Site icon Episcopal Church of St. Martin

“All Y’all”: Sermon by the Very Rev. Pamela Dolan 11/2/2025

gabe

Sermon on November 2, 2025
“All Y’all: A Sermon for All Saints”
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan

https://churchofstmartin.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025_11_02_AllSaintssermon.mp3

One of the best expressions I learned living in the almost-southern state of Missouri was “all y’all.” Being an English major to my core, my first instinct was to see it as redundant, because I assumed that y’all was already a plural form of you. I was wrong about that, at least as far as colloquial usage goes, but I was also missing the larger point.

The phrase all y’all is not just a way to remove ambiguity from the language. All y’all is an attitude. It is expansive, invitational, aspirational, profligate. It means that when we say ALL are welcome, we mean ALL. It’s like throwing your arms open wide, like buying a round for the whole bar, like asking everyone to come to your house for the afterparty. When someone says all y’all they sound like the kind of person who has never met a stranger, who is ready to put the kettle on and pull up an extra chair at the kitchen table, just because you happened by.

I love celebrating All Saints Sunday as an all y’all kind of feast day. Technically, we should have had a service yesterday, celebrating the official saints, the ones who have dates on our liturgical calendar, and then another service today commemorating All Souls, or the Feast of All Faithful Departed. I love all of these different celebrations and commemorations, but I’m also perfectly happy with this kind of mishmash of multiple festivities when we put them all together on the Sunday following, as we do today. We’re celebrating ALL the saints today, however you define “saint” and whatever that celebration means to you. We are remembering that saints come in all sorts, as the Irish might say. Some are achingly pious and some are kinda loony and some are scholars and some fought battles and some refused to fight at all. Probably the majority of the souls who make up the Communion of Saints were pretty unremarkable, at least on the outside, and not much noticed by the world. But you can bet that they were noticed, cherished, rejoiced over even, by God. All Saints is an all y’all kind of day.

Believe it or not, in today’s Gospel I think Jesus is having an all y’all moment. It doesn’t look like it at first. Rather, it looks like he’s separating the world into two kinds of people, those who are blessed and those who are not. But I’m not so sure. I think what he is proclaiming here is what he always proclaims: a message of good news, liberation, and radical inclusion. And it starts with his own location among us.

Most of us likely think of the Beatitudes, the blessings we hear in today’s Gospel, as part of the Sermon on the Mount, but that’s not exactly what we’re encountering here. Today’s version is from the Gospel of Luke, and it is sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain. Just briefly, there are two other primary differences between Luke’s version and Matthew’s version, in addition to the location. One is that Luke’s version has the section on “woes,” as we just heard; there is no parallel for these in the Gospel of Matthew. The other difference is that Luke is much more direct and practical: it’s blessed are you who are poor, not blessed are those who are poor in spirit; blessed are you who hunger now, not blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. That kind of thing.

But what I want us to focus on is the location of Jesus. A few verses earlier, Jesus went up on a mountain to pray, and it was there he named his 12 disciples from among his followers. That’s the context. Now, Jesus is standing on a level place, with a multitude of people around him. In fact, he seems to have gone down even lower than the disciples did, for the text tells us that he looked up at them before he began to speak.

This detail of location in Luke seems to me to break open the whole passage. Jesus is speaking from a place of solidarity, of community. Jesus is not standing over people, making pronouncements, talking down to us. Not at all! Rather, Jesus will go as far down into the depths as he has to go in order to reach us—all of us. When the words of our ancient creeds say that Jesus came down from heaven, or that he descended to the dead, it’s not necessary to think of those as literal cosmological directions and accept or reject them accordingly.

Instead, we can lean on the core belief of our faith, that Jesus is God among us, God as and with and for us. All of us. All y’all! Language of “coming down” or “descending” is meant to indicate that the barriers that separate us from God are being erased. So the incarnation is about that solidarity that sees us all as family, all as equally beloved. The passion and death of Jesus is about his identification and communion with all who suffer and die, which is all of humanity. And the baptism of Jesus is about showing us that Jesus would willingly go down into the chaos and confusion that is the worst of the human condition, so that we would never have to be alone there again.

Today we are blessed and delighted to welcome two young men into the household of God through baptism. This has profound implications for their lives, and because of how connected we all are, to the Church as a whole. As theologian Rowan Williams puts it, “So baptism means being with Jesus ‘in the depths’: the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need – but also in the depths of God’s love; in the depths where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be.”[i] I look forward to seeing more of us “in the depths” together, supporting Leighton and Julian in their new life in Christ.

When we recognize that the location of Jesus, down among us, frames the whole of these beatitudes and woes, then it becomes clear that they are not about what divides us, but about what unites us. They are about whether we can do what Jesus did and go down to the depths in order to be in solidarity with others. If we ourselves are not poor, are we using our wealth to separate us from those who suffer, or to help raise others out of poverty? Is our laughter caused by scorn and contempt, or is it a sign of true joy, laughter that invites others in?

Rather than tie ourselves up in knots trying to figure out how many boxes I can check, how blessed I currently am by this strange metric that Jesus uses—or conversely, how much trouble I might be in—what if we heard these lists of blessings and woes as being descriptive of the whole of humanity and refuse to see ourselves as separate from any of it? Jesus did that, after all. Jesus was celebrated as a king and executed as a criminal. Jesus ate and drank, often in ways that scandalized more scrupulous believers, and Jesus also knew hunger and physical suffering. Jesus wept and Jesus rejoiced. Anything can lead to woe if we use it to keep ourselves apart from others, if we rely on wealth or wellbeing instead of relying on God and one another. And anything can be a blessing if it helps us connect more deeply to God and one another, even in our vulnerability and need.

Again, Rowan Williams has said that Jesus is always in the neighborhood of those who are suffering, and that if we want to find Jesus we have to go to those neighborhoods, too. Jesus isn’t excluding anyone, God isn’t excluding anyone, we are. If we didn’t have structures of exclusion built into our every institution and nation and community, then there wouldn’t need to be two different lists, the list of blessings and the list of woes. If we didn’t live in a world where power and privilege too often lead to callous indifference and cruelty, there wouldn’t be two different lists. Jesus is standing among us, as one of us, asking us to help create a world in which we can say:

Blessed are you, for there is no more hunger.

Blessed are you, for there is no more war.

Blessed are you, for nobody is poor, or afraid, or alone.

Blessed are you. All of you. All y’all. Amen.

[i] This quote and the other references to Rowan Williams’ theology of baptism are from his book Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Eerdmans, 2014).

OTHER RECENT SERMONS

To see more sermons
Exit mobile version