St Luke’s,
“Blessed are they …”
Here we are in the home straight to the end of the church year and as
always we begin that dash with the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls.
I put those two together because that’s really how they belong. All
Souls, the second of the two, only appeared at the end of the 10th
century because All Saints Day had become increasingly restricted to what we
might call ‘the heroes of the faith’ – the big S saints who grace our windows
and provide many a preacher with something to talk about at midweek services.
That was never originally the focus of All Saints, but that’s what it became,
so All Souls came along to plug the gap and give people the opportunity to
remember all the other saints, with small s’s, those many, many faithful
departed who may not feature in our windows but do so very much in our stories.
So today we bring together the two – All Saints and All Souls – and to
them we add a 3rd, the beginning of our Stewardship Campaign. I can
hear you wriggling in your pews with excitement. Great! Another stewardship
campaign, more talk about money and why you should give more of it to the
church so that we can do this, that and something else, doesn’t it just fill
you with anticipation … or something?
Well, I could tell you that this year we won’t be asking you for money
or telling you about all the things we could be doing if you gave it to us. I
could tell you that, but I’d be lying and I’m told that’s frowned upon around
here, so let me be completely honest and say, yes, we’re going to ask you for
that and tell you about that, and more besides, and we’re going to do that
because you need to hear it and I need to hear it and we all need to be
reminded of the responsibilities that go with being part of this place, this
community, this entity we call our Church. And All Saints and All Souls is
actually a very appropriate place to begin that process.
Those of you who have already seen the latest issue of Tidings will have
hopefully read my comments about the sense of history I feel whenever I walk
into this building. Many of us say it often, we’re so lucky to have such a
beautiful church, but its beauty for many of us isn’t just in its windows and
wood, but in the stories it enfolds, in the history it re-presents, in the past
that it makes present for us now.
For me as a newcomer that sense of the past being present in this place
is strong enough, but I suspect that for those of you who have been here most
of your lives, and whose parents and grandparents were here before that, that
must be even more so. We come into this place and we stand and we know that our
forebears stand with us. Here for us at St Luke’s that great communion of the
saints – mostly with a small s – is real and palpable and very much a part of
who and what we are, and that, for the most part, is a very good thing because,
being so aware of our past and the legacy we have inherited, we are even more
conscious of our responsibility to protect it.
I want to invite you to spend just a moment looking around the church. I
know most of you do so all the time – you’ve probably been doing so while I’ve
been preaching so far – but do it again. Just take a moment to look around and
notice what we have. What do you see? What are you immediately drawn to?
The windows, the woodwork, the altars – every single one of them tells a
story. Every window, every piece of wood, every carefully detailed item, even
the pews, all of them tell a story about those who have gone before us in this
place. Most of us know some of those stories, some of us know most of those
stories, none of us know all of those stories, but whether we know them or not
we are aware that they are there. We know that those who sat and stood here
before us prayed and cried and laughed and sang and preached right here. They
even sat through stewardship campaigns right here, and responded by giving of
their time and talents and treasures - just like we’re going to ask you to do –
right here, and this is the result.
Well, it’s part of the result. Actually most of the result we can’t see,
or at least it’s not obvious, and the same is true for now. Most of what we do,
most of what we spend money on, doesn’t go into the building. When you give
what you can back to God nearly none of it goes into keeping the windows
beautiful or the wood polished of the carpets relatively clean. The vast
majority of it goes into people.
I want you to note the piece on the back of today’s newsletter. There’ll
be a different one each week over the next three weeks. All of them will focus
just briefly on one piece of ministry that your stewardship, our stewardship,
makes possible. Pastoral care might seem a bit mundane, after all isn’t that
what vicars and curates have been doing for centuries? Isn’t that just part of
the job? Well, yes it is and it continues to be, just as it always has been,
just as it was fifty or sixty years ago, when our forebears gave their money
back to God to pay the stipends of the vicar and the two or three or sometimes
four curates and associate priests a parish might have had to care for the
hundred or so people on the roll. Today we pay for two with, as of Friday,
about 759 on the roll.
So, as you can read about, we have committed ourselves to supporting two
clergy for the next year, with one taking particular responsibility for
coordinating the Parish pastoral care programme. And that’s going to cost. In
terms of the numbers we have regularly giving their money back to God we need
to up our average giving by about $4.50 per week per person to cover that cost.
It doesn’t sound like much when you put it like that does it? I can promise it
sounds like a lot more when you’re sitting around the Vestry table talking about
the total. But if 130 people give less than $5 more than they give now per week
it’s covered.
Of course at the end of the day that extra $4.50 a week won’t produce a
single window or altar or lectern, well not directly anyway. And the same was
true for those who sat and stood here before us. The vast majority of them
don’t have their name on a window or a plaque, most of them probably never
donated a pew or a Bible, but what they did was make possible the normal,
everyday work and activities of the parish and kick-start new initiatives and
ministries as well.
There are lots of different reasons why people come to any church, this
one included. But I believe completely that if all those many forebears of ours
had focused on was the building, St Luke’s would still be here today, but more
as a museum than a church, or perhaps a pretty chapel in demand for weddings
and the occasional baptism, but without the beating heart of an active,
worshipping congregation. There would be no Mission Guild, providing thousands
of dollars every year to missions both local and abroad. There would be no
young people roaring around the lounge on Friday nights. There would be no
lounge! And there would probably be no pastoral care team.
These things are the real legacy our forebears have left us. The windows
and the wood are wonderful and we remain blessed by them, and yes, we should
protect them. But so much more we should protect that true legacy, the life and
vibrancy that come from a well resourced, active and caring church community.
If, and I know it’s a big if, if you’ve been listening carefully there
are two things you may have noted about this sermon. One is that I’ve referred
several times to giving things back to God, to which I’ll return in a a couple
of weeks, and two, I haven’t yet referred to a single one of our readings, and
I want to rectify that first.
Whoever it was who chose the beatitudes as the Gospel for All Saints did
so, I suspect, because they believed that in those words - ‘Blessed are they’
etc – we find the instruction manual for being a saint, and I think they’re
right, to a point.
Let’s think again for a moment about those saints of ours. I’m sure some
of them might have fitted a few of the beatitudes at least. Maybe a few were
poor, although I suspect not many. Perhaps some were meek, and there would have
been a few peacemakers of course, but not all. Jesus isn’t saying here that you
need to be poor to be a saint, or meek for that matter. In fact Jesus didn’t
say much at all about being a saint, that wasn’t what interested him. What
Jesus spoke about was a world turned upside down.
Long before Martin Luther King said, ‘I have a dream’ Jesus said,
‘Blessed are those.’ Blessed are those who are poor, and meek, and working for
peace and struggling against injustice. Blessed are those people who are at the
margins of society now but who in the
Let’s remember that first and foremost the sermon on the mount, which
starts with the beatitudes, is a series of lessons about what it means to be a
disciple of Jesus, and the final beatitude should really be the first, ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute
you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.’ Blessed are
you when you face criticisms and threats and all sorts of risks because you’re
working to make that new world a reality.
This is what a saint is;
someone who strives to make the world Jesus dreams of real. A saint is one who
knows that the beatitudes are not pious platitudes to be mouthed, but Christ’s
attitudes to be lived and breathed and made real for those whom they refer to.
A saint is one who blesses the poor and the meek and the peacemaker and works
towards a world where their blessing is the norm.
Those are our true saints,
those many, many men and women who have worked and prayed and given in this
place not so they could be immortalized on a plaque or commemorated in a
window, but so that this parish, the church, could continue the work of making
the world of the beatitudes a reality.
For those saints I ask you
to join me in giving thanks, and I invite us all to be like them, to take up
their mantle, to accept the responsibility of their legacy, and to continue
their work. Thanks be to God.