All Saints Sunday

Rev. Jennifer Masada - St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church - Kapa’au, Hawai'i
November 2, 2025 - All Saints Sunday, Year C
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As we celebrate All Saints Sunday today, we hear the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Luke. The Beatitudes are a tough bit of scripture to unpack. On the surface, it reads like a simple list of blessings for good people followed by warnings for bad people.  Perhaps we've been conditioned to hear it that way. When we hear this passage, our first impulse might be to sort ourselves into categories. We might ask ourselves, “Which one am I? Am I among the poor or the rich? Am I one who weeps or one who laughs? Have I known hunger—or fullness? To which group do I belong: ‘blessed are you’ or ‘woe to you’” ?
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In our society, we spend a lot of time and energy dividing the winners from the losers. From an early age, we’re trained to compete. We’re taught to judge people based on their status. We label people, and we label ourselves. 

But perhaps that’s not the point of Jesus' words in this passage. Perhaps we are invited to hear the Beatitudes as a list of human experiences. Think about it: poor and rich, hungry and full, weeping and laughing, despised and accepted. Haven’t we experienced ALL of these? Yes we have, to varying degrees.

I don’t hear the Beatitudes as a list of golden traits versus character flaws. We experience both blessings and woes because we are human.

What may first appear to be a list dividing the blessed from the cursed is actually a portrait of the whole human condition. We are at once full and hungry, joyful and grieving, honored and rejected. The blessings and the woes belong together. They are not opposites—they are facets of our shared humanity.

The Beatitudes are not a checklist for worthiness. They remind us that in every circumstance—joy or sorrow, gain or loss—God is present. The Divine current flows through all of it. This list does not divide us into good people and bad people. It unifies us, helping us to recognize the vast range of human experiences. Even in a single 24-hour period, we experience a lot! So do our family members, neighbors, and every person in the world. This list invites us to hold compassion and love for all.

Jesus makes this clear in what he says next: “But I say to you that listen, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” The heart of the passage lives in these simple instructions. 
It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Yet in the heat of a hard conversation or the ache of betrayal, this kind of love can feel like the hardest thing we’ll ever do. Perhaps that’s why we need the saints—to remind us it’s possible.

So as we celebrate the saints this weekend, we can ask God to guide us as God guides the saints: those who have gone before us, those living among us, and those yet to come. It's good to remember that "saints" are not perfect people. They are ordinary human beings who choose, again and again, to return to love. They practice kindness when it is difficult. They forgive when it seems impossible. They treat others not as judged by human standards, but as God sees them — through the lens of divine love.

I am not sure exactly how saints become saints, but I imagine they probably have one thing in common: practice. Reading about saints, it appears to me that they practice at least these three things:

1. They practice maintaining their relationship with God. 
2. Their connection with God helps them practice
   returning to love. 
3. Returning to love helps them practice observing their thoughts and feelings and bringing troubling thoughts and feelings to their heart. 

In those moments when we’re struggling with our thoughts and feelings, when we are confronting difficulties with another person, we can practice bringing everything into our hearts. With our connection to the Divine, we can return to love and that’s when it happens: the idea of “enemy” begins to melt away. Our hard feelings soften into compassion. 

When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he’s not just talking about the people “out there.” Sometimes our so-called enemies are the voices inside our own heads—the grudges we hold, the fears we feed, the stories we tell about ourselves and others.
When we observe the chatter that happens in here, we begin to notice how we react to anger, criticism, or pain. We begin to notice when we close our hearts and when we open them. And this is where transformation begins: in meeting judgment with compassion; in meeting hatred with mercy; in meeting fear with love.

The saints are not perfect; they simply practice returning to love. As we experience the whole range of what it is to be human — the blessings and the woes and everything in between — we open our hearts to compassion. 
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The realm of God is not a faraway reward for a just few worthy saints. It is what happens when we practice living as though love is the truest thing about us — because it is. Through Christ, Amen.

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