voting for those who will help us build a more just and equitable society where all can flourish, not one based on religious purity laws, but on love and blessing and peace and justice for all, righting systemic wrongs, lifting up those who are low. Love may require relationship with those who frustrate us, it may require turning off our devices, walking out our doors, engaging those around us. You see, living a life of love is a whole-life commitment, not just for Sunday mornings, not just for brunch. This faith is not just a personal thing between you and “the big guy.” No, living in love requires much of us. It requires much. But it gives us much too. There is no other way to be truly happy, to be actually blessed, than to be in relationship with Jesus.

This morning, Church of the Epiphany, I invite you to reflect on the lives of our diverse group of Christ-following saints, to read Jesus’s Beatitudes as a description of all of those who live their lives based in love, to understand blessing and what it is to follow this Messiah anew. And then, I invite you to live, to truly live, to vote on Tuesday and to give abundantly… and to treat each other as if you really believe that all this is true, that it is in loving God and loving others that we are find true blessing.

Amen.