All Saints, All Souls, All Peoples: Isaiah 25:4-9
All Saints Day
You have been a refuge for the poor,
a refuge for
the needy in distress,
a hiding
place from the storm,
a shade from
the heat.
When the breath of tyrants is like a winter storm
5 or like
heat in the desert,
you subdue
the roar of foreigners.
Like heat shaded by a cloud,
the tyrants’ song falls silent.
the Lord of heavenly forces will prepare
for all peoples
a rich feast, a feast of
choice wines,
of
select foods rich in flavor,
of
choice wines well refined.
7 He will swallow up on this mountain the veil that is
veiling all peoples,
the shroud
enshrouding all nations.
8 He will swallow up death forever.
The Lord God will wipe tears from every face;
he will
remove his people’s disgrace from off the whole earth,
for the
Lord has spoken.
9 They will say on that day,
“Look! This is our God,
for whom we
have waited—
and he has
saved us!
This is the Lord, for whom we have waited;
let’s be
glad and rejoice in his salvation!” (CEB)
My
mother’s family is Catholic, several proud generations’ worth adhering to the
one true faith, and one side effect of this is that there has always been the
accoutrement of saints cluttering at the edges of daily life. Whenever I couldn’t find a book or my class
notes or my mother’s keys, my aunt would advise me to beseech St. Anthony of
Padua, patron saint of lost things: “Tony, Tony, come around; something’s lost
and can’t be found.” Evidence is still
inconclusive as to whether Anthony is accepting enough of being called “Tony”
to come help me find my item.
When
my siblings and I took to leaving on all sorts of adventures as we grew older, a
St. Christopher statue—patron saint of travelers—arrived in the front garden to
keep watch over the rhododendrons and us alike.
When my stepfather converted to Catholicism, he took to wearing a medal
of St. Michael the Archangel, patron saint of police officers. Until my grandfather died, a small figurine
of St. Joseph—patron saint of fathers and families, among other things—stood on
his bedside table with his watch and rosary. The great cloud of witnesses had very specific
names growing up in that world, and it was as familiar to me to have St. Mary
of Magdala’s eyes follow me across a sanctuary as Christ’s.
It was
always an understood part of the conversation that there were people who were
saints, who were useful and involved in our daily lives, and there were those
who were decidedly not. The most common categorical
opposition is “sinners,” in a “sheep and goats” sort of way that allows for
neat separation as though Paul hasn’t declared us all to be sinners, as though
every saint doesn’t have some shadow whether or not we’ve recorded it. Oddly and conveniently enough, the sinners of
my world were quite often such not because they didn’t have holy enough bones
or their names on a registry but because they disagreed with my grandfather, or
the priest, or me.
On joining
The United Methodist Church as an adult, I realized we don’t really weigh in on
saints in the same way. Following our
Protestant heritage, Methodist doctrine is uncomfortable with there being any
sort of intercession between us and God—which is a primary use of the saints,
like poor Tony—but Methodists also greatly dislike the notion that there can be
some people who are in any way more divine than others (besides Jesus, of
course). Officially, “John Wesley
believed we have much to learn from the saints, but he did not encourage anyone
to worship them. He expressed concern about the Church of England's focus on
saints’ days and said that ‘most of the holy days were at present answering no
valuable end.’ Wesley’s focus was
entirely on the saving grace of Jesus Christ.”[1]
So
why bother to recognize All Saints’ Day if we don’t really recognize
saints? It’s a bit of a misnomer, since
what we commemorate is actually closer to the Catholic holy day of All Souls’
Day, or the day in which all those of the faith who have died are
remembered. For us Methodists, they’re
one and the same; the UMC states that, “United Methodists call people ‘saints’ because
they exemplified the Christian life. In this sense, every Christian can be
considered a saint.”[2] Sinners are thus not in opposition to saints
but are the saints themselves because we are them and they are us, the names
earned daily by our choices about our reception of God’s grace and our drawing
near to God’s perfection. We do not get
to draw the neat lines between the accepted and venerated saints and the
forgotten—yet we still do. It is human
nature to pay attention to the people important to us, and it is a good and
holy thing that we gather on this first weekend of November to remember the ones
we have loved and lost. Generations of
us have done the same, grieving the separation of death even while we proclaim
the hope of resurrection, and if we only light candles for the people we know,
if we only ring bells for those who can fit in the slideshow, well. Those are our saints.
It is such
a very irksome God thing that this lectionary reading from Isaiah invites us to
think that maybe All Souls means more than all the souls from our own community,
the ones we have learned to love and respect—that maybe All Souls means, in
fact, all souls.
“On
this mountain, / the Lord of heavenly forces will prepare for all peoples / a
rich feast,” writes Isaiah. We have to
back up a bit to see why it matters that the feast has so many attendees; the
prophet writing under the name Isaiah lived during the latter part of the 700s
BC, during the time of the Assyrian invasion of Israel.[3] This is the first real external loss since
David settled into Jerusalem some 250 years earlier[4]
and it rocks Israel to the core, spurring several different prophets’ worth of
anger and grief at the loss of their autonomy and culture as well as the human
devastation of war. The chapters just
before our reading today speak of Isaiah’s anger at the “foreigners,” continued
here in the relish of the idea of a God Who “subdue[s] the roar of foreigners”
and makes the “tyrants’ song” fall silent. On this day in November, we don’t have to
think very hard to remember the language of tyrants and foreigners on our own
lips, the prayers we have sent in our line drawing between sinners and saints,
the ways we feel anger and grief and loss as we remember the people we have
loved and continue to navigate a world of people we, perhaps, don’t.
“On
this mountain, / the Lord of heavenly forces will prepare for all peoples / a
rich feast,” says Isaiah. Rev. Bryan
Findlayson writes that, “This poem speaks of the final day of salvation and
makes a number of points which, for the people in Isaiah’s day, would be
regarded as quite revolutionary. In the coming day, the nations will gather as
one people in Jerusalem. It will be a time of fellowship, of feasting, a time
of great joy for all peoples and not just the descendants of Abraham.”[5]
A
time of great joy, of feasting, of hope and connection for all peoples—for
the saints we can name and the ones we’d rather not, the sinners we don’t even
want to think of as saints, the ones we don’t even know about in far-flung
countries and in the city next door. Isaiah’s
vision of the mountain refuses the ways even his culture said that some weren’t
welcome, and said that only when all nations are gathering in the name of the
Lord will sorrow cease. “The Lord God
will wipe tears from every face; he will remove his people’s disgrace from off
the whole earth, for the Lord has spoken.”
The idea of wiping away tears is far more often pulled from the images
of New Jerusalem in Revelation but that image comes from here, comes from the
ruins of a nation in which the possibilities of healing are stronger than the
grief of current separation and loss.
Yet
even this is counteracted; even this has Isaiah’s humanity. You see, the verse after these says that
Moabites still won’t be welcome—because they chose not to come, says Isaiah,
but we who understand that the Scriptures are divinely inspired but humanly
written understand that the idea of all nations is terrifying. What if some of the saints are the people I
don’t think are saintly at all? What if the
mountain has the people I love and the people I really, really don’t and the
people I never knew at all?
What
if? God says absolutely; the only
entry fee is understanding that God invites those who come in peace, shalom,
in recognition that there shall be no more hatred and cruelty, that there shall
be no division and prejudice. dAll
nations come to the feast—and God has one of God’s own.
“He
will swallow up on this mountain the veil that is veiling all peoples, / the
shroud enshrouding all nations. / He will swallow up death forever.” This is why we celebrate All Saints’ the way
we do, as All Souls; this is why we step into the current every year of grief
and sorrow and say we remember: because death does not care whether we
are saints or sinners, whether our name is invoked in prayer for lost things or
our name is forgotten along with us.
Death has no respect for political boundary lines or sacred texts or
worship opinions or funeral arrangements; death does not make rules about
whether you are white enough, or straight enough, or rich enough, or Christian
enough, not in the way of God’s restoration to wholeness but in the apathy that
we have anything to make whole at all.
Death has no care for the measurements we put in place but approaches us
all with the deep fear of our own mortality, lapping up the tears of grief as
the great leveler it is.
And
God feasts on it.
While
the people on the mountain are treated to rich wines and sumptuous meats, God
eats the very shroud of death, swallowing it forever. There’s a lot of really cool subtext
happening here around the gods of the time and the image of Sheol and Mot that
I can absolutely geek out at you about later if you’d like, but the point
Isaiah is making is that the great leveler gets leveled; on the mountain where
God wipes away tears and all nations feast together, we no longer delineate
between sinner and saint, between ours and other, but only recognize that we
have responded to God with our tentative or resounding yes. “Look, this is our God!” Look, people who grieve, people who have
lost, people who have drawn a thousand barriers between each other; look at how
God has made us equals, has truly overridden our presuppositions and our
violence, has given us fine wine, has invited us all to the mountain, sinners
and saints, and torn to shreds the death that we so often use as a threat
against each other. God has invited us
to be the light that shines just as the candles we often light for the saints
we recognize and love, burning the shadow away with full knowledge that there
is so much we don’t yet see, that the mountain will have so many we did not
expect.
“This
is the God for Whom we have waited,” writes Isaiah, but before that there are
so many ways God is present: “You have been a refuge for the poor,” the
poet writes, “a refuge for the needy in distress, a hiding place from the
storm, a shade from the heat.” This is
God already at work, God already sheltering God’s people, God not waiting for
saints or angels or the end of the world but providing refuge now, creating
shade now, protecting those in the storm now. This is the God Who knows that death is a
future meal, that tears are not forever, that no matter how many All Saints’
services we hold and bell tones ring throughout the years, we are always
invited to the mountain and loved. This
is the God Who knows that death is a present reality and tears choke our
throats when we think of facing the first Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays
without our loved ones, that no amount of future wine can dull the pain of
present grief—and this is the God Who invites us to speak the names of our
people and miss them horribly. This is
the God Who is waiting for us, Who invites us to the Kingdom now, Who
is building shade and respite now, Who calls us to always see that grace
is so much bigger and saints are so much more unexpected and the whole concept
of a feast so much weirder than we ever thought.
All
Saints’, in the pattern of this and many other Methodist churches, always falls
on a day we celebrate communion. It’s
not an accident; here, too, is a feast on a mountain where all are invited, and
while we have neither fine wine nor rich foods at our particular table, we do
have Christ’s words that there are none barred from this sacred act. Saint James and sinner Judas alike came to
the table and were fed; death came and was defeated; there was refuge for the
poor and shade from the heat in a life and death and resurrection anchored in a
meal between friends. This is the meal of
all nations; this is the grief of all that is lost, and the adamant hope that
such loss is not forever; this is the act of faith that there is and will be
this God Who grieves with us and promises us that the deaths we hand each other
are not the end. We are called to the
table to be flabbergasted once again by the absolutely beautiful mess of grace
that says all are welcome, sinners and saints, every nation shining in love’s
unending Light. It is our choice to be
part of the meal, whether at this table or on a mountain; may we have the
courage to answer this call, and the faith to see that God is at work now, now,
and forever. Amen.
[2]
Ibid.; to be fair, the RCC also considers every Christian to be called to be a
saint, but there are stratifications on how well that’s achieved (Saints | USCCB)
[3]
First
Isaiah → Historical Context – Study Guide - Yale Bible Study; the Assyrian
invasion is agreed to be around 732 BCE.
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