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Blessed Are You
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
November 2, 2008
All Saints’ Sunday
Matthew 5:1-12
Today is All Saints’
Sunday, one of my favorite days on the Christian calendar. I say that not only
because we get to sing that great hymn—“For all the Saints”—but also because we
pause on this day to remember those common, ordinary, everyday saints of the
church, and we’ve all known a few of those, haven’t we? But if this is your
first encounter with All Saints’ Sunday you may be wondering: What is it? Where
did it come from? And why are we celebrating it here, in a Baptist church,
where—other than Lottie Moon—we don’t usually talk about “the saints”? To find
the answers we will have to go back to the earliest days of the church, when
Christianity was still considered a cult and Christians were being persecuted
for their faith.
You remember the story of
Stephen from Acts 7, don’t you? How he was stoned to death for his faith in
Jesus? Well, this part of the story is not written down but I would guess that
on the anniversary of his death some of those Christians in Jerusalem gathered
at the place where he had died, and while they were there they must have told
the story again, of what he had done and how brave he had been. As the years
went by they came to think of him not only as a courageous Christian, but as a
saint. They began to celebrate the anniversary of his death with a solemn
feast, and invite other Christians to join them as they gathered for worship and
told the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr.
Now, imagine this sort of
thing going on wherever someone had died for his faith in Christ, and imagine
the number of martyrs increasing as the early church was persecuted under Nero,
Domitian, and Diocletian, until every day on the calendar had someone’s name on
it, and some of those days had several names on them. It got to the point where
there was no way to recognize each one, and so—while the major saints still had
their own feast days—the church picked one day on the calendar to honor the
lives of all the saints: November 1st. In the beginning it honored
only those who had been martyred for their faith, but as the church gained in
acceptance and popularity it soon began to recognize other Christians of “heroic
virtue.” And this is how the tradition of honoring all those common, ordinary,
everyday saints began. Because you and I have each known people whose names
will never show up on the Christian calendar, but who have been saints to us all
the same. Grandparents and parents, uncles and aunts, pastors and Sunday school
teachers, friends and neighbors who have taught us more about what it means to
live a Christian life than any of the so-called saints.
That’s the reason we’re
celebrating All Saints’ Sunday today: to acknowledge those ordinary Christians
whose extraordinary lives have touched our own, people like those whose names
were read earlier. We call them saints in the same way Paul used the
word. Do you remember? “To the saints who are in Corinth,” he wrote, but if
you read a few chapters into that letter you find that those Corinthians were
not all that saintly. Paul would say it wasn’t what they had done that made
them saints, it was what Jesus had done for them—sanctified them through
his death on the cross, which is another way of saying he made holy people who
otherwise had no chance of being holy, in the same way he has done it for us.
So, that grandmother who taught you to love Jesus was not only a good woman, she
was—by virtue of her faith in him—a saint. Today we remember her and all those
others like her who have touched our lives with their own.
Which is why this passage
from Matthew 5 is so appropriate.
Matthew tells us that when
Jesus saw the crowds he went up on the mountain; and after he sat down, his
disciples came to him. Not disciples with a capital “D.” Not the Twelve. Just
“his disciples,” meaning all those ordinary, everyday people who were following
him.[i]
Jesus went up on the mountain and sat down to teach, and all those people
settled down around him to hear what he had to say. I think it must have taken
a while, don’t you? Just as it always does when you ask a roomful of people to
settle down and find a seat. These people must have been carrying their
belongings, some of them holding children or hobbling on crutches. Jesus,
sitting there, must have been watching as they all found a spot to sit down,
tried to get comfortable, and then leaned in to listen. And as he looked on
those faces I think he began to describe what he saw:
“Blessed are the poor, and
those who are poor in spirit,” he said, looking at that man with the sunken
cheeks. Blessed are those who are mourning the loss of their loved ones,” he
said, looking at that woman with tears in her eyes. Blessed are the meek, the
little ones, the least of these my brethren,” he said, looking at the children
who were there. And on he went: “Blessed are the hungry and thirsty, as well as
those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are those who are full
of mercy—I see you! And blessed are those who are pure in heart—you’ll see
God. Blessed are the peacemakers, the ones who hold their families together.
And blessed are those who are persecuted because they try to do the right
thing.” What Jesus was doing was dignifying the lives of these people who had
almost nothing in the world. With every blessing they must have sat up a little
straighter, lifted their heads, and looked into the loving eyes of Jesus. And
as he called them “blessed” he sanctified them: pronounced God’s blessing upon
them and thereby made saints out of ordinary people.
But he did even more than
that.
I have been to that place
in Israel they call the “Mount of Beatitudes.” There is a church built on that
spot, as there is on almost every holy spot in the Holy Land. When I was there
with a group of ministers from the States our tour guide asked someone to read
Matthew 5:1-12 and my friend Jim Eastin, a Methodist minister, read it. As he
did, and as I pictured that crowd of people sitting there on the hillside
listening to Jesus, I couldn’t help thinking how revolutionary these words must
have sounded. “You may have nothing now,” Jesus was saying, “you may be poor
and meek and hungry now, but blessed are you all the same, because everything is
about to change. God’s kingdom is about to come, God’s will is about to be
done, and when it is those who have nothing will have something, and those who
are weeping will laugh, and those who are hungry will be filled with good
things.” Can you imagine how those words would have sounded in their ears, and
how they might have thought Jesus was announcing a revolution?
Well, I think he was, but
not the kind of revolution those people may have imagined. If you think of a
big wheel turning, so that what was at the top is at the bottom, and what was at
the bottom is at the top, you get a picture of the kind of revolution Jesus had
in mind. Wasn’t he the one who was always saying that in the Kingdom the last
shall be first and the least shall be great? I think he meant that when God has
his way in the world those faithful followers of his, who may have been nobodies
up until that moment, will become somebodies. Those people Jesus was looking
at—the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning—would at last have everything they
needed and more. So, “blessed are you,” Jesus says, and another way to
translate that is to say, “How fortunate you are, how lucky!” to be poor in
spirit, to be meek and lowly, to be mourning the loss of a loved one, because
the wheel is about to turn, everything is about to change.
It didn’t happen right
away. In fact, it hasn’t happened yet. Week after week, in churches around the
world, Christians pray that God’s kingdom would come, that God’s will would be
done, on earth as it is in heaven. There are still too many of Christ’s
followers who are poor and meek and mourning. But every time we stoop low to
lift them up we participate in revolution. Every time we say a gracious word or
do a loving thing the Kingdom comes a little closer. But what we hear in the
Beatitudes is the good news that even before the Kingdom comes those people are
precious to God, that no matter what the world may say about them he says they
are blessed, and we’ve had some experience with that. Haven’t each of us known
somebody who was nothing in the eyes of the world and everything in the eyes of
God? Someone whose sainthood will never be recognized by the ecclesiastical
authorities, but someone who was a saint nonetheless?
The one who comes to my
mind this morning is Scotty McCarty.
Scotty was the son of
Cecil and Peggy McCarty, who owned the garage in New Castle, Kentucky. He had
been born with hydrocephaly—what they used to call “water-on-the-brain”—and the
doctors told his parents he wouldn’t live to be five. But when I came to that
little town as pastor Scotty had passed his thirtieth birthday, and was still
going strong. His head was enormous, and so was his body. He spoke in a
childish, high-pitched voice. He sat in an extra-wide wheelchair near the door
at New Castle Motors, where he could greet everyone who came in. Scotty was
legally blind, but he knew everybody in town by the sound of their voice. When
someone came in through the door, as soon as they spoke, he would call them by
name and then say, “Come love me.” Those old farmers would walk over to where
Scotty sat, lean down to give him a hug, press their rough faces up against his
cheek, and say, “I love you, Scotty.” Men who probably hadn’t said such a thing
to their wives in years said it to Scotty every time they saw him, because he
asked them to, and because they did love him. They couldn’t help themselves.
The people of that church
told me about the time Scotty had been baptized. There had been some
conversation about it among the deacons, because Scotty had the mental ability
of a five-year-old and they weren’t sure he understood everything he should to
be a Christian, and also because they didn’t know how they would get him in the
baptistery. But Scotty told the pastor he loved Jesus and wanted to be baptized
and the pastor said they would find a way. So, on a designated Sunday morning
the men of the church carried Scotty up the front steps on a set of box
springs. They got him back into his wheelchair, rolled him down the aisle, and
up a ramp onto the platform. The pastor asked him if he wanted to follow Jesus
and he said yes. The pastor asked him if he wanted to be baptized and he said
yes. And then the pastor scooped some water out of the baptistery and—in the
name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—poured it on Scotty’s head.
Scotty blinked, looked out toward the congregation, and said, “He poured water
on me!” But as the laughter was dying down he began to sing in that high, clear
voice of his, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” I was told that there
wasn’t a dry eye in the house that day, that something about Scotty’s way of
following Jesus struck those people as perfectly pure.
Scotty died a few years
ago, way past the time when his doctors said he would. I heard about it only
later, after his funeral, and so I wasn’t able to be there, but if Jesus had
been there (and I think he was) he might have said, “Blessed are you when you’re
stuck in a wheelchair all your life, when you can’t graduate from college and go
off to get a good job in the city, when all you can do is get crusty old farmers
to profess their love, and a group of grown men to carry you up the steps, and a
church full of people to break down and cry because of your sweet and simple
childlike faith. Blessed are you, Scotty McCarty, and great is your reward in
heaven.”
In every church I’ve
served there have been people like that—common, ordinary, everyday saints
without whom the church could not function and the world would not turn. If it
keeps on turning I believe it will someday come around to that place Jesus
talked about, where the last are first and the least are great and God has his
way at last. So may it be, and so may we pray:
Dear God, for saints like
Scotty and all those others who come to mind we thank you. We pray that we
would learn from the example they have set before us, and follow you more
faithfully in the days ahead. We ask you to keep us working and praying for
that day when your kingdom comes and your will is done on earth as it is in
heaven.
Amen.
—Jim Somerville, © 2008
[i]
M. Eugene Boring, “Matthew,” The New Interpreter’s Bible
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 175.
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