I have known a lot of grief in my life.
By the time I was 30, I had lost three grandparents, my father, and at least 5 friends. Since then, I have lost many more. Few of them were people that would traditionally call saints. None of them smelled of roses when they died (a trait tied to early saints in the church), none of them were martyrs for their faith. They were, as all of us, good and bad, saint and sinner – in a word, human. And I think that’s one of the reasons for the reading we have from Luke today.
This reading speaks to the ways in which we are all complicated people, as are likely those we have lost. We can be in mourning and full, hungry and laughing, excluded and rich. Heck, we can even be in mourning and laughing at the same time. As we move through life most of us will experience both sides of what Jesus is saying here.
We have this idea of what Sainthood looks like and have a really hard time accepting the fact that people who do a lot of good can also do harm, or that people who do harm can also do good.
Sometimes I kind of wish Lutherans did more with Saints, because I think it is good to have people to follow, to set as our north star for how we want to live our lives in Christ. But we also have to be able to accept that people are complex beings, and be open to both people saying a person we considered a good person did a harmful thing and, conversely, be open to the idea that people we think of as bad people can do kind, loving, generous things.
We have a problem with hagiography in this country – we make people into saints after they die, especially if they die unexpectedly.
We don’t allow for the truth to be told – the complicated truth that people are both sinners and saints. And when we do this, when we insist the people have only ever done good, that they only belong on God’s blessed list, we disrupt or even halt the grieving process, and turn the dead into weird, untrue facsimiles of themselves.
It’s okay if what you need to do in your place in grief is to believe a certain story about someone. But it’s also okay, necessary even, to, at some point, tell the full story of who people are. To come to a full understanding that all of us are beautiful and messy and messed up and miracles.
Before the part of the sermon on the plain we have here today (yes, in Luke, it is the sermon on the plain), Jesus comes down from where he is with his closest disciples to speak to all of his disciples – a crowded mass of people from all over the region.
This is where we get into the other reason I think this reading may have been chosen for today (or a reason I am deciding it was chosen). Jesus came down to be with the people. People of all different backgrounds, from all over the place.
The gospels are stories of God coming down to be with humanity.
Luke, in particular, is very concerned with not only Jesus coming to the people, but with Jesus having a leveling effect on everything. Not only does God come down, but God lifts up those who are often considered lowly, and pulls down from the high places people who are considered important or powerful. There is a great reversal.
And in this great reversal, we are all in this together.
What does it mean to be joyful when someone else is deep in grief? What does it mean to be full when others are hungry, to be rich when others are poor? How do we participate in this world in a way that responds to Jesus' call to love one another and to live into this great reversal that he proclaims?
The word blessed has kind of been culturally hijacked. We have this tendency to think of it like God bestowing something upon us. The word we translate as blessed, makarios, had a meaning in Greek culture as a thing for the Gods who were set apart from human cares or worries, so we tend to translate that as happy or blessed. But what if we think about it as set apart for special care? Set apart in such a way that they didn’t have to tend to life’s worries?
What if that is how we blessed the grieving, the poor, the hungry, or the excluded? If we took special care of them? We are, after all, all in this together. And there will likely be a time when we will be in grief, most people are a paycheck or two away from being poor or hungry if they aren’t already, most of us have experienced exclusion. Maybe this is one of the ways we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
We are called to be little Christs in this time between the ascension and Jesus’ return. To be God with some skin on. To allow Jesus to be present with our neighbors not only in spirit but in body through our words and actions. We are a conduit for God’s love, passing from this table to you to your neighbor to the world.
We don’t do grief terribly well in our culture. We shove it to the side, we reserve a couple of days for it, we allow ourselves the space to cry when we are alone or with a chosen few. We expect ourselves, and all to often others, to keep their grief private. To keep going no matter how much it hurts inside. To show up for work, to show up for school, to show up for all of the things even when we feel like we are falling apart inside.
What if we set people apart when they are in mourning – heck, what if we allowed ourselves to be set apart, to have the time and space to grieve? What if we care deeply for people who are experiencing poverty or hunger, set them apart, gave them special care until their pockets and bellies were full. What if we provided a glimpse of the kingdom to come.
Most of us are probably not on the way to sainthood, but we can lean into the saint side of ourselves and away from the sinner, lean into being blessings and not receiving woes, we can do our best to turn the other cheek and love one another as we have been loved.
And, regardless of the level of our sainthood, God is with us.
God comes down to the plain to be with the multitudes. And when we die, God greets us with open arms as we are, blessed sinner and saint.
