Ancestors
Luke 6:20-31
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It’s been said that none of us get the funeral that we deserve. Now, you can take that one of two ways. Last year, the New York Times began a project called Overlooked. The purpose of the project is to feature obituaries for remarkable people (often women and people of color) whose deaths went unreported at the time of their passing; women like journalist Ida B. Wells, photographer Diane Arbus, and the poet Sylvia Plath, people of color like Scott Joplin and Granville T. Woods. These are people of some notoriety, but there are countless more who have passed invisibly from this world with hardly anyone taking notice. They certainly don’t get the funeral they deserve.
But there are also the funerals you go to for the people you hardly recognize, even if you’ve known them over your lifetime. Everyone says the nicest things, to the point you might begin to wonder just who it is they are talking about. So that, when attention is paid, it is done so with a reverence that appears to white-wash every flaw that person ever had. As a friend recalled recently about a eulogy delivered at his father’s funeral, “it was a eulogy for a person who never existed.” But maybe that’s okay. I’m not sure I’d like the funeral I probably deserve.
In the Reformed church, All Saints Day is a celebration similar to the Dia de Muertos in Mexican culture. We don’t do the kind of canonized saints found other Christian traditions, because Reformed Christianity, to which Presbyterians belong, understands sainthood less in terms of personal achievement, and more in terms of what God does in Jesus Christ. The conventional use of saintliness is to talk about someone who is exceptionally holy. Maybe all the things that Jesus talks about at the end of this passage; someone who is able to love their enemies and do good to the ones who hate them, who turns the other cheek, gives you the shirt off their back, gives endlessly. But the biblical use of the word has to do with the people that God sets apart, the ones whom God has made holy. So, for us, All Saints is the occasion for us to remember the dead who have gone before us, those we have entrusted to God who makes all of us holy through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We name as saints the ones who might have gone overlooked, and the ones who might not have been as good as we’d like to remember them. We name them as saints because none of us get the funeral that we deserve. We name them as saints, because in the end, ‘deserve’ has nothing to do with it.
Maybe that’s really what Jesus’ words in this reading from Luke’s gospel are getting at. At first, the words have a familiar ring to them. We know this, we think. These are the beatitudes, the blessings Jesus names. But right away we get a clue that something’s not quite like we remembered them. “Blessed are the poor,” says Jesus. And we want to correct him. “I think you mean, ‘blessed are the poor in spirit,’ Jesus.” Everyone knows that there’s no blessing to be found in poverty. Is there? But he keeps going. You who are hungry, you who weep; blessed are you when people hate you.” We start to feel a little like the character Indigo Montoya in the movie The Princess Bride, “you keep using that word, ‘blessed,’ Jesus. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Unless you’re in the south and someone’s mad at you (bless your heart) to bless someone is supposed to wish them good things. Not poverty, hunger, sorrow, and hatred. What gives? Is this Sonya’s final line from Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, it’s okay that life is bitter, full of suffering and tears, because later we’ll have our rest and our reward. When we’re dead? If so, I think I’ll pass. Thanks.
Our tendency is to judge a person’s poverty, hunger, grief and abuse as in some way self-created. We imagine that the reasons they are poor while we are not, hungry while we have our fill, sad while we experience happiness have to do with something they’ve done wrong that we’ve done right. We convince ourselves that we are all somehow the product of our choices and actions, so if someone else is suffering while we are not, well that’s on them somehow. But I get the feeling that Jesus is calling that idea into question. And not only calling it into question, but subverting our own attitudes of judgement and self-righteousness. Anyone who has actually been poor can tell you that it’s about a whole lot more than personal choices, that there are systemic conditions that are at work to keep people poor. Just like people who grieve don’t have the option of putting away their grief and putting on a happy face. Or, if they do, the pretense of that happy face simply makes the grief more profound. There’s a moment in the Netflix series Dead to Me in which one of the lead characters is talking about everything she is feeling surrounding the sudden death of her husband in a hit-and-run accident. In the aftermath, it’s revealed that he had been unfaithful to her, and she admits that knowing that makes her hate him, only she doesn’t want to hate him. Then she adds, “I don’t want to feel any of this anymore.”
Here’s the truth, those who experience and have experienced poverty often have a deeper appreciation for those things in life that can’t be bought, sold, earned, or acquired. A sign hangs at a guest house in the nation of Haiti. “Tell us what you are missing,” it reads, “and we will teach you how we live without it.” There is a blessing that comes with such poverty, because it opens us up to a greater reliance on what is of most importance. That’s not to glorify poverty, or to advocate against programs that lift people out of the most crippling and dire forms of extreme poverty. But it does caution us against pitying someone that may have something to teach us. Likewise, hunger is something we as a church understand we’re called to address. But to be hungry often deepens our understanding of the things that fill us and the things that don’t, which is a blessing. And tears are often the product of love when it is lost, or goes away. It means we have experienced the kind of connection that also makes us laugh, and that is a blessing.
But it’s the last of these blessings that is most instructive on this Sunday when we remember the saints who have gone before us. Jesus says that we are blessed when people hate, exclude, revile, and defame us on account of him. I know that there’s talk of Christian persecution in our country, but that’s largely a misperception. What some Christians see as persecution is simply the natural reaction to an overbearing insistence that others share one’s own values. If anything, we’re so fearful of how others might lump us in with that overbearing crowd that we fail to say or do anything that might visibly identify us with Jesus. We fail to raise a prophetic voice because we know what happens to prophets. But Jesus says that the blessing comes from being on the right side of history with the prophets and not by aligning ourselves with our ancestors who persecuted them. His words serve as a caution on this All Saints Sunday. We are indebted in many ways to those who have gone before us, our ancestors in the faith. It is right for us the remember them and honor their memory. Without them, quite literally, none of us would be here. We wouldn’t be church without their faithfulness and the things they have handed down. And while God certainly worked through them by the power of the Holy Spirit to bring us this far, it is also true that God worked in spite of them by the power of the Holy Spirit to bring us this far. We do them, and ourselves, no favors by neglecting or denying that fact. Our ancestors got it wrong when it came to biblical justifications for the doctrine of discovery, allowing them to disregard the image of God in the lives of indigenous peoples who were expunged from their land. Our ancestors got it wrong when it came to biblical arguments supporting the ongoing practice of chattel slavery and the perpetuation of white supremacist attitudes. Our ancestors got it wrong when it came to subordinating the lives of women to men in the name of biblical authority. This is also our inheritance, because we are still living with the affects of all those mistaken beliefs.
We often fail to name that because it feels so negative, and no one wants to speak ill of the dead. Maybe it brings us shame and we’re afraid that telling the truth about those who have gone before somehow implicates us. In fact, people might even hate us, exclude us, revile and demean us for it. But there is a blessing to be found even so. Because in telling the truth about these things we are taking a step toward God’s work of healing those deep wounds. And woe to us when we silence such conversations. Woe to us when we privilege our own comfort over telling the truth. Woe to us when we choose an easy lie over a difficult and sometimes painful history. Very little is made better by willful ignorance, or deliberate pretense. The blessing Jesus promises doesn’t come from pretending we are saints; by believing that we, or those who came before us, are somehow better than we are. The blessing Jesus promises, the kingdom that is ours, comes from honestly naming just what we lack, and turning toward the only one who can set it right in the end. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.