Since all these things – heaven and earth – are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be? 

I recently heard a friend talk about how in the assigned lectionary texts, most weeks, there’s one sentence somewhere that really seizes his attention, demands reflection and response. 

In our lessons for the second Sunday in Advent this year, this is that sentence, for me. 

Since all things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be? 

I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. 

That’s the bit of Scripture that just occasionally floats to the top in my brain… not the much more familiar, and comforting!, beginning of Isaiah chapter 40: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…” 

Those words are the beginning of a portion of the Book of Isaiah – which is sixty-six chapters long! – that is sometimes called the Book of Consolation. It contains many prophecies of return and restoration, after the more catastrophic words of the preceding chapters.

But even the comfort of Isaiah 40 is nuanced. We read a few verses further and find the text telling us that all people are grass, short-lived, ephemeral, insignificant. And in practically the same breath the text talks about good tidings! Good news!

The grass withers, the flower fades; surely the people are grass.

Is that good news?… 

Have you noticed – have you felt – the fascination of abandoned places? Places where people, with all our busyness and plans, used to be, and aren’t, anymore? 

TikTok regularly shows me videos of people exploring a derelict hotel, school, or shopping mall. 

Now, I do watch those videos, and TikTok will show you more of something it thinks you like, but it’s not just me. 

Posts like that regularly get 300, 400, 500 thousand likes, sometimes more. 

Turning over to Instagram, a better platform for evocative still photography as well as video… 

Abandoned America is a photographic project by an artist named Matthew Christopher. He has 84,000 followers on Instagram. 

Another account with a similar theme, Deserted Places, brings together videos and photos from folks exploring abandoned places all over the world, and has 1.3 million followers… 

A third account called simply “itsabandoned” boasts “Beautiful abandoned places” for its 1.2 million followers. 

There are photos of a three-story gracious home in the woods, trees growing from a tower, the patio and steps swallowed by moss, ivy climbing the walls. 

A greenhouse, elegant with stained glass – who knows where? – is being slowly swallowed by vines that have broken their way in from outside, the floor carpeted with dead leaves. 

A bowling alley still has a ball and pins waiting for use, as the floor returns to earth, and ferns, moss, and trees grow in the dim daylight from broken windows. 

There’s always an extra fascination for me in images of abandoned churches – glass and stone gradually falling to earth, fragment by fragment; pews and prayerbooks gently decaying back to their component molecules… 

In these images, in these places, I feel some tantalizing stew of recognition of mortality, and a strange delight in seeing what man hath wrought fall to ruin, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

Five chapters before those famous words, “Comfort, comfort,” the book of Isaiah contains an evocative oracle of desolation.

Of Israel’s neighbor and enemy Edom, Chapter 34 says,

“From generation to generation it shall lie waste;
no one shall pass through it for ever and ever.
But the hawk^* and the hedgehog^* shall possess it;
the owl^* and the raven shall live in it…
They shall name it No Kingdom There,
and all its princes shall be nothing.
Thorns shall grow over its strongholds,
nettles and thistles in its fortresses.
It shall be the haunt of jackals,
an abode for ostriches.
Wildcats shall meet with hyenas,
goat-demons shall call to each other… 

There shall the owl nest
and lay and hatch and brood in its shadow;
there too the buzzards shall gather,
each one with its mate.”

This is a prophecy of doom for Israel’s enemies – one that echoes what happens to Jerusalem and Judea when they are conquered, ruined, and emptied out. 

But it’s also beautiful. 

I want to see those ruins, don’t you?

Overgrown by thorns and thistles, inhabited by owls and wildcats and hedgehogs…

A place of death become a place of vibrant life. 

Wilderness is different from apocalypse. 

That was last week’s theme. 

But wilderness may be what comes after. 

What’s left, when all the things we built and planned and expected and relied on have dissolved.

Today – as always on the second Sunday in Advent – the lectionary turns towards John the Baptist, who announces Jesus’ arrival and mission. 

John is a prophet, like all the Old Testament prophets before him. And John is, specifically, a wilderness prophet.  

He preaches in the wilderness; he dresses like the wilderness, in animal skins instead of decent woven cloth; he eats the wilderness, living on bugs and wild honey. 

Wilderness is an important kind of place, in Scripture.

It’s a place of chaos, danger, and clarity. 

A place of life and a place of death.

A place you run to, to escape human danger, and a place where you confront non-human danger: wildcats and jackals, lions and wolves, hunger and thirst, the harsh terrain itself. 

The wilderness is inhospitable at best, and hostile at worst.

And the wilderness in Scripture is a place where, again and again, people encounter the Holy.

We read this Isaiah text today because our Gospel text from Mark quotes it: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness…” 

Studying these texts this week, I realized something that I had somehow never noticed before. 

There is ambiguity in the text of Isaiah 40. 

Our translation, the New Revised Standard Version, says, ‘A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord…”’

But when Mark quotes the same text, the mysterious Voice is no longer just talking about the wilderness, it has become “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness…” 

Apparently this slight quirk of translation was part of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible that Mark would have known, called the Septuagint.

But a new translation of the Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter that I often consult renders the Isaiah verse the same way: A voice cries out in the wilderness… 

Whose voice is this, anyway, that cries out either about – or in – the wilderness? It’s not clear. A footnote in one of my scholarly Bibles notes, “The identity of the voice… has been deliberately left mysterious by the prophet.” (Jerusalem Bible) 

What the text does say plainly is that God’s presence will be found in the wilderness. 

So perhaps the voice is also in the wilderness… or even of the wilderness. 

It’s not a far-fetched thought! Just two chapters later, in Isaiah 42, Creation speaks: “Sing to the Lord a new song! Let the sea roar and all that fills it….let the desert and its towns lift up their voice!” 

An ecological lectionary commentary recently introduced me to the Earth Bible Project’s principles of ecology in Scripture, including the principle of voice: That Earth is a living entity capable of raising its voice in celebration and against injustice.

And the principal of resistance: Creation not only suffers from human injustices, but actively resists them. 

I immediately realized I had learned similar ideas in seminary from Ellen Davis, one of the greatest Old Testament scholars of our time. 

Walter Brueggeman – another one – talks about this stuff too. 

The idea that Creation or Earth has agency and a voice isn’t just 21st century ecological woo. 

These are assumptions that underlie much of Scripture. 

Where modern environmental science and ancient wisdom point us in the same direction, we should probably pay attention, and listen to the voice of Creation – or its component parts. 

Isaiah 40 hints that the wilderness that is speaking, here, is the dry and rocky near-desert that the Judean exiles would have had to cross to come home to Jerusalem from Babylon. 

But with Isaiah 34 close at hand, the wilderness that comes after civilization may well be in our minds too – those owl-haunted ruins and moss-eaten mansions… 

When the post-human wilderness tells us, Surely the people are grass, it speaks with particular authority. 

So what does the voice in, the voice of, the wilderness have to say, in Isaiah 40? 

Human life and accomplishments are temporary. Nothing lasts. 

God’s coming anyway. Take comfort. Get ready. 

Since all things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be? 

This past Tuesday I attended the Wisconsin Council of Churches annual meeting. British poet Jay Hulme was the keynote speaker. 

Our theme for the event was “chaplains to the apocalypse.” 

An invitation to wonder, together, what spiritual community and spiritual leadership look like in this season of the world. 

Jay told us – among other things – about Coventry Cathedral.

Our 2 Peter reading includes these frightening words: The heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire. 

On November 14th, 1940, during World War II, that happened to the city of Coventry, a midsized city in central England. 

515 German bomber planes carried out an attack on Coventry that night. Over the course of the night the Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of high explosives and 30,000 incendiaries – bombs made to start fires. 

More than 43,000 homes were damaged or destroyed; infrastructure was shattered. 

At least 500 people died, possibly many more. 

And when morning came, Coventry’s 14th-century cathedral church was in ruins – its wood and metal interior structure had burned and melted, and its roof had collapsed. 

Surely the people are grass. 

But as people who loved the Cathedral wandered among its smoking ruins the morning of November 15, something remarkable started to happen.

The cathedral stonemason found two charred beams and lashed them together into a cross, standing it behind an altar of rubble. 

The vicar of a nearby church took a few of the big medieval nails from the floor – liberated as ancient beams burned – and tied them together with wire to create a smaller cross. 

And the Provost of the Cathedral, Richard Howard, took some chalk and wrote two words on the charred wall of the cathedral: 

“Father Forgive.” 

An abbreviated quotation of Jesus’ words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

As the website of the Diocese of Coventry explains, Howard “wanted everyone to recognize their own part in the destructive patterns of behaviors which can lead to disaster… [and] to make a commitment not to seek revenge but to strive for reconciliation with the enemy.” 

The response to disaster – apocalypse – dissolving that first began to emerge, that smoky morning, developed into a lasting commitment to peace and reconciliation work grounded at Coventry Cathedral. 

After the German city of Dresden was brutally bombed in February of 1945, the Cathedral community sent Dresden a cross made from the nails of their ruined cathedral – a sign of hope, of endurance, of empathy. 

That cross has a place of honor in Dresden’s Frauenkirche. 

When it was time to rebuild Coventry’s cathedral, the design they chose was not one that tried to remake what had been before. 

To erase the wounds, the destruction. 

Instead, they built a modern worship space, and planted a garden within the ruined walls still standing. 

In that garden, members of the community pray the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation every day. 

Jay told us about Coventry. 

The bombs – the crosses. Father, forgive. The garden in the ruins. 

And he told us: When there’s an apocalypse, you have to make a choice about what kind of world you want to build among the ruins. 

What sort of persons ought we to be? … 

There are so many kinds of wilderness.  

Literal wildernesses in their sprawling glory.

We have to protect them by law, now, but in the past they were simply the places humans couldn’t easily figure out how to tame, to use, to inhabit. 

The wildernesses we leave behind when we abandon a place: derelict malls, boarded-up hotels or churches, sometimes whole neighborhoods or cities – hollowed out, haunted by crows, raccoons, coyotes. 

The inner wildernesses of our lives, our hearts, disorienting and empty. Places we avoid because they frighten us. 

Places where something once was, and isn’t anymore. 

Some churches will tell you that the themes of Advent are things like Peace and Love and Hope. 

I am here to tell you that the themes of Advent are things like Apocalypse and Wilderness.

But yes, also: Hope. 

There is hope in apocalypse, hope in wilderness.

Hope in the emptiness before, and after, human striving. 

Hope in naming and facing our losses and our fears. 

Hope in grappling with what kind of person we mean to be.

Hope in the wilderness calling us to get ready –

Because even now, even here,

The Holy comes to meet us. 

More about Jay:

https://jayhulme.com/

More about Coventry: 

https://www.coventry.anglican.org/the-story-of-the-cross-of-nails.php

Today we read one of my very favorite collects. A collect is a type of prayer – a short paragraph that says something about God and then asks something from God. The funny name comes from the idea that it’s gathering us, or our prayers – collecting them together. We say a collect at the beginning of worship, and another collect at the end of the prayers of the people. 

The collect assigned for this Sunday reads, “Blessed God, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them…” 

This is one of our really old collects; it goes back to the first English Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549, and was written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. If you’ve heard that the Church of England, our mother church, was founded by Henry the Eighth, please do look up Thomas Cranmer sometime! Cranmer’s big work was getting liturgy and Scripture to be in the language people understood – English, instead of medieval Latin. Having ordinary people be able to read and study the Bible was very important to him, and it’s important to me, too. 

I have always loved that list of verbs: Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. It lays out that receiving and finding meaning in Scripture isn’t a one-step or simple process. It takes time and reflection. Sometimes it takes study, seeking more information. It takes curiosity and prayerful openness.  

We have read several pieces of Scripture this morning already. So let’s turn to the rest of those verbs. What about mark? 

Mark is being used here in a somewhat archaic way, still preserved in the saying “You mark my words!” It means, To pay close attention to, or take note of. 

Let’s pause, then, to mark our first reading today, from the book of Judges – about the judge Deborah. 

Judges is the book of the Bible that lays out what happens after God’s people settled in the land of Canaan. Last week you heard their leader Joshua, Moses’ successor, ask the people: Are you going to follow the God who brought you out of Egypt, and obey God’s commandments? And the people answered: The Lord our God we will serve and obey!

Narrator: The Lord their God they did NOT serve and obey. At least, not for long.

The Book of Judges has some dark stuff in it – some PG-13, some definitely R – but it’s a fascinating read. People sometimes assume that anything contained in the Bible is good – is how things are supposed to be. Judges is NOT that. 

The editorial voice of the text is really clear: This is a book about a time when society was coming apart at the seams. Leadership was unstable; there was a lot of chaos and violence; there were no strong shared values or sense of the common good. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes, says Judges chapter 17. 

Among other things, the Israelites UTTERLY FAIL to wipe out all the other peoples who are living in the land, as the text claims God told them they should. They live right alongside the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; and they intermarry with them, and they start worshipping their gods. (3:5-6) 

The Israelites are breaking Commandment number one – You shall have no other gods before me! – left and right. And God gets cranky about it. 

As the book of Judges understands it, because the people aren’t loyal to God, God repeatedly lets them get conquered by other nations, in the many tiny back-and-forth territorial wars of this time and place. 

When they get conquered, Israel remembers God and cries out to God for help, and God sends them a leader to help them – a judge. The ideal judge was wise and attuned to God, and also capable of leading the people as needed, including military leadership at times. 

Not all of the judges in the Book of Judges are ideal judges! Have you heard of Samson, the strong man? He’s probably the most famous figure from Judges. But the text is not kind to Samson.  

Deborah is Israel’s fourth judge, after Othniel, Ehud – that’s a story! – and Shamgar. I hope we’ll see a short drama of the rest of the story at our Talent Show, but you can also just read Judges chapter 4 – it’s not long. 

What might we mark about Deborah’s story? 

It is significant that she is a woman! One of very few named female *leaders* in the Bible. 

It makes sense that this happens in the early years of Israel, when leadership is still informal and based on call and giftedness. 

More formal and hierarchical leadership structures tend to lean patriarchal and lock women out; this happens both in Israel’s history, and then later in Christian history. 

The voice of the text accepts Deborah’s leadership – and seems to present her as one of the successful judges. At the same time, the text is aware of conventional gender norms, and plays with them. War was men’s work – and we are supposed to notice that Barak, whom Deborah calls to lead Israel in battle, says, “I’m not going unless you go too.” And Deborah fires back by saying, Fine, but God’s going to use a woman to kill the enemy general. You aren’t going to get to chop his head off and bask in manly glory. 

I think all of that is really interesting, and in some ways surprisingly current! We are still, as a culture, working through how we feel about women as warriors – or even just as strong, assertive leaders. 

It was only during the Obama years – another Barak! – that combat positions in the U.S. military were opened to women. 

And it’s well known, at least among women, that if you’re in a leadership role and try to lead like a man, you’ll get called things like abrasive and bossy and another word that starts with b.

So I mark that about the Deborah story: that there are seeds of solidarity and struggle here for the long, long human journey of unpacking expectations and constraints around gender roles. 

How about learn? Sometimes we learn from Scripture;  sometimes we learn things that shape how we read Scripture. 

Our text from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is beautiful. It’s one of many in these weeks that lean towards Advent, with themes of staying alert and being ready for the day of the Lord, the second coming of Christ, the great and transformational intervention of God in history that the church still awaits. 

The thing that I am learning, in relation to this text and many like it, is that we need to be thoughtful about our imagery. 

This passage refers to Christians as children of light, not of darkness. What do light and dark mean, here? 

There’s a first layer of metaphor that’s pretty direct:

In the dark, you can’t see. You can’t do much. 

There aren’t electric lights, and oil lamps only go so far.

Dark is when thieves and bandits operate, and when people do the things they’re ashamed to be seen doing. 

Daylight is a blessing, in comparison. You can see what’s going on, and go about your business. 

That’s all straightforward enough.

Some later Christian texts, especially gnostic Christian writings, use light and dark in a more value-laden way – where light means good and pure, and dark means bad, evil, or corrupt. Paul is maybe leaning in that direction a little here. 

Sixteen hundred years later, European nations started conquering Africa and other places where darker-skinned peoples lived. And we started to add a racial dimension to those moral metaphors of light and darkness. 

Light-skinned people of European origin understood themselves as the bearers of culture, civilization, and the light of the Gospel to the dark places of the earth. 

And the idea of “darkness” increasingly tied together skin color with ideas of ignorance, childishness, and moral depravity. 

We who lead and worship in predominantly white churches have been asked to pay attention to how we use imagery and metaphors about light and darkness. Not to edit them out of our Scriptures, but to be mindful of the harm this language has caused, and can still cause. 

Sometimes learning makes us handle Scripture more carefully or in new ways. Being children of light, children of the day, means openness, honesty, integrity. Some of the metaphorical associations of “daylight” in modern American English have to do with coming to a new understanding, or with bringing something out into the open so we can take a good look at it. Developing greater awareness of the ways centuries of systemic racism have filtered into our language and thought is actually a pretty good way to be children of light. 

That brings us to inwardly digest. What a wonderful phrase! Sometimes we definitely have to really chew on Scripture to get to something that can feed us. 

Today’s Gospel parable is a puzzler. I don’t feel like I fully know what Jesus meant by it. What’s more, I’m not sure the Gospels know what Jesus meant by it. 

It is widely interpreted as a capitalist parable: Take a little, turn it into a lot, please the boss. 

We have this story in both Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, but they tell it very differently. Luke’s version includes some details that point towards a universally-hated political leader, Herod Archelaus, who was around when Jesus was a child. So it seems that for Luke’s version, the boss in the story is a bad guy. 

In Matthew’s version, if you peel back the layers of all the sermons you’ve heard about how you’re supposed to use your talents to please God – and I say this as we’re about to share a talent show! – it’s actually pretty hard to tell how we’re supposed to feel about the rich man. 

If we think he stands for God, what do we do with the fact that he is presented as harsh and greedy? 

What if instead of emulating the first two slaves, we’re supposed to see them as being welcomed in to a corrupt and exploitative status quo? Like a new employee who proves he’s willing to lie and cut corners, so he gets a promotion?… 

I’m not sure either Matthew or Luke has a coherent theological understanding of this parable. I wish we could get back to what Jesus actually said. I suspect part of the puzzle is that Jesus’ original audience would have known stuff we don’t know, that would have made the gist of the story more clear to them – like recognizing the allusions to Archelaus, or like the fact that being trusted with someone else’s money was a really big deal in the ancient world. (And a talent was a LOT of money! This was a fraught, risky situation.) 

What comes next in Matthew’s gospel is the parable of the sheep and the goats. We’ll hear it next week. That story features a true and righteous ruler – and suggests that what God is looking for in our lives is not return on investment, but feeding the hungry, clothing the cold, visiting the sick and imprisoned. 

There is – clearly – much to digest inwardly here! 

Our collect says that the goal of reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting Scripture is to hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life. First Thessalonians says that we will always be with God, whether awake or asleep, but other than that, today’s Scriptures don’t have a lot to say about life beyond this world. What I hope, rather, is that our abiding with, and grappling with, Scripture will help us feel that there’s something here worth the seeking, worth the reading, learning, and digesting. 

That in this big, strange chronicle of some part of the long human dance with God, there are texts that – by the grace of the Holy Spirit – still speak to challenges, questions, hearts and lives today/ That can still point us beyond ourselves towards something – towards Someone – bigger, better, wiser and kinder than we can imagine.

Let’s pray it one more time… 

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This Gospel text is generally known as the Beatitudes – from the Latin word for Blessed. It may sound familiar; besides being often quoted, this is also the third time in a year that we’ve had it in the lectionary. We had the version from the Gospel of Luke last All Saints, 364 days ago, and we read Matthew’s version back in January when we were reading our way through the early chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. 

Nevertheless, thanks to a commentary on this passage at the Salt Project website, I do have a new thought to share. 

The Salt commentary points out that people have a tendency to try and turn this passage into instructions. Christians want to be blessed and here’s a list, direct from Jesus, of people who are blessed. So these must be our marching orders! 

But these are not instructions. Grammatically, these sentences are indicative, not imperative. Jesus isn’t telling people that they should go get themselves persecuted, or find cause to mourn. 

While aspiring to be a peacemaker, or to become more pure in heart, may be worthwhile, and while elsewhere Jesus does offer teachings about how we should live, that’s just not what’s happening here. 

Rather, Jesus’ words here are revealing a truth that is counter to many peoples’ assumptions, past and present. The Salt commentary says, “Looking around the world, then and now, it’s easy to conclude that the “blessed” are the rich, happy, strong, satisfied, ruthless, deceptive, aggressive, safe, and well-liked — and yet here’s Jesus, saying that despite appearances, the truly ‘blessed’ are actually the poor, mourning, gentle, hungry, merciful, pure in heart, peacemaking, persecuted, and reviled… This way of beginning [his sermon] rejects at the outset the idea that what’s most important about God’s blessing is how to get it and keep it. On the contrary, for Jesus, the most important thing about divine blessing is that it’s already graciously given; indeed, it’s already all over the place, just not where we might … expect it to be.”

The famous repeated word in this Gospel passage, “Blessed,” can be translated equally well as “happy” or “fortunate.” And that overlap in meanings itself points to the idea that anyone who seems fortunate, who has things really going for them, must be particularly blessed and favored by the Powers That Be. 

In every generation there are people and movements who rediscover and proclaim the idea that those whom God truly loves will inevitably be healthy, wealthy, and happy.

But there’s just no Scriptural basis for that idea. That’s never been the deal. 

Spiritual writer Annie Dillard put it this way in her book For the Time Being:  “You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.”

What this means, among other things, is that suffering – and bearing witness to suffering, which is itself a kind of suffering – is just part of life. 

If, as Jesus tells the crowd in the Gospel today, God’s blessedness particularly enfolds us when we grieve, when we struggle and yearn and shout, then there is no reason to think that belonging to God – being beloved of God – will somehow opt us out of the common human catastrophe in its many forms. 

Blessed and beloved, we will struggle. We will ache. We will grieve and rage. 

In our Revelation text today, John of Patmos gazes in wonder at the white-robed throng before the throne of God, and learns that these are those “who have come out of the great ordeal…” 

John probably had a particular great ordeal in mind – likely the persecution of Christians in his time. But there have been so many great ordeals.

Those touched by the many ordeals of human history indeed make up “a great multitude that no one [can] count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.” 

But. But belonging to God does matter. Somehow. Even if it doesn’t make us ordeal-proof. Even if we cannot opt out of the welter of colliding materials. 

The first letter of John says, boldly and tenderly:  We are God’s children now. 

There is growth and becoming – what we will be has not yet been revealed – but: Belonging, blessedness, belovedness, are already given. We are already a people claimed and called. Held in holy love.  Blessed to be a blessing. 

I think I say this every year at All Saints but it bears repeating: We are used to hearing “saint” used for extraordinary people, people with stories of miracles or martyrdoms or great acts of courage or faithfulness or self-denial to their name. 

But the early churches called all their members saints. People burdened by sorrow or beaten down by the daily struggle. People who never have enough. People who can’t reconcile themselves to the world as it is.  The hungry, the lonely, the strange.  Happy. Fortunate. Blessed. Beloved. 

Saints. 

What does that word mean, anyway? 

I know that going to etymology, word origins, is a frowned-upon tactic in freshman composition classes.  But I sometimes find it really interesting to dig into the deep roots of a word, to find its nearest relations and see what that cluster of meanings might suggest.

Saint is a particularly annoying word to investigate. It comes, straightforwardly enough, from the Latin word sanctus.  As in, sanctify, or the title for the thing we say or sing in the Eucharist that begins, Holy, holy, holy.

But the definition for both those words is just, more or less, sacred. Which has the same root word if you go back another language or two. And as you go further and further back in root words and origins, everything just means sacred or holy.  It’s the proverbial turtles all the way down. 

I think the frustrating circularity here does say something about the sacred: it’s hard to capture or define in words. We know it when we come close to it, but it’s hard to do more, within the limits of human language, than say: That. That’s sacred. That’s holy. 

But I chased the etymology of saint and sacred a little further – with the help of my well-informed friend Google – to the Proto Indo-European root of this cluster of words. People who study language have figured out some possible very deep, very old roots of many of our European and Asian languages.

The likely Proto Indo-European root word here is sehk. And that root word has some other branches, which can help us think about what defines the sacred. One branch is, To seek. As in, to look persistently for something that might be hard to find. 

Another branch is, Sacrifice. Giving or offering up something of value, something important to you – not in a transaction or a trade, but perhaps as an expression of gratitude, or loyalty, or in the hopes of strengthening a relationship by showing how much it matters to you.

Another branch on that word tree is, To make a treaty or a pact. To make an arrangement between two people or groups to be at peace, or to share resources or territory; or even to become one new thing, together. 

So: Maybe the sacred is that which we seek. 

Maybe the sacred is that to which we feel called to offer something. 

Maybe the sacred is what we are missing, when we feel adrift, alone or disconnected. That with which we long to reconnect or reconcile. 

A saint, then, is a person who has some kind of relationship with the sacred, the Holy – with that Other that we can’t easily name or describe. A relationship that might include seeking; offering; reconciling and belonging. 

This is fuzzy and undefined – but that’s kind of what I like about it, because that’s how it feels to me, a lot of the time. 

It resonates with my lived experience of sainthood, of striving to live my daily life as a person who belongs to God. 

A person of faith, where by “faith” I do not mean a coherent and theologically sophisticated and unquestioning conviction of the divinity of Jesus Christ, but something more like the thread in William Stafford’s poem, The Way It is. 

Listen: William Stafford’s “The Way It Is” –  

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I don’t know much about this poet. I don’t know what the thread was, for him. But I know that this simple poem captures something, for me, of what it feels like to choose and follow faith. 

To be particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with God. 

To be a saint, even though I wrestle with that word. 

Tragedies happen; people get hurt and die; nothing we do can stop time’s unfolding. 

But that thread of relationship with the Holy runs through it all – that relationship that has something of seeking and something of giving and something of returning and belonging. 

Today we observe the feast of All Saints. We honor saints widely known and named, the ones with miracles and martyrdoms and great acts of courage and faith.  We remember with love our beloved dead, the faithful departed and the not-so-faithful departed too, who have gone on ahead. And – I hope – we know ourselves, and one another, to be blessed. Known and loved. Called and claimed. Saints. 

Let us now continue with the lighting of candles on our saint altar. If you are so moved, you are welcome to come forward and light a candle in memory of someone you love and miss. Take your time; we will take as long as we need. 

Salt Project commentary (accessed October 31, 2023):  

https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/10/26/blessing-comes-first-salts-commentary-for-all-saints-day?rq=All%20Saints%20