Monday, November 22, 2010

How God Reigns (sermon for Christ the King Sunday, November 21, 2010)

Luke 23:33-43

One of the things many Christians find challenging about the different books of the Bible and especially about the gospels, is that at times they completely contradict each other. So if we are supposed to believe, as many of us were taught, that the Bible is true, then how do we reconcile these differences?

One way is to try and figure out why a particular author chose to present a particular episode in a particular way. What is the author trying to tell us with the details he or she includes?

We have spent quite a bit of time over the last months in the gospel of Luke. This is a gospel that has a lot in common with both Matthew and Mark, but with distinct differences. For one thing, time and time again, Luke’s gospel shows Jesus interacting with people on the margins: the poor, the outcast, women, children, tax collectors, refugees. Not only does Jesus interact with them, he heals them, forgives them, socializes with them, and tells parables in which they come out on top. Luke also talks about repentance more than any of the other gospels. Many of the beloved parables that are unique to the gospel of Luke -- the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the lost sheep and the lost coin -- Jesus tells to make a point about how important it is to repent, or turn back to God.

Today, on this last Sunday of the church year, also known as “Christ the King” Sunday, our reading is Luke’s version of the crucifixion, and again, his version is different from Matthew, Mark, and John’s versions in ways that reveal to us just what kind of king Luke understands Jesus to be.

The first thing that happens when Jesus is nailed to the cross is that he asks God to forgive his executioners: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing.” Jesus asking God’s forgiveness even for those who participate in his torture and murder emphasizes Luke’s claim throughout this gospel that God willingly and sometimes even foolishly forgives the most wayward of God’s children.

Then we have three different characters challenging Jesus to “save himself.” First “the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God!’” Then, “the soldiers also mocked him...saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’” And finally, one of the criminals being crucified with him “kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’”

If we had read Luke’s gospel straight through, it might occur to us that these three challenges to Jesus to save himself and prove that he is God’s Messiah echo the three challenges Jesus faced from Satan at the very beginning of his ministry. After his baptism, Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness, where Satan challenges him three times to prove that he is indeed God’s son.

So from the beginning of Luke’s account of the life and ministry of Jesus, Satan and others have pressured Jesus to prove that he is the Messiah, God’s anointed one. Can we blame them? If we were God’s chosen people, continually oppressed and persecuted but convinced that one day, the Messiah would come and overthrow our oppressors, wouldn’t we also find this Jesus confusing? Because Jesus acts as if he is powerless in the face of the injustice being done to him. As one commentator says, “how can we receive a Messiah who does not act like a Messiah? How can you see salvation if no one is being saved?”

How can a king that forgives his oppressors and does nothing to save himself from destruction save anyone? For many of us who have dealt with what God is unable to do in the face of suffering, sickness, or death, we may have wondered the same thing. If God is so powerful, then why didn’t God save my loved one, fix my relationship, or give me the one thing I wanted the most? Where was God’s power when I needed saving? It’s a good question to ask how this kind of king can possibly save the world. It’s a good question, but it’s the wrong one.

The question we should be asking is not ‘how’, but ‘what’. What is Luke trying to tell us about our salvation? What is the message behind the story of a Messiah who suffers and dies? (1)

Galileo was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Perhaps his greatest contribution to this revolution was providing proof through the powerful telescopes he built that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe, around which other celestial bodies (including the earth) orbited.

Many people in Galileo’s day simply refused to accept this theory, not the least the authorities of the Catholic Church, who denounced Galileo’s view as “false and contrary to Scripture.” To anyone who challenged him, whose imagination refused to admit that Galileo’s theory could be true, Galileo would offer an opportunity to look through the telescope and see for themselves what he had seen. But most of those who disagreed with him not only refused to admit that he might be right, they refused to even look through his telescope! They suffered from a total lack of imagination and they were paralyzed by fear. They were simply too afraid that changing their understanding of the universe might change everything they knew about the world and their place in it.

The salvation we long for is real, but it is not what we imagined it to be. What we discover about Jesus at his crucifixion defies our expectations and forces us to imagine the unimaginable, because if this Jesus, this forgiving, parable-telling, outcast-loving, dying Jesus is the heir to God’s kingdom, then that kingdom must look completely different than what we expected. In this kingdom God loves, forgives, and saves everyone, everyone -- even a convicted criminal -- not with power and might and force, but by coming alongside us and being with us, in all the pain and suffering and confusion and wonder of our human lives.

The problem is, once we look through that telescope, once we allow ourselves to glimpse who this Jesus is and what he reveals about God, things will never be the same again. Not only are we forced to re-imagine who God is and what God’s kingdom looks like, we cannot help but recognize that our role in this kingdom is totally different than we imagined it, for we are not just the ones saved but also the ones called to share the good news of salvation with others. And God calls us to fulfill this role not someday in some heavenly realm, but right here and now. Like the thief who proclaimed that Jesus was indeed innocent, God calls us to join Christ in Paradise today by extending Christ’s love and grace to all people.

*****
Will Willimon was once the pastor of a small church in a dying neighborhood, which is to say that the people moving into the neighborhood were quite different than the people who had always attended that church. The church had long been losing members and so they decided it was time to embark on a new effort of evangelism. One Sunday after worship, a handful of brave souls gathered together, and Willimon specifically heard someone tell two elderly women, Sarah and Mary, to go down Summit, turn right, and then knock on the doors of the houses on that street.

A couple of hours later, after many discouraging conversations -- not to mention all the houses whose occupants refused to converse with the church members at all -- the band of evangelists returned to the church and shared their stories. People hadn’t answered their doors, others hadn’t wanted to talk about church, others already had a church home and weren’t interested in hearing about a new one.

Then, in walked Sarah and Mary, breathless and excited. “we went down Summit,” they said, “and then we turned left and then we started knocking on doors.”

“Wait a minute,” Willimon interrupted. “You were supposed to go down Summit and then turn right, not left.” “Yeah,” someone else chimed in, “you weren’t supposed to go into that neighborhood. That’s the projects!”

“Well, anyway,” Mary and Sarah went on, “there were lots of people who didn’t answer the doors or who weren’t interested, but there was this one lady -- Verlene. She came to the door and she had two little kids and we told her about our church and she said she was just desperate and we told her that was just the kind of person we needed at our church! We invited her to come to the Wednesday morning Ladies’ Bible study!” Mary and Sarah were beaming, but everyone else looked skeptical.

“What about the kids?” someone asked. “We told her to bring them,” they said. “We said we’d provide childcare.”

And sure enough, on Wednesday morning, Verlene showed up at the church, kids in tow. The Bible study that day was about temptation and after they had read the passage, Willimon asked the women to share about a time they had faced temptation. At first, no one spoke. Then one lady told about going to the grocery store the day before and discovering in the parking lot that she had a loaf of bread in her bag she hadn’t paid for. “At first I wasn’t going to do anything about it,” she said. “I mean, really, is one loaf of bread going to make or break that big store? But I knew I had to do the right thing, so I went back and returned it.”

Everyone around the table nodded their approval. Then Verlene spoke up. “Well, there was this one time,” she started. “I was living with this guy, not the father of my second child, but the man before that, and we were doing a lot of coke, you know, and that stuff if really messes with your head, and one day we needed some cash, and he talked me into robbing this little service station. And we went in and he put a gun to the man’s head and we made out with about $200...easy as taking candy from a baby. But something about it just didn’t feel right to me. Then a few weeks later, he came up with another plan to rob a convenience store. And I thought about it and I just couldn’t do it. I told him no, I’m not going to do it. And he beat me the hell out of me. But that was the first time in my life I said no to anybody, about anything. It was the first time in my life I felt like somebody.”

And Willimon said, “Oh, okay, well, I think it’s time for us to pray now.”

Later, in the parking lot, Mary said to Willimon, “Wow, your Bible study just got a whole lot more interesting. I’m going to go home and get on the phone, because I think I can get a crowd there. I mean, this is good, this is good stuff.”

Willimon said, “Look, you were told to go down Summit and turn right, not left!”
And Mary said, “Preacher, I am as bored with this church as you are. I think Verlene was sent to us by God to remind us what the gospel is really about. I believe I can get a crowd for this.” (2)

God’s reign defies our expectations time and time again...in the Bible, in the church, in our own lives. Right up until the end, when he is hanging on a cross, when he is suffering an agonizing death, Jesus is showing us that how God reigns changes everything. It forces us to see things we refused to believe could be true...that the meek and the lowly might in fact be the very ones who reveal God to us...that admitting when we were wrong might be the very moment we receive the blessing of forgiveness...that even in this dark and hurting world we ordinary people can reach out to each other and in doing so bring the kingdom of God -- Paradise indeed! -- even here, even now, today. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Thanks to the Rev. Derek Starr Redwine for his thoughts on how it helps to reframe the question from “how” to “what”.
2. Will Willimon tells this story in the sermon “A Little Yeast,” which he delivered on July 23, 2010 at the Lakeside, Ohio Chautauqua community. Listen to or download it here.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Fumbling for Flashlights (sermon, November 14, 2010)

Luke 21:5-19

One Saturday morning, the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor visited a colleague at his church. After looking at the newly renovated fellowship hall, her colleague led her to the sanctuary, where she noticed something strange on the communion table: a fat white candle sitting in a dish with rusted barbed wire climbing the air around it. “What is that?” she asked, thinking maybe it had something to do with the church’s prison ministry. “It’s a symbol I came across that really spoke to me,” her colleague said as he reached over and gently touched one of the steel barbs. “See, the light has already come into the world, but there is still work to be done. There is still darkness between us and the light.” (1)

There is still darkness between us and the light. This time of year, we begin to experience this truth in a very present way, as Daylight Savings Time ends and the days grow shorter and shorter from now until late December. It is an accident of our location in the world that this time of increasing darkness also corresponds both with the very end and the very beginning of the church year.

Today is the second to last Sunday in the church year. Now, I know that very few of us really live our lives according to the church calendar. We tend to mark time by the change of seasons or the cycles of the school year or which sports season it is or the dates on the calendar. Nothing is wrong with any of these ways of keeping time, of course; it’s only natural that the things that dominate our daily lives are the ones by which we keep track of time’s passage. But the church calendar is important because it focuses on the life of Christ and by doing so it helps us to focus on what it means to be Christ’s followers.

As we move toward the end of the church year, we continue our travels in the gospel of Luke, which we have moved through for much of the summer and fall. For the past few months in our readings, Jesus has been traveling toward Jerusalem, which is to say he has been moving closer and closer to the place and time of his trial and his death, closer and closer to the darkest days that he and his disciples will face.

But when Jesus and his disciples first arrive in Jerusalem, they aren’t focused on darkness. What catches the disciples’ eye is the magnificent temple built by Herod Antipas. During his reign over Jerusalem, King Herod tore down the existing temple and undertook a massive renovation and reconstruction project, one of the largest construction projects of the first century. The completed temple was a sight to behold, and the disciples are in awe of its beauty and majesty, as was anyone who had the chance to see it.

Anyone, that is, except Jesus. His perspective on the temple is different: “Don’t put your faith in these things that seem so amazing now,” he tells the gawking disciples. “They aren’t going to last.”

Such a prediction would have been unthinkable, even laughable, at the time. The temple had taken decades to build, in part because it was not made of local stone but of imported white marble that gleamed in the daylight and made the whole complex even more magnificent. As the disciples stood there admiring it, they simply could not have fathomed that those marble stones would soon be reduced to a pile of rubble.

The disciples couldn’t have imagined it, but the first people to hear Luke’s gospel knew otherwise. Less than ten years after it was finally completed, the temple was destroyed in the devastating Siege of Jerusalem. In contrast to the disciples, Luke’s original audience might actually have been relieved to hear Jesus predict that the temple would fall, because they had personally experienced it. They had lived the truth that there is still darkness between us and the light.

Luke’s Jesus doesn’t stop with the temple, either, when he begins to speak of destruction and suffering. He goes on to predict that there will be false prophets, wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues...and then Jesus takes it a step further. Because the dark times ahead are going to get personal. The disciples themselves will be arrested and persecuted and brought to trial, all because of their association with Jesus. They will be abandoned, betrayed by those closest to them; some of them will even die. All in all, it’s not a ringing endorsement of discipleship. The way Jesus describes it, discipleship is a state in which we are constantly reminded that there is still darkness between us and the light, and the darkness often seems like more than could ever be overcome; more like a blackout curtain than barbed wire.

Surely Luke’s first readers weren’t the only ones for whom Jesus’ words rang true: after all, haven’t we experienced it too? There seems to be no shortage of events in the world that make us wonder: is this how the world is going to end? 9-11. The earthquake in 2004 that triggered a tsunami which decimated Indonesia and killed more than 200,000 people across 15 different countries. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. H1N1. The Gulf Coast oil spill. If we were trying to predict the end of the world, there are no shortage of signs that could point to it.

Add to those events all the ways the world ends for individuals every day as their personal temples, the ones they thought could never fall, crumble: the death of a child, the diagnosis of disease, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a job, the devastation of addiction. Whether these things happen to us personally or to someone we know, we are constantly reminded: there is still darkness between and the light.

We find our attention riveted to such things in the same way the disciples were riveted by the sight of Herod’s temple. Whether it is something so magnificent or so terrifying that we can’t turn away, the point is, we get sucked in to these global and personal events. We become consumed by them, whether by grief of fear or amazement. And when that happens we risk forgetting who we are, we risk focusing on the darkness, and fearing that the light itself no longer exists.

“Things are not as they seem,” Jesus tells his followers. “Be careful that the false prophets and the natural disasters and the personal trials don’t distract you from what is real.” Instead, Jesus promises, all of these things, these dark moments when temples crumble, are, in fact, opportunities to testify...to testify that even when it looks otherwise -- perhaps especially when it looks otherwise -- the light is still there. God is still with us.

Now when Jesus speaks to his disciples about testifying, he means it literally, for many of the original followers of Jesus would indeed be arrested, persecuted, and handed over to authorities. The trials we face will probably look very different from this, but they are no less challenging. And what Jesus says to the disciples is true for us to: in our darkest moments, no matter how bleak things may seem, we can cling to the truth that God is with us, that Jesus himself is giving us words and wisdom to endure, that ultimately, in some sense, not a head of our heads will perish. We can testify to the light.

One problem with this word “testify,” though, is that for most of us it implies using words, and, as any of us who have experienced times of deep suffering know, at those times, words can often do more harm than good. Just as Jesus advises the disciples against trying to read signs and make predictions, so we should avoid trying to figuring out exactly what God might be trying to teach us through various events. Darkness and suffering are simply a part of life, every life. Even the most carefully constructed temples we have built may unexpectedly fall. And when they do we do not need anyone to explain the meaning of the darkness to us. What we need is for someone to point past the darkness to the light.

Pedro’s life was full of persecutions and dreadful portents. As a young kid, caught in gang life on the streets of LA, Pedro was filled with rage and resentment that he covered up with heavy drinking and eventually an addiction to crack cocaine.

Whenever Father Boyle saw Pedro on the streets he would offer to take him to rehab, but every time Pedro would gently decline. “Thanks, G, but I’m okay.”

Well, one day, Pedro changed his answer and got in the car with Father Boyle and began his long, hard journey of returning to himself.

Thirty days into Pedro’s rehab his younger brother, caught up in similar demons, did the unthinkable. He took his own life. The world around him was just too much to handle. When Father Boyle called Pedro with the news, of course, Pedro was devastated, but now that he was thirty days sober and thinking with a clear head and feeling with a clear heart he allowed the pain to settle into his core, instead of putting it in some corner to fester.

When Father Boyle arrived at the rehab center to take Pedro to the funeral, they didn’t speak. Before Father Boyle can figure out what to say, the silence was punctured by Pedro’s intense retelling of a dream he had the night before.

In the dream, Pedro and Father Boyle are in a large empty room, alone. There are no lights, no illuminated exit signs, no light creeping in from under a door. There are no windows. It is complete, total darkness.

But despite the darkness, Pedro knows that Father Boyle is there in the room with him, even though no words are spoken. Suddenly, in the dark silence, Father Boyle retrieves a flashlight from his pocket and turns it on. Slowly, deliberately, he shines the flashlight around the room until its narrow beam illuminates a light switch on the wall. No words are spoken, no explanation offered, no promise of a better tomorrow, just a beam of light revealing a switch on the wall.

Pedro stands up, realizing that he is the one who has to turn on the light. Slowly, with some trepidation, he makes his way to the switch, takes a deep breath, and flips it on. The room is flooded with light.

At this point in the retelling of is dream, Pedro is sobbing. With a voice of astonishing discovery, he said, “And the light...is better...than the darkness.” As if he did not know this before. Then he said, “I guess my brother....just never found the switch.”

Father Boyle concludes this story with this: “Possessing flashlights and occasionally knowing where to aim them has to be enough for us. Fortunately, none of us can save anybody. but we all find ourselves in this dark, windowless room, fumbling for grace and flashlights. You aim the light this time, and I’ll do it the next.” (2)

I can’t think of a more powerful way to testify to God’s presence with us than that. Amen.

1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine. Cowley Publications, 1995, p. 133.
2. Boyle, Gregory, Tattoos on the Heart, Free Press, 2010.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Who Are the Saints? (sermon for All Saints' Day, Nov. 7, 2010)

Luke 6:20-31
Ephesians 1:11-23

After all the Halloween festivities the past couple of weeks, not to mention the stores dedicated to Halloween merchandise that opened up all over town, I doubt any of us would be that surprised to hear that as a holiday, Halloween now ranks second in consumer spending, coming only after Christmas.

I read last week that some people think Halloween has become such a popular holiday because it is completely non-controversial and non-ideological. Lord knows, we could use a little of that in an election season! Think about it: people can celebrate Halloween without worrying that they are going to offend someone of a different race or religion. It’s a kind of “equal opportunity” holiday. My aunt, a kindergarten teacher, says that the week of Halloween is the most important week of the whole school year. “It’s the one holiday we’re still allowed to celebrate in a public school,” she said, and her school goes all-out with a whole week of events.

But is Halloween really a completely secular holiday? Originally, it began as an agricultural festival in ancient Celtic society called Samhain, which means “summer’s end.” This was the time of year when the sun’s ability to offer warmth and light and growth were decreasing, and the months of darkness and cold and frost were fast approaching. Samhain represented a time in-between -- between light and darkness, warmth and cold, life and death, this world and the next.

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that as Christianity spread across Europe and even, Samhain became tied to All Saints’ Day and was renamed All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween. All Saints’ Day is a time when we celebrate those who have died, a time when, in a sense, we the living, draw nearer to the dead. As All Saints’ Day approached, Halloween offered people an opportunity to come close to that which they often feared most: death and the powers of darkness.

In many ways, Halloween still allows people to do this. We live in a culture that is obsessed with security, that is terrified of death, and Halloween offers us the chance to face those fears head-on, if only for a night. But for Christians, there is the Sunday after Halloween, when we acknowledge that death will not have the final word, when we remember that ultimately, we have nothing to fear because we are God’s own. That is the day we celebrate today, All Saints’ Day. (1)

The challenge of this day, though, is that the very word “saint” is confusing. In the Catholic tradition, “saint” refers to someone who has been officially recognized by the Church because they were exceptionally virtuous in some way. This is not so different from the original idea of “saint” that inspired the early church celebration of All Saints’ Day. Back then there were still many who were martyrs for their faith, whose allegiance to Christ got them killed. But many of those martyred for the faith were unknown, their names were never recorded in the history books, and so All Saints’ Day was set aside to keep their memory, if not their names, alive.

In this tradition, sainthood was something that had to be earned through virtuous behavior.

There is an episode of the television show The Simpsons in which Homer Simpson dreams that he has died and gone to heaven. Just as he is about to pass through the pearly gates, Saint Peter stops him and says he hasn’t earned enough points to be admitted. But he has another chance: he can return to earth and do one good deed.

So Homer’s spirit goes back to his home, where he tells his wife Marge, “I have to do one good deed to get into heaven. Tell me what to do.” Marge says, “There’s plenty of chores that need doing -- wash the dishes, mow the lawn, feed the dog.” “Geez,” Homer fumes, “I just want to enter Heaven, I’m not running for Jesus!”

The original idea of sainthood -- and the Catholic Church’s understanding of saints -- seems to be that there is a sense in which we can all “run for Jesus” and some will get further than others. But this conception of sainthood was challenged during the Reformation, which gave birth to the Presbyterian Church as well as other denominations we refer to as “Reformed”. The leaders of the Reformation put a renewed emphasis on God’s action and God’s grace. Human beings could not earn salvation through righteous living; rather, salvation is a gracious gift from our loving God that then inspires us to live -- or at least try to live -- according to God’s ways. At this point in history, the concept of sainthood in the Reformed tradition was expanded to include all those who had been baptized into the family of God, all those who had received God’s grace. So All Saints’ Day became a day to celebrate the sainthood of all believers, and particularly those who have already died and entered God’s kingdom.

Today we heard a portion of Paul’s letters to the Ephesians. Here he has taken on the monumental task of explaining what Christians gain through their faith in Jesus Christ. First he reminds his readers of the big picture: when we heard the gospel and believed it we were “marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” This is what we celebrate in baptism, that our primary identity in life is that we are God’s beloved children. But even more than that, when we are grafted into the family of God it means that each one of us, no matter what our background or family identity -- has a share in what Paul calls “the riches of [Christ’s] glorious inheritance.” And Paul describes these riches in amazing terms: Christ, seated at God’s right hand in heaven, above all the other authorities and power, with all things under his feet...I don’t know about you, but in our current political climate what a relief it is to remember that Christ’s authority completely surpasses all human authority.

Still, I’m not sure that this passage gives a crystal clear answer to this question of who are the saints. One of my colleagues put it this way in an email to his church about All Saints’ Day: “the saints of my life are literally those I could not live without.” The writer Frederick Beuchner refers to lines in his prayer book that talk about “the Angels and Archangles and all the company of heaven” and says that “‘all the company of heaven’ means everybody we ever loved and lost, including the ones we didn’t know we loved until we lost them or didn’t love at all. It means people we never heard of. It means everybody who ever did -- or at some unimaginable time in the future ever will -- come together at something like this table in search of something like what is offered at it.” (2) I think that explanation is exquisite, but I confess I still find it hard to wrap my head around.

Nicholas Kristoff is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and a veteran reporter who has traveled and lived all over the world. At the height of the terrible conflict in Darfur, he traveled to that region multiple times and wrote impassioned columns about what he saw there: mass violence, people driven from their homes, children massacred, women raped...but it seemed as though no matter what he wrote his columns didn’t seem to make an impact, they just disappeared without a ripple. At about that same time, there was a red-tailed hawk in New York City that was essentially evicted from its home atop an apartment building. It seemed the entire city was infuriated that this hawk had been forced from its home. Why, Kristoff wondered, why wasn’t there the same level of outrage for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Darfur as for this homeless bird?

That’s when Kristoff came across a series of studies by Paul Slovic. In these experiments, people were shown a picture of a starving girl named Rokia and given the opportunity to donate to her cause. Others were shown a picture of a starving boy named Moussa and had the opportunity to help him by donating money. Both groups responded generously and compassionately to the photographs of the individual children. But when a third group was shown one picture with the image of Rokia and Moussa together and asked to donate, their giving significantly decreased. (3)

For us to respond compassionately to those in need, we need to feel an emotional connection. And statistics, numbers, and other rational arguments just don’t do a good job of tugging at the heartstrings. Instead, they create something in us known as “compassion fatigue” -- we all know what that feels like, when the destruction and death and violence just overwhelms us and we can’t take it in. Well, it turns out that the number at which we begin to show compassion fatigue is when the number of victims goes from one to two. Show us one person in need and we will respond with compassion; but show us two and our compassion and generosity begins to wane.

So today, before we get overwhelmed with the concept of “all saints,” may we need to stop for a moment and think of that one person who defines “saint” for us. Maybe this person is a saint because we simply could not imagine our lives without them. Maybe it’s because through their actions they showed us what it means to live out the gospel, to share in that glorious inheritance that Paul writes about. As I wrote this sermon I kept thinking about the members of this community who died in the past year, Glenna Duncan, Estella Plaster, and Cristle Roney, and how their lives taught so many people the true meaning of love and sacrifice and service.

But maybe the person who defines a “saint” for you is entirely different. Maybe it’s someone that you struggle to love or even to like. Yet you know they are a saint because what matters is not whether they have earned your love and admiration, but that God loves them and extends the same glorious inheritance to them as God does to all God’s children. After all, in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus makes very clear that God blesses, not just those we like and can relate to, but the poor, the hungry, and the suffering. In a fractured and divided world, we need to remember these people as well, and remember that they too are the saints, whether we can see it or not.

No matter whom you think of today, no matter whom you remember as a saint, may you start with that one person, and may that memory spark the emotional connection that inspires you to respond compassionately to all people, for truly we are all the saints of God, moving forward on this journey that leads, not just to death, but to a place where someday, somehow, we will gather with all the saints around a table, guests of the One who lived and died and rose and reigns for us all. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. I am indebted to Tom Long’s article “Halloween: The Killing Frost and the Gospel” in Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1, pp. 2-7 for these statistics and this interpretation of the relationship between Halloween and All Saints’ Day.
2. Both quotes in this paragraph are from an evotional by the Rev. Mark Ramsey at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC. Read it online here.
3. Kristoff told this story in an interview with Krista Tippett for her radio show “On Being.” Find the podcast here. Read a related article about Slovic’s research here.