“Sermon on the Mount” – Carl Bloch (1877)
“Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.”
When God gazes on us, God beholds beauty.
No wonder the writer of I John says that we should be called children of God.
God gazes on us with the loving eyes of a parent.
When you were born, I’ll bet your mother gazed at your wrinkly red self and said in amazement, meaning every word, “What a beautiful baby!” Grandparents might be even worse than parents about believing that their grandchildren are the most beautiful creations on this earth.
One reason our parents find us so beautiful is that because when they look at us, they see something of themselves, just as God, our parent, sees some of God’s beautiful qualities in each one of us—after all, God made us in God’s image, as I talked about in last week’s sermon.
What a scary, awesome and life changing thing looking in the mirror can be when we remember that as we look at our early morning, wrinkled old selves through bleary eyes we are also looking straight into the eyes of God our parent, loving us even when we feel totally unlovable.
Even more amazing is to think that God is looking with that same gaze of love into the eyes of all God’s children, even the ones that I could not imagine being part of my own tribe.
James Howell, who writes a weekly preaching blog, whose work I am drawing on this week for this sermon, quotes C.S. Lewis, a 20th century theologian, who said in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” that “it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which you would be strongly tempted to worship—There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Lewis knew that as children of God, we all bear God’s image in this world, even if we do so imperfectly.
Lewis says that “we act in certain ways because a first faint gleam of heaven is already inside us.” When we can see that glint of heaven, our inheritance as children of God, then we desire with all our hearts to act in good saintly ways toward the others in our lives, and in response to the things that happen in our lives.
C. S. Lewis describes these saintly people as being “filled with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.”
God is the source of goodness. “What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is that when God is revealed, we will be like God, for we will see God as God is.”
The last verse of today’s epistle describes purity as a trait that belongs to us who are in the family of God, as Clifton Black in the New Interpreter’s Bible says.
“All who have this hope in God purify themselves, just as God is pure.”
Jesus says in the beatitudes that the pure in heart are blessed, for they shall see God.
Howell’s commentary on this beatitude is that “the human predicament is that we let ourselves get frittered away in multiple directions, trying to be and to do everything, when we were made for just one thing, the one thing that finally matters: God.” Howell goes on to say that the pure in heart keep their eyes focused on God, their one goal, the only thing that matters at the finish line: God.
Purity is the simple desire to be near God. Howell describes the deathbed scene of Thomas Aquinas, an Italian theologian who lived in the 1200’s and said things like, “The things that we love tell us what we are.”
Thomas is dying and he hears the voice of God saying, “Thomas, you have written well of me. What reward would you ask for yourself?”
And Thomas replies, “Nothing but yourself, O Lord.”
Thomas is focused, at his death, even as he was in his life, on God.
Thomas must have known that God is the parent who can see beyond our ugly imperfections and predilections and bad habits and still claim us as God’s children.
God is the only One who can take the hurts, tragedies and messes that keep us distracted and anxious and worried and unfocused on God and bring us back to God.
On this All Saints’ Day, when the world tells us that only what we have can make us happy, that only what we want for ourselves, even at the expense of others, is all that matters,
When the world tells us to rage against others and play the blame game rather than to mourn for what has been lost,
When the world tells us that doing the right thing is for sissies,
When the world tells us that mercy has no place when dealing with those who are different,
When the world tells us that violence is the only way to win,
When the world tells us to persecute others because those others don’t see God the same way we do,
Remember that Jesus blesses those who have the traits of the family of God. The poor in spirit, the ones who mourn, the ones who are meek, the ones who seek to be good because they know God’s goodness, the ones who have mercy, the ones who make peace, the ones who endure persecution for the sake of God, these are the ones who trust God and stay focused on God.
These childlike ones are the ones who look in the mirror every morning and see God gazing back with love.
They are the ones who already see a bit of God in the most unlikely and unlovable people around them.
They are the pure in heart.
God sees that they are already the saints.
And I want to be one too.