“With the Eyes of Your Heart Enlightened” Christian Community Congregational Churches of San Carlos All Saints Sunday October 31, 2021

Since it is the day before All Saints Day, our readings today relate to saintliness and blessedness.?What is this quality of saintliness??What makes a saint saintly?

When my mother lost patience and got particularly angry at me, or my brother or my Dad, she would often exclaim “You would drive a saint crazy.”???

Perhaps what makes a saint a saint is this very quality of patience.?My mother, by running out of patience and losing her temper, showed thereby that she was not a saint, and was being driven even crazier than a saint would be by the outrageous behavior of her child.

In defense of my mother, and father, I think we can safely say that almost all parents had at least some of the patience of saints, otherwise no one would have survived childhood.?In our honoring of everyday saints today, I think parents come first, followed by all of those who took care of us and loved us and taught us as children.

The Beatitudes we heard today are familiar and they pertain directly to today’s honoring of saints.?They are among the many things that Jesus our Lord said that sound impossible or perhaps more diplomatically, paradoxical.

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now,?

for you will be filled.

. . .?

"But woe to you who are rich,

for you have received your consolation.

"Woe to you who are full now,

for you will be hungry.

Blessed are the poor and woe to the rich and so on. ?

What do we make of this??Just what is blessed about poverty??And what is woeful about being, say, not filthy rich, but wealthy enough to live free from financial worry?

Certainly there are days when I think I would rather be on the bad side of Jesus and rich than receive the blessing of Jesus and be poor.?And so on through this list of blessings and woes. ?

What do we make of this?

One of my favorite Bible commentators says that we have an infinite longing for God that cannot be filled by any finite good.?He suggests that the Beatitudes are a formula for making God our ultimate concern in such a complete way that if we are at one with God, then we really don’t need anything else; and in fact, it may be better not to have anything else.

This attitude inspired the monastic movement in Christianity.?Certainly – though way fewer now than before - monasteries are of full of saintly and blessed people whose every act and thought is offered up to God.

But what about the rest of us??We do not live like that.?We do not live in monasteries.?We have to accumulate some wealth and we have to eat.?We do not just crave the love of God, we crave for a wide variety of loves – the more the merrier.?We crave the recognition and honor of our family, friends and neighbors.?How can we make God our ultimate concern while living in what we call the real world, outside the very ordered and tidy world of a monastery?

Let’s listen again to St. Paul this morning.?Perhaps what he says will help us out:

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 . . .

It is a very arresting phrase.?The spirit of wisdom and revelation, of course, is the Holy Spirit and Paul prays that this Spirit may come to us and enlighten the eyes of our hearts.?

I hadn’t thought about the heart having eyes before.?The great philosopher Pascal famously said that the heart has its reasons.?But eyes?

Well, according to St. Paul, certainly a great authority, this is indeed the hope to which God has called us, that we may live with the eyes of our hearts enlightened.

This indeed happened for Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, our branch of Christianity.?By the way, it is Reformation Sunday, so it is appropriate to give a nod to Dr. Luther.?He tried everything that the church could offer in order to lift the burden of guilt from his soul, but nothing worked until he just threw himself upon the mercy of God.?Only then did he feel enlightened in the two senses of the word:?He was enlightened in that he no longer felt burdened and he was enlightened in the sense that he had light to see.?Somehow the burden was lifted from his soul and the scales fell from his eyes. ?

For him, this was a once for all life changing event.

How about the rest of us??Does this sort of thing happen to us??Well, usually not.?Can we not be saved or enlightened then?

Well, certainly we can.?The eyes of our hearts do lighten up, at least occasionally.?But it is the struggle to keep the lights on, the struggle to see the best in one another that leads to sainthood.?I firmly believe that we are all on the path, in our fashion; thus we celebrate the feast of all saints; we celebrate Reformation Sunday, and we celebrate our children on this wonderful dress up holiday that Halloween has become.

Please try something.?Right now.?Take a big deep breath in.

Hold it.?And let it out.

Now maybe the world seems to have changed a little.?Because we have changed a little.?A little more breath, a little more oxygen, a little more spirit . . .?and the eyes of our hearts have grown enlightened.

On this day of the celebration of all saints we especially honor those who have transmitted the Gospel to us, who have kept the faith, who told us the stories of salvation.?We also celebrate all souls who came before us.?We tuck everyone into the tradition.?We honor all who came before us, saints or sinners, who helped us in some way to weave the fabric of our lives and we are grateful for the beautiful tapestry.