For Sunday
All Saints Day
Collect
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
These blessings Jesus offers are popularly known as The Beatitudes and represent the stark and passionate beginning of Jesus’s famous Sermon on the Mount. We receive this reading in the context of All Saints Day—a principle feast of the church and among the highest of holy days.
The first thing that strikes us when we read this passage, however, is how these are the most unlikely blessings of all time. When we think of blessings, we’re no doubt thinking of money, fame, opportunity, health, hope. We aren’t thinking about meekness and suffering.
It also has an interesting orientation. The more you read them, the less they sound like descriptions of person groups who receive blessings and more like patterns of behavior that are inherently blessed. This may be startling to the person who associates blessing with rewards given to kinds of people or with being in the right in-group.
Jesus speaks of blessedness in a fresh way—even for those of us who have read this countless times. It remains fresh and novel. He is speaking of a blessedness that we still struggle to share in.
This sense of blessedness, of being blessed in the midst of struggle—internal and in a challenging environment—is less reward as it is fuel for a journey, protection from a storm, or even the simple reminder that we’re on the right path. The assurance that we’re doing the right things when the world can’t offer us that.
Even that our living will always end in death—and some sufferings will hasten it! But even in that, too, we are blessed by God’s grace.
This week, as we remember all of the saints and souls, let us do so with Christ’s everlasting hope. With the reminder of our blessing in these times. And with the reminder to be beacons of the hope of God’s blessing with our neighbors.