What can we say Nov. 6? All Saints / 22nd after Pentecost

   We will observe All Saints’ Day on November 6. If you are, let me refer you to my blog from the last time All Saints fell on a Sunday – with lots of reflections, illustrations and suggestions. The 2022 All Saints lections we’ll get to below. Right now, I want to touch on the Nov. 6, not-specifically-for-All-Saints texts.

    Haggai 1:15-29 would have been terrific for Reformation Sunday. The prophet tries to jostle the people out of their sleepy-headedness, out of their weary discouragement, and to rebuild the temple. The date he spoke? October 17, 520. I love the scholarly precision we find in the commentaries! Most standing there could not recall the former temple and its splendor. Could Haggai? Joshua and Zerubbabel (a name that is just so fun to say out loud!) could not as they’d been born in exile. Silver and gold will be required; the Lord claims it’s all his anyhow.

     The image we carry is that the temple they did build in response was modest, even shabby. But it can’t have been too shabby. It appears to have been a smidgeon larger than Solomon’s, and it stood for exactly 500 years until Herod took it down to replace it.

   2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 12-17 would be tough to preach, with the ominous Godless One stalking the people. Mind you, the notion of such a godless one being puffed up above all other objects of worship might give us the shivers, given all going on in our culture and wider world today. Luke 20:27-28 is (for me) another hard text to warm up to. Another good reason to stick with the All Saints’ lections!

   Ephesians 1:11-23 is one of those lovely texts that don’t require much explaining; it’s more eloquent just to linger over them. I certainly wouldn’t try to make such powerful words “relevant” or any such nonsense. They speak beautifully for themselves. I hope my people will notice I cherish these words, that I am personally awed by them. I hope to sound like a docent in a museum, pointing with gawking delight. Maybe my people will get caught up in the mood! The luxurious, lavish verbiage had to be mind-boggling to the early Christians, meager as their resources and prospects were. Frank Thielman is right: “Words that emphasize God’s meticulous planning pile up one upon another – purpose, work, counsel, will – how privileged are we!” Heirs, inheritances, riches, glory, destiny... 

   That last word, “destiny,” begs for a parenthesis. The old “God is in control” notion is ridiculous, of course. I love how Markus Barth (Karl’s son!) clarifies how personal this destining is: “It pertains exclusively to the relationship of the Father to his children. If no wise human father would treat his children according to a schedule fixed before their birth, how much less would the Father who is blessed in Ephesians 1:3-14!”

   The responsibilities of even the most fabulous heirs were driven home to me at the World Methodist Council in 1986 when Donald English reported on attending the wedding of Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew – and how the couple, immensely wealthy, able to do whatever they might wish, had bowed and pledged fealty to the crown, to the “rights and responsibilities” that went with being a royal couple.

    I love Paul’s “prayer report” here. It’s not so much that What we asked God for was ‘answered.’ What intrigues is the content of his prayer – that the recipients, the objects of his praying, might have a “spirit of wisdom and revelation,” that their “eyes of their hearts might be enlightened” (reminding me of St. Francis’s constant prayer during his season of conversion, “Most high, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart, and give me, Lord, correct faith, firm hope, perfect charity, wisdom and perception, that I may do what is truly your most holy will.”

   Paul also prays for 3 things (Do you wish people prayed this for you? for one another?): (1) the hope to which he has called you, (2) the God’s glorious inheritance, and (3) the magnitude of God! Do we get such prayer requests? What if we did? The hope business: Emily Dickinson suggested that “Hope is the thing in the soul with feathers…” – but is it in the soul? Or is it more about God? Markus Barth, again: “The emphasis lies not so much on the mood of the person hoping as on the substance or subject matter of expectation.” It’s the thing hoped for. Christopher Lasch (in his marvelous The True and Only Heaven) clarified that optimism is the fantasy that all will be better tomorrow, and it depends on us; but hope is the ability to deal with tomorrow if things aren’t better – and it depends not on us but on God.

   Luke 6:20-31. Unsure nowadays whether to sing David Haas’s wonderful “Blest Are They,” after the trouble he got into. His text is also the far more beloved Matthean slant on the Beatitudes. Luke’s is tougher, adding the “Woe” moments absent in Matthew. We’d probably prefer Jesus bless the “poor in spirit” instead of more simply Luke’s “poor.”

   Clarence Jordan shrewdly pointed out that the poor prefer Luke, while the rest of us delight in Matthew! Jesus spoke to the poor, the nobodies – and blessed them. They were accustomed to being cursed, ignored or blamed – as we see in our world today. How amazing was Jesus? For All Saints’ Day, it’s hard not to hear the line “Blessed are those who mourn.” We come mourning, indeed – but we grieve as those who have hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Again, I trust the reading of the names in God’s holy place more than I trust my frail words to express the hope of the Gospel!

   Robert Schuller tried to modernize the text with the rubric “The Be-Happy Attitudes.” But Jesus isn’t issuing commandments, much less doling out advice for a chipper life. He blesses, he embraces, loves, knows, recognizes, and gives hope to the hopeless, to the people nobody else wants – and then he brings down a Woe! on the big dogs, those who think they’re somebody, and especially the self-righteous. Jesus’ words are light years from the conventional wisdom of our day. He doesn’t say Blessed are the good-looking, the successful, the well-connected, the white Americans, and he doesn’t say Woe to the immigrant, the unemployed, the lonely or the homeless. The preacher has one more chance just now to chip away at the façade of thin, culturally-mashed-down thinking, and open the window into Jesus’ revolutionary worldview.

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   Check out my book, valuable for preachers and laity during Advent, Why This Jubilee? - reflections on carols, sacred and secular.