Sermon of All Saints, Sunday the 4th of November, 2007

Here is this past Sunday's sermon. I've been bad about posting them, but I really enjoyed this one. I'll try to get the rest of the recent ones up soon.

Readings: Daniel 7:1-3,15-18, Psalm 149, Ephesians 1:11-23, Luke 6:20-31

The turn from Halloween on October 31st, to All Saints Day on November 1st is a dramatic contrast. Over two thousand years ago, the parochial superstitions about the roaming spirits of the departed gave rise to Celtic traditions such as the Jack of the Lantern where a turnip or large Beet would be carved out and a candle placed inside so as to scare off the wandering spirits of imps and other wily spirits sent to antagonize and otherwise torture the living. In addition, the spirits of departed loved ones trying to find their way back to the lit lantern on the threshold of the family homestead on the night before the Celtic New Year, when the boundary between the physical world and the spirit world was at its thinnest, could be appeased by placing food outside the door (as well as kept outside by that scary Jack o’ Lantern). One never knew whether the spirit at the door on Halloween night would be a trick or a treat. Most people were too afraid to go outside on this particular night, but those who dared would dress up as ghosts and ghouls so as to trick wandering spirits into thinking that he or she was just another of the walking dead.

The transition from Samhain, the eve of the Celtic New Year, to All Saints Day is a prime example of Imperial Christianity in the Roman Empire co-opting local traditions and attaching Christian meaning to them as a means of easing local customs and beliefs into Christianity. These and other non-Christian Celtic superstitions and practices surrounding the first new-moon after the harvest moon were normalized in the calendar year by the early church in the 9th century under the umbrella of All Saints Day, when we celebrate our communion with and continuing connection to the followers of Christ who have gone before us. All Hallows Eve, as the night before All Saints Day, replaced the Celtic Samhain celebration of the dead with a new custom of feeding the poor, who would go door to door seeking food in the form of what were called “soul cakes.”

While the ancient customs of ghoulish costumes, jack o’ lanterns, and leaving food out for the spirits is alive and well in today’s secular Halloween traditions, the deeper religious significance of remembering our connection to Christians both past and present in what the Apostle’s Creed calls the “Communion of Saints” draws our attention back to Christ on this Holy Day. Yet there is a close connection between the behavior of the wily ancient spirits that give rise to our modern Halloween and Christ as the embodiment of the trickster in today’s gospel reading.

The Trickster is a character from Native American (and other) traditions, who intentionally transgressed boundaries and social traditions as a means of turning people’s deep held beliefs on their heads and challenging the structures and powers that formed and governed civilized society. The Loki character of European traditions mirrors the trickster in spirit form as does the character of the fairy king and the devil (not to be confused with modern references to Satan) in Celtic folklore.

This character not only provided super-human comic relief to stories of morality and stories about why things are they way they are, but also provided important counterpoint to the expectations and social conventions that so frequently needed (and still need) to be challenged in the ordering of society. It is the child that insists that the emperor is, in fact, naked. It is the Native American spirit guide, coyote, who, like the Holy Spirit, has a habit of unexpectedly calling us to a complete change of our lives. And it is Christ in today’s gospel, speaking in truths that challenged the way people thought (and still think), and counseling his followers to turn their thinking completely upside down as a means of challenging the status quo.

It was as much up to Christ’s listeners two-thousand years ago to figure out wherein lay the truths of his statements as it is up to us today. And I very much believe that Christ intended to challenge his listeners with his statements.

Christ lists as blessed those who are poor, hungry, distressed, excluded, reviled, and defamed, but lists as cursed (or subject to woe) those who are rich, sated, laughing, and revered.
In true trickster fashion, there is truth in his statements, though we have to dig for a meaning that may be different for each of us. For my own part, Christ’s words today force me to really look at the times in my own life when I have experienced each of these states of being.

As a starving student in seminary I was often forced to rely on God’s providence. Fuego and I were very newly married. We had rent to pay, undergraduate loans to pay, food to buy so that we could eat, seminary tuition to pay, and books to buy, but financial aid only for one. Fuego was herself just recently graduated from college and had relocated from Arcata, new to the professional world, new to being a wife, new to seminary, and was dealing with the terribly new loss of her father just two months after our wedding (about a month into seminary). For the three years we were in seminary, we lived on an average income of about seven thousand dollars per year over and above my financial aid. At the lowest, our first year, we only made five thousand dollars that wasn’t financial aid, prompting one member of the seminary grant committee in the Diocese of MyOldDiocese to clarify whether that might be our monthly rather than our annual income. There were whole months at the end of semesters where we weren’t sure how we were going to feed ourselves. Yet these years were some of the most blessed we have spent. We experienced community the likes of which we will likely never experience again. We, without fail, experienced God’s providence in the form of gifts from various unexpected sources that came just when we thought we had nowhere else to turn. Though we sometimes scraped by on Top Ramen and Peanut Butter, we never actually went hungry, and we truly felt that blessing of God that Christ, today, pronounces for the poor.

By contrast, the fourteen months I spent working at Intel in Santa Clara, CA before going to work for the Diocese of MyOldDiocese were some of the most vocationally unfulfilling months I’ve spent in my life. While I took the job purely motivated by paying off my undergraduate loans before starting seminary, and while I was incredibly blessed to have been able to do so, the rewards were purely in the pay check. Working long hours at spiritually meaningless tasks certainly brought the woe that Christ describes today.

I look at similar experiences in the roller coaster of life and realize that those times when I have been at the lowest ebbs: hungry, excluded, reviled, defamed, or desperately distressed to my emotional core, the experience of relief from any and all of these has been an experience of blessing, an experience of elation, an experience of the profound truth in Christ’s statement from today’s gospel of the joy and lifting up of my spirit in God. Conversely, when we are at the top, we truly do have the furthest to fall, and great is that fall when it happens.

I’ve never been so sated as after participating in a thirty-hour famine, nor so hungry as after a hearty breakfast followed by nothing for lunch or dinner.

For any of us who has lived to experience both the highs and the lows, Christ’s words, in all their truth, are cyclic, yet I believe the point of them, beyond their profound truth, is simply to challenge our perceptions, to teach us to look at life in a way that turns social convention on its head. If we can do this, if we can find the truth in these statements, Christ invites us, as those described as “those who listen,” to further challenge our perceptions and the conventions that have shaped us and predisposed us to think in a specific way.

“Love your enemies,” our trickster Christ tells us. “Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” In essence, Christ is teaching us to spin the power balance in a world where wickedness and self centeredness have become the rule. ‘Act in defiance to the powers seeking to draw you away from God,’ he seems to be saying. Those who act out of hatred, and enmity, or seek to raise themselves up by cursing or abusing others live a life empty of God. They are described elsewhere as the “children of this corrupt generation” as opposed to the Children of Light. Instead of allowing ourselves to be dragged away from God by the wiles of the corrupt, Christ encourages us to pity them and to act out of mercy and compassion.

A simple and somewhat silly example is the difference I feel when I’m suck in traffic between joining in the chaos of trying to get ahead at the cost of all those around me versus taking the opportunity to show mercy to those who so desperately seem to be seeking to cut me off, run me off the road, or otherwise force me into a collision with them or others around me.

There are days when I simply can’t distance myself from the stresses of getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. These are typically those days when I have over-scheduled myself and not taken into account the little unexpected delays, like poopie diapers, that keep me from getting on the road when I had planned too little time for myself in the first place.

Perhaps none of you has ever experienced this, but I’m guessing I’m not alone. You get in the car, promptly get back out to go back in the house for the first of about five things that you’ll forget and have to go back for before you can finally back out of the driveway. By this point, you’re leaving at least ten (or perhaps as many as thirty) minutes later than you had intended. Since you’re running late, you don’t have time to get that precious morning cup of coffee that can make or break the tone for the rest of the day. You’re out of gas because you had some good reason, that now eludes you, to rush past the gas station on the way home the previous evening – and the price per gallon has jumped five cents since last night, adding insult to injury. So you finally get on the freeway now fifteen (or thirty-five) minutes late, only to find that some other late person five miles up the road has given into the intense pressure to run into the guy ahead of him. And so you sit, frustrated, perhaps on the verge of tears depending on how important is was for you to be on time this particular day, and you’re surrounded by other frustrated, rushed, late, drivers who don’t seem willing to accept that you deserve to be allowed to pass through this sea of would-be road blocks more than they do. Suddenly the next lane seems to be moving faster and every car behind you jumps into it, leaving you stuck even though you were ahead of them in the first place and clearly deserved to get over before them. With grim pleasure, you note that theirs is the lane that is closed ahead, but instead of getting to gloat over your new found advantage, they simply cut you off without so much as signaling.
It is in this moment that we are given the clarity to choose between weeping bitterly as we instruct the driver ahead of us with a strategic choice of sign language involving an extended finger, or to simply throw up our hands and accept that the only path to sanity lies in refusing to play by the same rules as everyone else on the road anymore. So in the midst of the insanity, we stop trying to “win,” and simply allow these poor souls to get back over. The trickster Christ, in us at this moment, is given over to mercy when everything around us demands retribution.

Understanding this twist in the gospel, we are finally ready for the truly subversive instructions of Christ that went to the heart of an occupied and powerless people.

Each of Christ’s final instructions was a form of peaceful protest against Rome… turning the other cheek meant that a Roman who used a demeaning backhand as punishment would have to use a palm slap in order to complete his punishment, thereby recognizing his subordinate as an equal… To demand an outer garment of a subordinate was the right of any roman soldier, but to leave the subordinate naked was a social embarrassment and was forbidden, so to not withhold the tunic when the jacket was demanded was to put the soldier at risk for reprimand. Matthew’s gospel also includes walking the extra mile, which strikes at a Soldier’s right to demand that a subordinate carry their pack for up to, but no more than, a mile. By carrying a soldier’s pack an extra mile, the soldier is again subject to reprimand.

By contrast, Christ’s final words in today’s gospel, some of the most famous from the Bible, known as the “Golden Rule” of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” seems somewhat out of place in the midst of these strangely twisted truths, but in essence, they are the new rule for life after we have broken free of the constructs that bind us to the unreasonable social conventions that keep us from honoring one another as children of God. For many of us, this is the “rule” that we most try to live by in our daily lives, yet are constantly at odds with as we eek out an existence in a society and world that thinks more about how to get what we want for ourselves than about how to treat others around us.

So on this day of All Saints, we are reminded by Christ of those who have come before us, who have lived their lives as a holy example of what it means to seek and serve Christ in all others, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace, and to respect the dignity of every living thing. We are called into that communion of Saints that, led by our trickster Christ, defies the rules and structures in this world that tear down and alienate us from God’s kingdom and the Good News in Christ that we are each precious and loved by a God who will never stop seeking for us, and who will never stop reaching out to us as God’s own precious children – even if it means approaching us in the garb of the fool to get through to us.

Maybe it’s time for us to try on the wisdom of the fool, the trickster Christ is waiting to be our guide.

Amen.