The Church of St. Paul and Incarnation, Jersey City NJ
November 1, 2020
Year A: All Saints’ Day
Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
To Be Bread
Well, once again we find ourselves in an unsettling in-between time.
After a bit of a lull during the summer, the plague of Covid-19 is once again raging across our country and around much of the world – rates of infection and hospitalization are soaring, and here in the United States we’re losing something close to 1,000 people every day, a number that hopefully still shocks us and breaks our hearts.
Many businesses and schools and, yes, some houses of worship, are still open, but we wonder how long that will last. It feels like we’re sliding right back to where we were back in March when so much of daily life shut down and we were all scrounging around for toilet paper.
We are in an unsettling in-between time.
And, you may have heard that there’s a big election – it’s already underway, of course – hopefully most, if not all, of you have already voted – it’s already underway but it’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that we won’t know the outcome on Tuesday night – there may not be a concession speech or a victory celebration anytime soon. Instead, the days after Election Day may be even more contentious than the days before.
We are in an unsettling in-between time.
And, here in church, last Sunday we completed the exodus with the people of Israel – their journey through the wilderness from Egypt to the Promised Land.
For Israel, it was a forty-year long in-between time, years when they sometimes got frightened and impatient, when they sometimes gave into the temptation to be just like everybody else, choosing to worship gold instead of God.
But, also during their forty-year in-between time, the Israelites got to know God better than ever, they received God’s Law, and they came to know in their bones that God would never abandon them, no matter what.
And, in our gospel lessons, we’ve been hearing the ongoing conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders of his time.
Jesus could get along with almost anybody it seems, even people like lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors – all the people that he was supposed to avoid like the plague – Jesus could get along with everybody it seems…except for the religious leaders.
He called out their hypocrisy – their willingness to place extra burdens on people already weighed down – he critiqued the love they had for their prestige and privilege.
Maybe worst of all, most of the religious leaders weren’t able to see God at work around them, especially in a craftsman from Galilee who was somehow able to teach and heal like no one else.
As a religious leader myself, I find these stories uncomfortable, to say the least. They make me wonder if my kind and I don’t fall into those same traps – getting full of ourselves, or so concerned about keeping the institution going, or protecting our own well-being, that we miss God at work all around us, usually in the people we might least expect.
I’ve mentioned Dorothy Day to you before – back in the last century she was the co-founder of the Catholic Worker.
She spent her life living among and feeding the poor, taking some very unpopular positions against war and capitalism, offering and modeling a very different vision of what life – what the Christian life - is supposed to be like.
Dorothy Day once said that she never expected very much from religious leaders. She said, “I never expected leadership from them. It is the saints that keep appearing all through history who keep things going. What I do expect is the bread of life and down through the ages there has been that continuity.”
Today we are in an unsettling in-between time, a place between sickness and health – a place between the last four years and whatever is to come – a place between exodus and the Promised Land – and, a place between the kingdom of earth and the kingdom of heaven.
And, as Dorothy Day understood, it’s the saints who keep things going – it’s the saints who will lead us from here to where we are meant to be.
Long ago Moses encountered God on a mountain.
It was on a mountain that God gave the Law to Moses, offering the people a roadmap to keep them on the right path, to keep them in right relationship with God and with each other.
And now, in today’s gospel lesson, it’s on a mountain where the Son of God offers his vision of the kingdom – the downside-up kingdom where the people the world sees as fools or losers are the ones who are, in fact, truly blessed.
In the downside-up kingdom of Jesus, the blessed ones are the poor in spirit, the mournful, and the meek.
In the downside-up kingdom of Jesus, the blessed ones are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted.
Whenever I read Jesus’ beautiful but also kind of overwhelming downside-up vision of the kingdom, I always wonder what the disciples made of it.
Jesus had used parables to describe the kingdom, of course.
It’s like a tiny mustard seed growing into a big shrub providing shelter for the birds.
The kingdom is like a father so happy and excited to welcome his seemingly good for nothing son back home, back into the family.
The kingdom is like the person you might fear or even hate turning out to be the one who shows mercy.
Those parables are beautiful and challenging, but here, on the mountain, Jesus lays out his downside up vision.
What did the disciples think?
Probably the same thing that we think:
We have a long way to go.
And, as Dorothy Day understood, it’s the saints who will lead us from here to where we are meant to be.
Growing up as I did in the Roman Catholic Church, I was well acquainted with the saints – or, at least, the saints who were officially recognized by the church, the saints whose statues were in front of houses, the saints we were taught to pray to, maybe when something was lost or when our cause seemed otherwise hopeless.
To be honest, it was well into adulthood before I really understood that saints are not some special category of human being, but, as Christians, all of us called to be saints, all of us are meant to be saints – whether the church or anybody else ever recognizes our sainthood.
With God’s help, we are called to lead each other through this unsettling in-between time to the Promised Land, to the downside-up kingdom.
But, how might we do that?
I was puzzling over that question when on Friday I read the obituary of the poet Diane di Prima, who died last week at the age of 86.
I had never heard of her, but reading her story I learned that she had led a long and unconventional and richly creative life, first in New York and then in San Francisco. She’s probably best remembered as one of the few female Beat poets.
Anyway, for a few minutes her obituary provided a fine distraction from my work, until I came to an excerpt from one of her poems, called “The Poetry Deal.”
In this poem, Diane di Prima addresses “poetry” itself, making a kind of agreement, or religious types like us might even say, a covenant, with poetry.
She writes,
I’d like my daily bread however you arrange it, and I’d also like to be bread, or sustenance for some others even after I’ve left.
I read that and I thought, well, there it is.
To be bread.
To be bread.
Long ago, God gave the Israelites manna in the wilderness.
God gives us Jesus the Bread of Life.
And, God gives us one another – each with the potential to be bread for others.
To be a saint is to be bread.
To be a saint is to be the bread of life, here and now, in our broken world.
To be a saint is to be bread that feeds others – feeding others with love and beauty and hope and truth and, even before all of that, being a saint means feeding others with real good food that fills their bellies, the way Dorothy Day did, and like we do at Triangle Park, and the homeless drop-in center, and at Stone Soup.
To be a saint is to be bread.
As Dorothy Day said, “It is the saints that keep appearing all through history who keep things going. What I do expect is the bread of life and down through the ages there has been that continuity.”
Today we are in an unsettling in-between time.
We would probably all like to race ahead, to somehow fast-forward through the next few days, or the next few months.
That’s not possible, of course.
But, Jesus has given us the vision of our destination: the downside-up kingdom, so different from our broken world.
God continues to send saints to keep things going, to get us from here to there.
And, those saints are not “them.”
The saints are us.
Especially on this particular All Saints’ Day, especially during this unsettling in-between time, sainthood may seem impossible, but, with God’s help, all that’s required is for us…
To be bread.
Amen.
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