All Saints Sunday

Wisdom 3:1-9; Psalm 24; Rev 21:1-6a; John 11:32-34

The Rev’d Dr. Deborah Meister, ODM

In 1941, a young Dutchwoman named Etty Hillesum began to write a journal, probably at the prompting of her therapist. During the next two years, Etty’s interior life became increasingly deep and rich, even as her external life was increasingly circumscribed by Nazi restrictions upon Jews. Confined to a neighborhood, then to a home, then, finally, to the Westerbork transit camp, from which people were sent on to Auschwitz, Etty leaned into the Gospels as well as her own heritage, seeking to respond to the dehumanization around her by cultivating a deeper and more active compassion. Early in those pages, she wrote, “I will have to dare to live life with all the seriousness it demands.” (An Interrupted Life, 40) She probably meant, by becoming an intellectual, but what she became was something like a saint, a person who spent her time in Westerbork sharing food with those even hungrier than she and tending the sick before they entered their final cattle car. A woman who could write, toward the end, “I have broken my body like bread and shared it out among men. And why not, they were hungry.” (Ibid, 230) And why not, they were hungry.

What even is a saint? Today the term gets tossed around too easily, like a piece of debased coinage. “He’s a saint,” we say, when someone washes our laundry for us, or helps us our in a pinch, or brings us a loaf of bread when we are isolating with Covid. Or we veer to the other extreme: put saints in stained-glass windows and pretend they are superhuman, far more than we could ever be. The first instance cheapens the title, making sainthood into something like “being a nice person” — as if being nice were something extraordinary. The second denatures it by removing the humanity from it entirely. We allow ourselves to imagine that these people were Not Like Us, when the truth is, they were exactly like us. Hiding that similarity is convenient; it lets us off the hook. It lets us pretend that we could never shed the kind of light they did, when shedding light — Christ’s light — is exactly what we were made to do. Not by our own strength, but by the presence of Christ in us.

That’s what we celebrate today, on the Feast of All Saints: people who have been touched by Christ. Not people who rose above their humanity, but people who lived into it, taking the daring risk of spiritual awareness and moral responsibility which is our true human nature. From the beginning, we were meant to be rooted in God and to live in the freedom of Christ. But because our world is threaded through with sin, because we have been raised in imperfection, we have each become imperfect in love. That’s why we tell stories about Eden, I think: because we sense that there is a primal peace and unity which ought to exist, but which is missing from our lives. That’s why we need Christ.

Imagine, for moment, that you’ve gone down to Krispy Kreme and bought yourself a jelly doughnut. Hold it in your hands, smell it in anticipation, bite into it — and suddenly, there is no jelly! What even?! Clearly, you should have gone to Tim Hortons! And, what are you actually holding? Can a doughnut without jelly be a jelly doughnut? Or has it become something less, something other? Something vaguely disappointing… Even so, we were made to be filled with God, and if we lack that deep connection with Christ, we are empty vessels, less than what we were made to be.

St. Athanasius taught us that God became human so that we might become divine. It’s audacious! When human nature had been emptied of its primal goodness, God took on mortal flesh and blood, joining our human nature back into God’s own nature, healing us and reconnecting us to the springs of life. That’s what we receive when we are baptized: reconnection to the life of God. It’s why, in the early church, any baptized believer was called a saint: because the great transforming power in our life comes from God, and not from ourselves.

And while that’s true, it’s up to us to receive the gift. Not just to take it and put it on a shelf and admire the wrapping paper, but really to receive it: to unwrap it and use it and consume it until it is battered and dog-eared like a well-loved book, and we have become beautiful in its place. The great saints are not people who led peaceful lives, but people who wrestled and struggled and failed and lay in the dirt and wept and complained and shook their fists and tried again, over and over, pressing against their own smallness and lack of love until they were able to allow Christ to be born in them and to grow.

There’s an old saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”; in hard times, times like ours, we are called to go deep. To be intentional about cultivating our spirit. People who are not formed are easily manipulated by power or caught up in the emotional movements of those around them. Those who have dug deep are able to live in moral freedom and to be rooted in Christ. Read the Bible; read the biographies of saints. Make time for prayer. Think deeply. Do what is right. Sing, even when you  are frightened; especially when you are frightened.  Give thanks in all things. (Col 3:16-17, paraphrase) That’s what it means not just to go to church, but to be the church.

Behind the ravages of our own time lies a great and appalling lack of spiritual integrity. Within each Israeli soldier who is dropping bombs on starving and desperate people, within each Palestinian who thought it was just fine to rape and dismember women and children, within each Russian “re-educating” Ukrainian children to believe that their homeland and family do not exist — within each of them is a great void where their humanity ought to be crying out. Within each corporate bigwig, seeking to grow rich at the cost of environmental devastation, or buying up housing and raising rents with no thought to the people who need a place to live, within each billionaire trying to buy power or to corrupt elections, there is a stunning silence where conscience ought to be. What this world needs is not more policies, although some would certainly help. What it needs is more saints — people who have had the courage to grow into spiritual maturity, to heed their conscience even when its voice is stern, to release old resentments and forgive their enemies and cherish the vulnerable until the space within them is able to hold the face of Love.

That is the goal of our lives as Christians: to be rich in love. Not rich like grandma, feeding us pancakes on Christmas morning (lovely though that is!), but rich like Greta Thunberg or Desmond Tutu— so rich in love that we refuse to tolerate anything less.

To love that deeply, to see courageously the wreckage around us and still to do what we can, to refuse to relinquish hope — that kind of maturity comes with a cost. It is far easier to tune out, to open Netflix, to eat too much chocolate — and we all need times of refreshment! But each of us can “dare to live life with the seriousness it demands” — which is to say, to receive it as God’s gift, to live it with thankfulness, to cherish its beauty, and not to turn away when our hearts are breaking.  Etty Hillesum captured that entwining of awe and heartbreak when she wrote from Westerbork, two months before boarding her own final cattle car “The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining in my face — and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension.” (8 June, 1943)

It is beyond our comprehension, although we are living it — but not beyond the comprehension of God. The God whom we love, the God who has redeemed us, is the God who has gone to the Cross. The One who has stood at the center of the raging storm, who has taken in our hatred, our indifference, our carelessness, our fear, all the cries of all the hurting and desperate peoples of the world — taken them into his heart and held them there until they have been transformed by love. Holding them in darkness like a tomb until we are ready to unbind them and let them go.

That’s what redemption means: not that it doesn’t matter if we do terrible things, but that it matters supremely — matters so much that God took them into himself so that they would not have the final word. And if we cannot imagine what that might look like, that’s OK.  Beyond a certain point, we’re not supposed to understand. In theological terms, God is “incomprehensible,” which is to say, God is so much greater than our understanding that we can only take in the briefest glimpses of his goodness and power. But the flip side is that God comprehends everything; all is contained within God’s love.

And so are we, my friends; so are we. That’s the truth we are called to live: that we and all others are held in God’s love. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” (The Fellowship of the Ring) To love, even through our grief; to cherish what is beautiful even as darkness surrounds it; to put a little love into a world that needs so much: those are the actions that make someone a saint, and each of them is a mirror of what God has already done in us.  St. John writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (I John 3:2) Until then, hold your candle high.