All Saints Sunday (5 November 2006)

Matthew 5:1-12

Pr. George L. Murphy

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron OH

ECCENTRICITY

There’s a word for the kind of people Jesus describes in today’s Gospel. It’s not a word we use so much anymore but it’s a good one. They are eccentric.

“Eccentric” means that a person’s behavior and way of life are unusual. The word used to be more common but it kind of declined back in the sixties – maybe because lots of people were trying to be eccentric – or “non-conformists” as we said then. How can you be “eccentric” when everyone is acting strange? The phrase “counter-cultural,” going against established customs, became more popular.

But “eccentric” really means something deeper than just being different. Literally the word means “out of center,” as when one circle has a different center from another.

People who are eccentric have a different focus from other people. Their lives revolve around something different.

Christians are called to be eccentric because their lives are to be centered outside themselves. God is to be the center of our life. And the whole problem of sin is that people aren’t centered on God but on something else – often themselves. Augustine spoke of sin as a condition of being “curved in upon the self” – curvatus in se. The basic problem of humanity is being centered wrongly, focused on itself instead of on God.

To summarize today’s Gospel, Jesus says “Blessed are the eccentric.” Blessed are those who, in that setting in first century Galilee, were counter-cultural. And it’s much the same today. If a society were really Christian - - if the great majority of its members were freely committed to Christian faith and life – then we wouldn’t be called to be counter-cultural. We could fit in. But society seldom is that way. When the rule is to look out for Number One, when money is more important than health and getting elected more important than truth, when sex is casual, violence celebrated and life cheap, then we are called to be counter-cultural. We are to be eccentric.

“Blessed are the eccentric.” Look at the picture in Matthew. Jesus went up on the hillside, “and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.” The words that follow, the Beatitudes, are spoken to those who are gathered around Jesus and centered on him. Jesus is speaking here within the Christian community – what we call “the communion of saints” in the Apostles’ Creed..

The very way the story is told shows us something important. When a similar account is given in Luke’s gospel there are fewer “blesseds” and some “woes” are directed toward those who remain centered on themselves. Both of the evangelists have edited their accounts to bring out different aspects of Jesus’ teaching and have included inspired reflections of the later Christian community. Their purpose is not to report the precise words of the historical Jesus, like a secretary. The purpose rather is to address the words of Jesus to the ongoing community of Jesus’ followers. The one about whom those few Jewish disciples gathered on a hillside in Galilee is the risen Lord whom the apostles proclaimed in synagogues and marketplaces, and the one about whom we still gather to learn about the lives we’re to live. Because he is the Son of God, our lives are centered on God when we come to him in faith.

In a couple of ways these words make sense only within the church. They are spoken to those whose lives are centered on Jesus and have been transmitted through the living tradition of believers. And what they say about the people who are blessed just sound crazy to those who are outside this community.

In Luke’s account, Jesus’ words are addressed directly to his immediate hearers: “Blessed are you who are poor ... hungry ... who weep ... when people hate you.” Matthew expands that direct address to set before us all those men and women and children who show us, in concrete form, what he was talking about. On this All Saints Sunday we remember some of them from our congregation who have died during the past year. And some are recorded on church calendars as examples for us of lives centered on Christ.

Blessed is Martin of Tours, who resigned from his position as an officer in the Roman army because of his faith and eventually became a bishop. The usual picture of Martin shows him using his sword to divide his military cloak with a beggar. His festival is this coming Saturday.

Blessed is Søren Kierkegaard, whose anniversary of death is the same day. A philosopher, theologian and writer, much of his life was a struggle, including the use of biting and sometimes hilarious sarcasm directed against the comfortable Danish state church of the nineteenth century. Kierkegaard was the one who said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

Blessed is Elizabeth of Thuringia, Princess of Hungary, whose commemoration the Prayer Book suggests on the nineteenth of this month. Happily married at the age of fourteen, having three children, she still found time in her short life – she died at the age of twenty-four – to aid the poor and unemployed and to found two hospitals. When you hear of a hospital named “St. Elizabeth’s,” it’s because of her.

Blessed are Perpetua and Felicity, executed in the arena in Carthage during the persecutions by the Roman government in A.D. 202. Felicity left behind a baby daughter a few days old, born during her imprisonment.

Blessed is Toyohiko Kagawa, disinherited by his wealthy Japanese family when he became a Christian and imprisoned by the government during World War II because he was a pacifist. He spent much of his life working in the slums to improve the conditions of workers and educating people about democracy after the war.

Blessed is Clara Maass, the German-American woman who served as a nurse in Cuba after the Spanish-American war. Today we have little fear of dying of Yellow Fever, in part because she volunteered for experiments to discover the cause of the disease – and died from it at the age of twenty-five.

And each of us can think of other examples of saints. Some, like those I named, are famous for some reason or other. But most of them will never be listed on any official calendar of commemorations. They are all gifts of God to us, signs of what it means for our lives to be centered on Jesus Christ – to know our need of God, to mourn, to be gentle in spirit, to desire justice, to be pure in heart, to be peacemakers, to suffer for the faith. They are God’s gifts to us. And just as the money we put in the offering plate for God’s work is first of all God’s gift to us, so God’s gift of the saints becomes the church’s offering to God.

Blessed are you, Lord our God, maker of all things. Through your goodness we have these gifts to offer. Amen. .