Solemnity of All Saints - Cycle A 2019-2020

Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14 | 1 John 3:1-3 | Matthew 5:1-12A

Almighty, everliving God, by whose gift we venerate in one celebration the merits of all the saints, bestow on us, we pray, through the prayers of so many intercessors, an abundance of the reconciliation with you for which we earnestly long.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re coming to the end of our year reflection on the gospel of St. Matthew, and as we come to the end of every year, we have this set of celebrations.  And the one that we’re doing today is the Feast of All Saints.  It is followed by another great feast, the Feast of the Holy Souls, All Souls Day.  And what I’d like to do is take the readings and draw something from them, but I really want to get into something that is somehow captured by these two feasts that are always together, an awareness of those who have gone before us that are with God, and they are our intercessors.  They are our helpers.  They are there for us.  We often don’t realize how much the dead have a part to play in our own personal journey toward a fuller understanding of who we are and who God is and why we’re here, and also the idea that there are people who have died who are not fully yet, not mature enough, let’s say, to enter fully into the relationship with God.  And we as Catholics have a very strong faith — a lot of other religions don’t believe in a place called purgatory, but it’s a beautiful teaching, I think, because it’s not so much that we are being punished for every sin we do and have to somehow make up for it, which never really made sense to me, because God said, “I remove the burden of sin from you.  I forgive all of your sins.”  And so to go and have to pay for every one of them, even though we’ve been forgiven, doesn’t make a lot of sense, because if we’ve gone through something that is a sin, I guarantee you, as we grow out of it, as we evolve past it, we’ve probably experienced a lot of pain because of that sin.  Sin is not just this thing that’s like a game where God just scores us to see if we hit the mark or not.  No, it’s God’s longing for us not to be engaged in something that harms us or someone else, and so the idea that we also have this feast called All Souls is that there is a way in which the people who die have this opportunity to continue to grow.  It just makes sense to me that we’re never finished growing.

So what I’d like you to imagine, these two feasts together are reminding us of something that I think is so important.  Why — what is it that we’re here to do, to accomplish?  And it’s not to stop sinning.  That was my most naive and over-simplified notion of what it means to be a Catholic or a Christian.  Stop sinning.  I don’t think God is looking at us as a scoreboard that says, “How many mistakes have you made?  You make so many, you go to purgatory.  You made a whole bunch.  You go to hell.  You haven’t done any mistakes.  You go to heaven.”  That just doesn’t make a lot of sense, but what is it that we’re here for?  What is it we’re called to do?  We’re called to evolve, to grow, to change.  There’s an image in All Saints, in the feast and the readings that says that some day we will see God face-to-face, and when we see him, we will know him.  And what we will know about him is that we are like him.  He is like us.  Think about that.  You look at the activity of human beings.  You can see incredible acts of self-sacrifice and love and giving, and other human beings can be so seemingly bent on an evil, destructive force that fills them.  So what’s the difference between a saint and a sinner, let’s say?  The difference is that there’s an awareness in one that is grown and evolved and gone through a process that’s been painful. 

Look at the beatitudes.  It’s kind of a list of an experience of human beings who are empty and broken and lost, and they’re found.  It’s like this journey that we’re on is not toward perfect literally but toward something that means that we go through painful things, like the survivors in the first reading.  They’re washed in the blood of the lamb.  What does that mean?  It means they’re forgiven.  Well, why is forgiveness so important unless God expects us to sin, expects us to make mistakes?  How do you ask a child to grow up and never make a mistake?  But those mistakes, if met with forgiveness, then there’s a possibility of the one who’s caught in an illusion that leads them to sin to say, “This is stupid.  This is irrational.  This doesn’t make any sense.  Why am I doing this?”  So that’s our process. 

How do we grow on a daily basis in this life, moving toward higher consciousness and more awareness of just what is reality?  I love that image that a spiritual person is the most real person.  There was a time when we thought that spiritual people had to separate themselves from the world, because the world was somehow unclean.  But the opposite, in a sense, is true.  Certainly there’s a reason to leave the world, and some do that.  And I’m not judging them, but I’m saying for most of us, the call is to enter into the world as an element of grace and life and love and God.  As we become more like God, we become more like the Christ who is God incarnate, and we find in him this man who didn’t go around so much telling people what to do as witnessing what they can do.  His presence was so powerful and so life-changing and transforming and healing.  That’s who we are, people in the world, bringing that into the world, and when we encounter the opposite of that, we have forgiveness in our heart and don’t reject anyone for that.

So this is a course that’s tough, and here’s my main thought I want to share with you this morning.  God has created a kind of ecosystem, a kind of system where we — a healthy ecosystem is every element, every living thing in an ecosystem has a purpose.  If you take one of those things out of an ecosystem, the whole thing gets out of balance.  They found that, if there’s a group of animals that live in Africa and you take one of those out of there that’s been a natural part of that, let’s say a predator, you get rid of that, and then the whole thing gets out of balance, and nobody is able to do what they really need to do.  The animals are not able to flourish as they’re intended to, because the balance is off.  Well, in the spiritual world that you and I live in, we have all kinds of sources that empower us to be who we are, to help us to know who we are, to know who God is.  Certainly religion is one.  Scripture is a major one.  Great wisdom, teachers from the past, they’re important, but the thing that we have to realize is the most important source we have of growing and developing of human beings is the presence of God within us.  That indwelling presence is the greatest source of wisdom, because God truly does speak to us.  But the beauty of his plan is that there’s more than just this God within us.  There’s a community of people around us where God is present in someone else, and they manifest to us the things that we need.  God uses our relationships as vehicles through which he works with us and guides us, but the other things that we often don’t pay attention to are angels and saints.  Saints are those who have died, those who have gone before us, and those who have been close to us that we know, they could be in purgatory working still to grow and evolve as that teaching teaches us that there’s a way in which God continues to help us to grow after death.  They could be with God in heaven, but either way, they’re there for us.  They have the power to intercede for us, to work for us, to encourage us.  I especially think those in purgatory are really aware of maybe where they failed us, and we pray for them as they grow, and they pray for us as we grow.  And it’s a beautiful relationship between the dead and such a sadness, and we lose contact with that.  But the other thing is angels.  These are creatures that God created from the very beginning, before he created human beings, and some turned against him in terms of his plan to help us and to get angels to serve us.  I think they felt — some may have felt that it was under their pay grade to help human beings, but God said, “No, that’s what I want you to do.”  And those that said yes, that’s their whole reason for being.  They want to be there to be messengers between God and us, and to not be aware of this powerful source of wisdom that comes from the dead, not to be aware of the work of angels in our life — they have this mysterious power to even be able to take human form and speak to us.  Sometimes people have someone in their life, and they were there for the right moment, and then they were gone, and they never see them again.  And they say, “I think that was an angel.”  They’re probably right.  It’s real, but think of it.  They’re so effective in being able to do what they do, and they even, as I said, have this power to be present in a physical form.  And they can be that strange person you encounter somewhere where they helped you, and then you turned around to help them, and they weren’t around or something like that.  All that’s real.  That’s so real.

So the thought of not being aware, not being conscious of these beings is a real, real shortcoming to the way in which God has planned forever for us to journey through this life, growing from sin and darkness to light and truth.  So to not have them in our awareness is to lose something about this beautiful system that God has created for us.  God is there for us. The dead are there for us.  Angels are there for us, and those last two we tend to maybe not pay much attention to. But it’s like being given all these sources.  Think of what makes a healthy human body.  We need nourishment.  We need moisture.  We need vitamins.  To cut out any one of those is going to limit our ability to grow and to become who we are.  Well, these beautiful creatures that God has created that never die, that are angels, they’re there for this beautiful, beautiful reason.  God does not want to lose anyone.  He does everything he can to save us, and saving us means helping us to grow into who he intended us to be.  It’s such a beautiful system, yet we sometimes turn it into something so much less exciting, even dark, where all he does is count our sins and holds them against us.  No, he took care of the sin problem, which then opens us to being able to be courageous enough to grow and to change and to try things.  And we live in a world of forgiveness, and we live in a world of these creatures that are there for us.  The richness that comes is beyond our imagining.  Think of it.  God’s longing for you to become who he intends you to be is so much greater than yours, and he gives you all of these ways in which you have the capacity to receive, receive, receive wisdom and truth.  Pay attention.  Don’t let them slip by.  They’re real. 

Father, your world is filled with you, with your love, with your longing that we grow and become all that you’ve intended us to be.So bless us with eyes that see and ears that hear and a sense of things as they really are so that we can grow in the fullness of who you want us to be and drink of all those ways in which you continue to pour love and life, forgiveness into each of us.And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.