Then when we got to wherever we were going, we would be around really old people. But I looked at it as people who has SEEN and EXPERIENCED things. I would listen to the stories of their lives and learn about my family’s history. One of my great-grandfathers on my Dad’s side, for instance, was the meanest so and so in seven counties on both sides of the Red River. He was a moonshiner who terrorized his family (it wasn’t explained like that but I read between the lines). He married a Native American woman, but refused to register the children on the tribal rolls because then they would have been excluded from schools for white children. Now, anyone in the county could see that these kids were half Native. But they went to the white kids’ schools because everybody was too afraid of their father to challenge this. This was one of the few benefits that accrued to his descendants from his meanness, but it was not an insubstantial one.
Sometimes, the older folks would actually talk to us kids rather than send us out to play. I remember I was helping one of my great-aunts make a blackberry cobbler one time in her tiny kitchen in the part of the clapboard house that had dated from territory times. It was about a million degrees in that kitchen, but she had cool sweet lemonade and the Cardinals game on a tiny radio, and so that helped overcome a lot of my resistance at being forced into the women’s sphere of life while the men sat in the breezeway and played dominoes and smoked.
I don’t know why that moment struck me so vividly. But it has stayed with me for decades now, and has been one of the most encouraging mantras of my life.
Expectations can shape your perception of the world, for the good, or for the bad. Looking back over my life, I see how my aunt’s wisdom has played out again and again. If you expect something to fail, you make it that much harder for it to succeed, and you even may take steps, consciously or unconsciously, to enable that failure. If you expect something to succeed, you will invest of yourself to help make that thing succeed, and you will be more likely to persevere to make that success a reality.
Look at how the post-war American public school system was proclaimed a failure twice in the 20th century. The first time was during the Cold War, when the Soviets were supposedly beating us technologically. But at that time, we decided we expected better. The answer then, in the 1950s, was to pour federal money into the schools to improve them, and also to desegregate them. And our schooling system, from kindergarten to college level, even with its rampant inequalities, became the envy of the world.
The second time our schools were declared failures was in the 1980s. But this time, the answer was to siphon funding away from schools—and for forty years we have slashed state and local tax support for our schools. We also resisted fully implementing desegregated schools when we realized that it would mean desegregating our neighborhoods, and you can still see this at work here in St. Louis. Those with means began setting up a partially-privately funded tier of schools, and siphoned even more money and support away. We let criticism become expectation. And now our schools are struggling and gasping for air, even as we pile more demands upon them. And the states who have most slashed funding to schools have seen their populations and economies dwindle.
Our gospel today is about expectations. Actually, our gospel almost EVERY day is about expectations.
In today’s gospel, we hear the first part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount—the most famous part, probably: the Beatitudes. What we may not hear are the expectations that Jesus is challenging in each one of the eight statements he makes. Yet he names groups of people, starting with those who struggle with the disappointments of this world, the poor in spirit, the ones who struggle against hopes being dashed, with instead being the recipients of God’s abundance and generosity. Each of these blessings begins in the present (Blessed ARE…) and points to the future (for they WILL BE…), except for the first and the eighth statements, which say that the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted are blessed “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Is. Present tense. The kingdom of heaven is inbreaking right now. Those who expect it can see it, and work for it, even in the midst of a pandemic. For it is during times of crisis that we humans can shake off our isolation and worship of self, a selfishness which only leads to feeling more vulnerable. We can instead remember that united we stand, and divided we most certainly will fall.
Especially as we deal with expectations at war with fear and division this week as we await, finally, Election Day, with a mixture of relief and dread, we need this reminder. So too, our political lives are rooted in the present, but should look forward in hope to a better future for all. Politics is about how we live with each other—partisanship is the disagreement about the basis of our common life. But our life together is political in best sense. As Christians, we are called first and foremost be a people of faith, hope, and love. We need to be people whose expectations are grounded in abundance. Yes—we actually NEED this, in order to sustain ourselves in the times of struggle.
And the WORLD needs us to be those people too. If we don’t witness in our lives to God’s abundance and presence in the world, who will? That’s the expectation that shaped the influence of all the saints we remember today. They looked, and saw what was, but then lived into the expectation of God’s grace and abundance. They didn’t have to be perfect to do that. They just had to open themselves, even a tiny bit, to being channels of God’s grace.
The Beatitudes remind us that those who are especially blessed of God are not the high and mighty ones, but those who are on the side of those the world esteems little: the poor, the weak, the suffering, the innocent, the peacemakers, and those who persevere in discipleship even when they stand at risk of unjustly losing all the things the world values. The Beatitudes are addressed to the Church, to those who proclaim that they are disciples of Jesus. Those who are blessed are those who look beyond themselves.
The world, especially the economic and the partisan world, tries to shake this out of us, of course. That world wants to convince us that scarcity and poverty in spirit rules the day and haunts the night. And here we see it again—expect that you will never have enough, and you will never feel that you have enough, no matter how much you actually have. The more you hold back, the less generous you become—and that applies to stewardship and church budgets as well. Those who are blessed are those who see what could be, and work and give to make that a reality and be a part of that reality. Faithful hope is the price of admission. Those who are blessed are those whose expectations are grounded in knowing that hope can be a more powerful instrument than faithlessness in changing the world for the better.
The gospel is a long, narrative story of expectations being shattered when the reign of God breaks in. The peasant teenager named Mary didn’t expect to have that angel pop up in front of her and call her “Favored One.” Joseph didn’t expect to have to explain a pregnant fiancée. Those shepherds didn’t expect to see the heavens break open and see the constellations swirl in beat to a hallelujah chorus. The Magi expected that special baby to be in a palace, not a hovel. Nobody expected a great prophet to come out of Nazareth. Nobody expected a carpenter’s son to be a healer and teacher, much less a savior.
And the gospels themselves are located with one single plot of scripture, as my beloved teacher and Psalm scholar Clint McCann would remind us repeatedly in seminary. And that plot is the reality of God’s grace. Genesis chapters 1-9 are about God’s relationship with the world- as Genesis 9 reminds us, God covenants with humanity, every creature, and even with the earth itself God calls us to embody justice by showing us that justice is grounded not in retribution, but in forgiveness and mercy—grace again, and the prophets attest to this even as they rail against human faithlessness.(1)
We are called to live our lives as Christians by taking seriously the hope and grace that is at the heart of God’s relationship with us. When we are transformed by this good news, this outpouring of blessing even upon those the world denigrates or overlooks, we move into the realm of the power of expectation—beyond the tension of what IS, to the assurance of what WILL BE.
What do you expect? What you expect becomes what you look for, and that then leads to what you see—or don’t see. As we remember the saints in our lives, let us decided, right now, today, to let those expectations lead us to the proclamation of the kingdom of God and the abundance of God’s dream for us, right here, right now.
Amen.
This sermon was preached at the 10:30 livestream worship from St. Martin's Episcopal Church during Coronatide on November 1, 2020, the Feast of All Saints.
Readings:
Citations:
1) The Rev. Dr. J. Clint McCann, Jr., "The Hermeneutics of Grace: Discerning the Bible's Single Plot," in Interpretation, January, 2003, pp. 5-15.
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