A Sermon for the Feast of All Saints
In the gospels, there are many passages of Jesus’ words that are difficult to understand; at first blush our reading today from the gospel of Luke is not one of those. Jesus’ words are very clear in this passage, a passage that is known as the Sermon on the Plain. We are told in the verses right before this that Jesus, having just called his 12 apostles, came down from the mountainside to a level place, where crowds were gathering. Jesus healed those who were present and then turned to the crowd and delivered this sermon. Standing face to face with those gathered on the plain, Jesus gives a very clear picture of the Kingdom of God and what it means to be a disciple. Jesus both describes and judges the world as it exists around him, a world of material injustice, one which we can recognize, of rich and poor, hungry and fed, laughter and sorrow, scorn and esteem. Jesus looks into the eyes of those around him, and he sees it all. And he lets them know that this is not okay, but it is also not permanent. This is not what God intended and this is not what the Kingdom of God looks like. If he had stopped there, they would have been left with a reminder of their consolation after death, a reminder that this mortal life is fleeting and so too is their present suffering or present fortune. But he didn’t stop there, He made it a whole lot harder. If not harder to understand, certainly harder to live out.
Because when he looks in the eyes of those who are suffering, including those he has just healed, what he tells them, is “Give more. Do more.” Yes, the world they live in is unjust, but still he says, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” I don’t know of any more clear and more challenging words in all of scripture. That’s probably intentional. If the words were more opaque, we humans would find a way around them. But just in case we were tempted to do so, Jesus adds some examples, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.” Give more. Do more.
This message of loving our enemies isn’t just a message of how we are to feel, with all the examples that Jesus gives, it is clearly a message of how we are to act. Whether we suffer still, or we have been healed of our suffering, the call Jesus gives us is the same, love even those who are responsible for our suffering. In this world, that could mean a lot of things, and thinking of “love your enemy” in the context of any of them can make us uncomfortable: things such as economic injustice, racial injustice, family conflict, gun violence, war. We should be careful that we consider what Jesus’ words mean for us personally, but we don’t presume what they mean for others. We should never be in the place of telling victims how to respond to those who have harmed them, there is far too long a history of words like this being used to preserve an unjust system, to minimize harm, to escape the kind of judgment that Jesus is clearly making in the Sermon on the Plain.
Yet, for ourselves, Jesus is telling us that we should always, when we have been harmed, act out of love. Jesus makes clear, there is no revenge in God’s Kingdom, no striking back, no retribution, there is only mercy, only love. Just like the 12 apostles, we who follow Jesus are called to be like him, to build the Kingdom of God, to offer mercy, to love our enemy. This can be such a difficult message to contemplate, that hearing these words, we might be tempted to go back to the text, read it again, wondering, “is this really what Jesus said?” I must warn you, if you are tempted to do that, it doesn’t get any easier. A few verses on from where we left off today, in Luke 6:35, Jesus again says, “But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. It isn’t enough for us to love those who are easy to love. If we are to be like Jesus, we must give more, do more.
The contrast of the Sermon on the Plain, the juxtaposition of Jesus’ judgment of what is clearly wrong and his call to love those who do wrong, is a balance that we Christians have struggled with since Jesus first preached these words. We can be far too comfortable with the judgment side of his message, and when I look around me these days, I don’t see a whole lot of “love your enemy.” On the one hand, we might say that this message of mercy and love that has been preached for centuries doesn’t seem to be breaking through. And yet, what we are celebrating today is the reality that it does just that. It does break through. Any book of saints could give us near daily examples of those who have made extraordinary choices to live out their faith in acts of love and mercy. It may not be the response of the majority in the world, and no one gets it right every time, but it has been the work of our communion of saints.
This is what we celebrate today. Unlike those who joined Jesus on the plain and heard his words for the first time, we are blessed to have centuries of examples to follow. As we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, we remember their lives and we give thanks for all those in our lives who have shown us what it means to follow Jesus. If we have been blessed to see this up close in the people who have played the role of saints in our own lives, we have probably noticed that living a life of discipleship isn’t only about the choices we make in an extraordinary moment, it’s also about the choices we make every day. So, let’s do more than remember and celebrate the saints today, let’s also be inspired by them, living our lives one choice at a time, to act in mercy and love until we also are transformed as we bring about the Kingdom of God. Amen.
About this image: Based on actual interviews, the Global Refugee Mural tells the story of three refugees who live in Maryland. Donation by photographer Anne Richardson. Attribution: Bergner, Joel. Global Refugee Mural, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56930 [retrieved November 4, 2025]. Original source: Joel Bernger, https://joelartista.com/about/.