All Saints

Matthew 5:1-12

I've always kinda wondered what exactly this passage has to do with All Saints day. After all Revelation has us with the multitude who has undergone great suffering and loss. 1 John talks about how we are children of God and we won't understand this fully until it is later revealed to us and we automatically fill in after death. So what does being blessed have to do with loss, with being a Saint?

All of these blessed involve loss though. No one strives to be poor in spirit, no one purposefully mourns, and most people have serious questions about what it means to be meek. Does this mean we just let people walk all over us? So these are not some goal we achieve yet are in some parts if our everyday life because we all deal with loss and this might make us meek, or mourn, or poor in spirit. 

If we look at the lives of some of the saints we begin to get a picture of some of these. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a crafter of words. Not only does her book Uncle Tom's Cabin speak of the abuses of slavery it also highlights the inequalities between male and female of her time. You can tell this was a great loss to her, yet she wrote subversively of this in her book. She was not afraid to meekly adress this problem. 

Loss is something each and every one of us deals with in our life. In Moru the Beatitudes are translated with no blessed or happy before. I think this gets to the heart of meaning we get so lost on the blessing part we lose sight of the end of the verse. Like "those who are poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Those who mourn, they will be comforted." Maybe not now, maybe not today, but a future promise if hope. The thing is sometimes we like Ms. Stowe have to trust that maybe someday it will come. Can you trust?