| All Saints' Sunday November 3, 2019 Daniel 7:1-3,15-18 Psalm 149 Ephesians 1:11-23 Luke 6:20-31 |
Our cinematic life and Halloween life is full of superheroes, including kings, queens, princes and princesses provided by Disney imagination stories. D.C. comics and their like have proliferated and one might ask why we are so obsessed with entertainment by imaginative superheroes?
Why do all the kids dress up like superheroes and princes and princesses? And why do we do it at Halloween is such a big way?
Why do we like superheroes? We perhaps feel the limitations of our human conditions. While we think that we are most superior of all the animals, we look at birds and think, "I can't fly.....I wish I could fly like a bird." And so Superman is invented; a human who can fly like a bird.
We invent superheroes because we are not completely satisfied with just being human. We are jealous about the strength of elephants, the swimming of fish, the flying of birds. We really want to have all of the unique traits of the other animals, but alas we can only be human. So we invent extra-human, super human beings.
In the past, we used to find our superheroes in the Bible and in our churches. The Messiah was the best person of all human imagination for people of faith. The prophets and the saints were also superheroes to whom we looked for inspiration because they were like us but they did great things and even became legendary.
What modern science taught us was to discount the entertainment and imagination value of the Messiah and the saints. Modern Science taught that the superior truth involved only things that could be empirically verified; everything else was mere fancy. And once the unable to be verified truths of the Messiah and the saints is discounted, what happened? There still remained a great hole in human imagination, the truth of human imagination.
And that hole got filled with superheroes galore, with science fiction and with Disney kingdoms. The truth of imagination did not and will not go away. We dispensed with the discourses of the truth of imagination which we have in the biblical epic of prophets, seers, Messiah and saints, and we have allowed endless surrogates to replace what we once had as the truthful imaginations of faith of our biblical tradition.
Once science was established as the predominate truth of common sense life, people of faith got an inferiority complex about their biblical truth. People like Thomas Jefferson responded by cutting out of the Bible, everything that did not comport with scientific reasoning. Worse, biblical fundamentalists acknowledged the truth of science and then began to argue that everything that is recounted in the Bible is scientifically true.
And people have come to live divided schizoidal lives regarding science and faith. It is completely dishonest to say that one cannot be a poet and a scientist at the same time. It is completely dishonest to say that one cannot understand and participate in discourses of faith and discourses of science at the same time, and not be crazy. But many people have come to believe that it is either biblical faith or science and not both. And those same people fill their lives with superhero genres and they dress up as Spock at a Trekkie conventions, and think that we Christians are wacky?
We, Christians need to stand up for our Messiah, Jesus. We need to stand up for our saints and souls whom we venerate as value setters for our lives. We have the three days of All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day to enter into the truth of the poetry of our faith. Whether one is Christian or not, it is hard to avoid thinking about post-death experience for ourselves or for those whom we loved and have lost intimate accessibility to. Our superhero, Jesus the Messiah, became so because of the exemplary way that he lived, died and re-appeared, to affirm the truth of the imaginations of the afterlife. So in these three days, we celebrate the resurrection afterlife of Jesus, the saints and the souls who have been saints for us in our personal histories.
Jesus, the Messiah, and the saints are witnesses to us that we too are called to be heroic in the witness of faith, first in the small things, as preparation for when we might be called to do a greater thing for the community.
Why do we read the beatitudes on All Saints' Day? The beatitudes might be called the lifestyle of many of the heroic saints. They were blessed and beatified because of what they were able to endure.
I have come to called the beatitudes the Christian martial arts for oppressed people. Most us can never really identify since we've never been slaves; we never lived under the duress of oppression. The early followers of Jesus had to live martial arts lives; they had to live peaceful resistant lives. Imagine the slave owner who is impressed with the cheerful diligence of his slaves, whom he holds as his pets. How can those slaves seem so cheerful? How can they sing those "spirituals" in such duress? The Christian martial arts life style of the beatitude for oppressed people became so winsome, it took over the Roman Empire. When Christianity became Christendom, for most Christians, the beatitude lifestyle was dispensed with as not needed for people in power.
The beatitudes were written as martial arts for the oppressed, to help people not only survive but to impress their oppressors about the superior quality of their life in the Holy Spirit. The Christian belief is that the Christian martial arts of the beatitudes for oppressed people will in the end win out because slavery and oppression and chauvinism are evil; they are not of God.
The saints are those who lived in the power of the Christian martial arts of the beatitudes. And if you and I do not need to live the life of the beatitudes, because we are not living under the conditions of oppression, we need to live the Christian martial arts of the beatitude on behalf of and in solidarity with the oppressed wherever they are found.
The best of the saintly life is expressed in the Christian martial arts of the beatitudes. This is the heroic life. This is the super heroic life. This is what the life of the Risen Christ can be within each of us as we let the conditions of this life call us to this kind of saintly life.
Today we thank God for the Saint of Saints, Jesus the Messiah, our superhero. We thank God for blessed Mary and an entire train of exemplary saints who lived the life of the Christian martial arts of the beatitudes when they were oppressed and when they saw others suffering oppression. And we ask that we in our time and place might find a way to follow them in learning to practice the Christian martial arts of the beatitudes. Amen.
