Blessed are You

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.”

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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