Good morning. I know many of you, but many of your faces are new to me. I’m Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, and I serve on Bishop Jennifer’s staff as canon to the ordinary for administration and evangelism. It’s my honor to be with you here at Nativity today.
Today we as a church are going to try
to observe three joyful occasions simultaneously, with each given its due
regard. Today we welcome three children, Logan, Micah, and Noah, into the
household of God through the waters of baptism. Through baptism we bring them
into the unity of the church across space and time, life and death, through the
communion of all God’s faithful, which we celebrate in the Feast of All Saints.
And it is the day this church has chosen as its first Consecration Sunday, when
each of you will prayerfully consider renewal of your commitment to God through
your gifts of money in this church.
The contemplation of the mystical
communion of saints and the sacrament of baptism may seem to be at odds with
the contemplation of our bank accounts. But what is baptism but the very means
by which the communion of saints is knit together? And what are saints but
those who have faithfully used all of the gifts entrusted to them by God to
leave a legacy of holiness, and among those gifts was their money? So, church, I’m
confident we can do this.
About the saints – I’m going to talk
briefly about three of them – none of them lived in poverty, but each lived
more modestly than their means would have allowed, out of an obligation to
something greater than themselves. Princess Elizabeth of Hungary (a princess!)
used the wealth afforded by her position to distribute alms throughout her
realm, and after being widowed at the age of 20, used her money to build a
hospital. Nicholas of Myra, better known to us as Santa Claus, delivered three
young women from the threat of a life of prostitution by anonymously tossing
bags of coins over their garden wall, allowing them to better position
themselves on the marriage market. Omobono Tucenghi, who you’ve probably never
heard of, responded to a call from God to a lucrative career as a cloth
merchant, specifically so that he could give his earnings away.
All these things happened nearly a
thousand years – or more – ago, but before we talk any more about them, I want
to take you back maybe a decade or so. Then, I was invited to a wedding of two
students at the Episcopal Campus Ministry at Indiana University. I didn’t know
them at all – in fact I wouldn’t even recognize them if they were in the room
today (so if you are here – I’m sorry), let alone remember their names. But I
had made the guest list because one member of the couple was Chinese, and they
wanted one of the lessons to be read in her native language. The campus
chaplain, who had baptized me when I was a senior at IU, remembered that
Chinese had been my major.
Now in point of fact by that time my
Chinese was so rusty that to say I spoke it would have been a lie – but I could
still pronounce it. So I wrote the text out phonetically, and at the appointed
time in the service, I stood up and recited the gospel in a language most of
the congregation – including me – couldn’t understand.
And yet the meaning of the text, I
learned, got through. At the reception guests excitedly told me that they had
correctly guessed what I was reading. Because it turns out that in whatever
language you read the Beatitudes, the repetitive sentence structure Jesus uses
pulses like a drumbeat: 有福了, 有福了, 有福了 – blessed, blessed, blessed.
Of course there’s another text with a repetitive sentence structure I could have been reading. But how many of you had the ten commandments read at your wedding? Right, I didn’t think so.
Still, the ten commandments and the Beatitudes
are often mentioned in the same breath. Sometimes the Beatitudes are treated as
a kinder, gentler catalog of good behavior. But that perspective both
misapprehends the grace chiseled into the tablets at Sinai, and misunderstands
what the Beatitudes really are.
Because these are not edicts or commands nor even
advice for good living. They are assertions that the downtrodden, the meek, the
merciful, the mourning, and the persecuted, whatever their misery or sorrow, are
beheld, beloved, and blessed, by God. The people who are treated as of little
account by the world are infinitely precious to the world’s creator. Most of us
can find ourselves in one of the categories Jesus declares blessed some days,
if not every day. And among the inventory of injustices and desolations there
are indeed some things to strive for – being pure of heart, being one who makes
peace and dispenses mercy.
But if we treat the Beatitudes as an alternative
10 commandments – new and improved, and now there are only eight of them! –
then that would mean that Jesus wants us to be persecuted or poor in
spirit so we can get to the kingdom of heaven, that he wants us to mourn in
pursuit of comfort, that he wants us to be reviled as the price of a great
reward in heaven.
Friends, Jesus knows we’re going to experience
these things, but he doesn’t want that for us. Part of the gift of the
incarnation is that God knows what it’s like to be one of us, not only as an
idea, but as an experience, and what Jesus is assuring us in these eight great
blessings is that there is no high point and even more - no low point, where we
are separated from the love of God. Blessed are you, whoever or wherever you
are, for God hates nothing that God has made. The Beatitudes aren’t a thing to
do, but a statement of who we are, at our best and our worst, the blessed
children of God most high. We can walk through the valley of the shadow of
death without fear of evil, for Jesus assures us that for those who believe, the
kingdom of God is never far.
Among those who believe are the three saints I
mentioned earlier – Elizabeth of Hungary, Nicholas of Myra, and Omobono
Tucenghi. It is because of what they did with their money that they are
remembered as saints by the church – and one of them became a pop cultural
icon. What they did is worthy of admiration and emulation, but more important
this morning is the question of why they did what they did.
I suppose one possibility is that they were
trying to buy God’s favor. But are these saints blessed because they were
generous with their money in pursuit of reward – is holiness saintly when it’s
transactional?
“See what love [God] has given us,” John writes
in the segment of his first letter that we heard this morning, “that we should
be called children of God, and that is what we are.” True generosity is born of
the understanding that as a child of God you have already been richly blessed,
and that blessedness compels you to a response. John goes on to write that, “we
will be like God, because we will see God as he is.” And part of being like
God, who gives us our bodies, our breath, and eternal hope through the life,
death and resurrection of God’s son, is to be inspired by God’s generosity to
us.
The biblical guidance for that response, at least
as far as finances are concerned, is an offering of 10% of your income. Father
Ben spoke about that last week, and he also pointed out that there may be good
reasons for you to give a greater or lesser percentage. I won’t belabor that
point. But in a little while you will receive your pledge cards, make your prayerful
financial commitment for the coming year, and bring that commitment to the
altar.
Moments after that, as Micah, Logan, and Noah are
about to be baptized, you will be asked, “Will you who witness these vows do
all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” Presuming
you all answer, “We will,” you will be faithful to that assent by being
examples of what a life committed to following Jesus looks like. If you’re not
sure how to approach fulfilling either of these commitments, you could do far
worse than to look to the saints. They don’t have to be the three I’ve listed
this morning. Think of your own favorites, in fact, better yet, the saints in
your life who have shown you what it is to truly follow Jesus – surely these
are numbered among the countless throngs gathered in the presence of God around
the heavenly throne.
God’s gift to us in the saints is a spiritual
ancestry whose bequest to us is a legacy of prayer, service, study, sacrifice,
and even miracles. Above all their legacy to us is the faith in Christ they
have passed down through 100 generations, a faith that has traversed wars,
famines, disasters, golden ages, busts, and booms, even the agony in the Holy
Land today, with the steady assurance passing through all time and into
eternity, “Blessed are you.”
--
Preached at the Episcopal Church of the Nativity, Indianapolis
November 5, 2023
Readings: Rev 7:9-17; Ps. 34:1-10, 22; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Matt.5:1-12
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