Ecclesiasticus 2:(1-6)7-11
Ephesians 1:(11-14)15-23
Luke 6:20-26(27-36)
Psalm 149
"Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return." What a wonderful and simple rule to live by - yet, the principles described in these words are anything but easy to practice.
In ancient times, before humans knew how to live "by Faith", they lived by "the Law". Their lives and communities were shaped and driven by a long list of rigid "do's" and "don'ts" in a course of training aimed at moving God's people forward to a time they would no longer need the force of Law but, instead, could - and would - be ruled by Faith.
The collective childhood of God's people in those early years was a time of training for an adulthood not yet known, except as foretold by the great prophets. These were formidable years of preparation, long before the revelation of Faith that was yet to come through the life, death and resurrection of God's son, Jesus.
It was a time before the world would notice a handful of remarkable persons beginning to move out ahead of the pack, taking the first bold baby steps to sainthood.
They lived and grew, worked and played, made mistakes and prayed on their way to adulthood much the same as we do yet today. But there was something different about the handful of folks who made it to the list of saints.
Sainthood remains an unthinkable goal for most of us yet today and, we wonder, what is it anyway that makes a saint a "Saint"? What are the characteristics shared by all the of saints who have stood out from the billions of people who have come and gone before us?
Let's look at just a few of them; surely they were all quite similar to each other, and not a bit like us:
We see grateful Saint Mary Magdalene, poetic and brainy Saint Thomas Aquinas, moody Saint Augustine, cantankerous Saint Jerome, the joke-cracking Saint Laurence, and St. Francis of Assissi, protector of our environment and all it's living creatures.
There are housewives and kings, lawyers and bakers, tax agents and teachers. These are quite a diverse bunch, so just what is it they all have in common? What makes a saint a "Saint"?
Mother Teresa, a blessed lady of our own time, who was recently beatified in Rome, was approached one day by a man who said to her, "Mother, I want to do something great for God, but I don't know what. Should I start a school, be a missionary in a foreign land, build up a charitable agency?"
Mother Teresa eyed him kindly, and responded, "What you need to do is make sure that no one in your family goes unloved."
Her words are profoundly simple and, if they were the only words we ever heard to describe the quality of a Saint, they would be more than adequate to start us out on our own "baby steps to Sainthood."
Today we celebrate All Saints Day and I am reminded once again, rightly or wrongly, of the association between All Saint's Day and the Eve of All Hallows we now call Halloween. Today Halloween is celebrated with fun and imagination, parties and scary costumes worn by kids as they wend themselves "trick or treating" through shadowy neighborhoods.
But my earliest memory of Halloween does not include scary costumes or threats to play tricks on neighbors who don't offer candy treats. Instead, my first Halloween was a different kind of fun and it was especially an opportunity to learn a very important lesson.
As pre-school girls, my twin sister and I spent a lot of time visiting our Aunt Martha who lived in a small, but ornate, cottage in the same neat little town where she, my father and eleven other siblings grew up.
Aunt Martha had graduated from St. Cloud Teacher's College years before I came on the scene, and went on to teach in Minnesota's rural school system until a serious infection affected her ears and left her deaf.
Unable to teach anymore, my aunt found other ways to work with children, including preparing meals at bible camps and as a resident cook at a boys' home in Minneapolis. She had a strong faith in God and the teachings of Jesus, and by learning to lip-read, she was able to maintain communication with those around her.
I regret that I was not keen enough as a child to ask about her years as a teacher - such curiosity was lost in the fleeting moments of childhood. And, before I thought to ask, she was gone and it was too late.
But I can recall some of the attributes I saw in her that surely must have made her an unforgettable treasure for those who had the privilege of sharing her class rooms.
Now, back to that memory of Halloween. Aunt Martha had just finished bagging the dozens of warm cookies she had spent all day baking when she made the exciting declaration, "It's time to go trick or treating!"
So, off we went all around the neighborhood, knocking on all the doors. "Trick or treat", we'd say when the door opened. Then we'd hand off a packet of Aunt Martha's cookies to our unsuspecting neighbors.
That was more fun than getting the treats we later came to expect from them and seeing the happy surprise on their faces was just as good as receiving praise. It was as good as it could get.
I hope that each of you, too, can reach back in time and recall your own special moments where things turned out wonderfully different from what you expected.
And while you are looking back, you will probably notice that childhood was more than just a carefree trip around the block. It was a carefully orchestrated journey, and you see now that, even before we outgrew our booties, we were deep in training for adulthood.
There were many steps we would take as we graduated from baby formula to solid food, learned to crawl, and finally to walk and run. It was like spending every day in school except that nobody drew us a neat little outline of what each next step in our training would be.
We were spoon-fed one small bite at a time as we learned by a series of examples, words of praise and an overuse of the word "NO". Like the ancients before us, we still get our lessons on a "need to know" basis.
No one told us that after we learn to run, we would also learn to stumble and fall; we would learn that only when the time was right and each fall brought a "knowing" that wasn't there before.
Like the ancients, we looked to our parents, teachers, and other caring people whose job it is to lay down the Law, keeping us from harm that we would have time to grow.
Paul, in his Letter to the Ephesians, offers a prayer that fits as well today as it did two thousand years ago:
"I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe."
And, how to get there? Jesus told it beautifully and simply - "Do to others as you would have them do to you."
Is that not the attribute that All Saints have in common? Is that not the path we see before us, where we can take our very own "baby steps" to Sainthood?
Amen