November 2nd ~ Remembering Wise and Loving Saints, With Wise and Loving Actions

Click above to listen to a recording of Sunday's Sermon

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18

Psalm 149

Ephesians 1:11-23

Luke 6:20-31

Sermon by Pastor Joel

If you are present in my house these days, you hear a lot of happy news. This is the side benefit of living with The Globe and Mail’s happiness reporter. But there is also a lot of talk about the state and definition of happiness. And on that front, Canada isn’t doing all that well. In the most recent standings in The World Happiness Report, we had a poor report, falling out of the top ten and placing 18th out of 134 countries. The World Happiness Report is based on an international survey that asks people around the world about trust, and community, and life satisfaction. But when you slice the numbers a different way, you suddenly see what’s driving that unhappiness. If you count only Canadians over 65, the country jumps right back up to 6th place. If you count only those under 30, we slide all the way down to 58th. And when researchers looked at how much happiness had changed among Canadian young people, we tumbled almost to the very bottom.

Young people are having a hard time, and we can see it. In our kids, trying to figure out what to study with AI. Or sending off resumes and never hearing anything back. Or not being able to afford a house. This week, I read about a new study that found one million Canadians now experience climate anxiety so severely they have trouble getting through their day – and anxiety at any level is highest among young people.

And yet, if you read the comments on The Globe story about unhappy findings, you will see all kinds of readers suggesting that young people are babies, or that everybody has it hard, or that, even more inexplicably, climate change does not exist. Scattered throughout are occasional notes of compassion. But the tone overall is nitpicking, defensive, and judgemental.

Is that anything like what we hear from Jesus today? I don’t want to be a downer – and this will turn around by the end, I promise you. But today is All Saints Sunday, when we remember the loved ones who died and what they mean to us and what we learned from them. The lessons I hold dear from the people I remember today are compassion, curiosity, and other-centredness. These were the people who reminded me that I wasn’t alone, that God loved me, that people loved me, and that community was the essence of life. If you are grieving today for someone in your life who died, I hope you are finding your laughter, as Jesus suggests, in the stories of those happy, comforting lessons.

Do we talk about those lessons enough? Do we remind ourselves of them when we need to? Jesus teaches us today that life is full of emotions that flip from one day to the next, that good fortune can follow bad, that pleasure can follow pain, and vice versa. Those who think they are on the top can fall to the bottom, and those at the bottom may find themselves at the top. Our enemies may suffer. They may also, with kindness, become our friends.

The inevitable fluctuations of life are not meant to frighten us. They are meant to bring us together, to reassure and unite us. Change comes for better or worse, and we get through it. We don’t lose the emotion that came before: it becomes part of us. We don’t grieve and then stop; that grief become part of who we are, how we feel and see the rest of life. To do that we need one another, to listen to and comfort us, to provide a deeper understanding, and to help us work through the more difficult moments of life. The neighbors of a community need this from one another. So do the citizens of a country, the members of generations.

And so collective unhappiness is a collective responsibility. We all share in it; we are all affected by it. The community of the wise and loving saints we remember today must be reflected here in wise and loving actions here – otherwise what is the point of remembering them at all?

In today’s gospel, Jesus, who loved a good parable, leaves us some of his most specific instructions: Love your enemy. Pray for those who hurt you. Turn the other cheek. Those ones are pretty tough. But even harder, perhaps are the next on the list: to be giving to anyone who asks, and most memorably, to do for others what you would want them to do for you.

This statement isn’t perfect, but it’s a good guide. If we are struggling and afraid of the future, what would we want to hear from our elders? I doubt judgement is high on that list. If we are old, and need help, what would we want to hear from those younger? I doubt scorn is up there. We would want to be loved, to look for a deeper understanding together, to see ourselves as one community.

We can start with what we want, but we cannot assume that the other person wants what we would want. A Boomer may not know what a Gen Z needs, if they have forgotten the memory of being 20. And a 20-something may not recognize the true needs of their grandparents, having never been old. That is where we must talk and ask questions and create community from a place of curiosity. Every person I remember today, whose wisdom I still seek even though they are no longer with me in the same way, taught me the power of a curious community. One day we will all be joined together. But until that day, let us be that community living with lives of complexity, with all the changing emotions, treating others as we want to be treated and then asking them what they need—seeing happiness not as an individual goal but as a collective one. I hope you have a wise Saint or two stored in your heart and saved in your memory, to guide you. Amen