O Lord, help us to embrace the difference that comes being a part of that mystic sweet communion of your Church. Amen.
I really enjoy psychological thrillers – movies and shows like Black Mirror, Inception, Memento, and The Matrix. They have mind-bending plots that make you, along with the characters, ask the question “what is real?” As people of faith, this is a question that we constantly contend with – what is real? As we heard in the reading from Ephesians, we are to “see with the eyes of our heart.” We come to know and trust that the least shall be the greatest, that it is more blessed to give than to receive, that death is not final, that in the Eucharist we received the Body and Blood of Jesus. But, constantly, we live in a world that makes us question the reality of our faith.
In 2022, Merriam-Webster Dictionary named “gaslighting” as the word of the year. Google has an interesting website that tracks the usage of words in published materials and, starting in 2016, there was an exponential rise in the use of the word “gaslighting.” I’ll let you make a conjecture about why usage soared beginning in 2016. The word comes from a 1938 play called “Gas Light,” in which a husband gradually reduces the gas-lit lights in the apartment, but denies doing so and tells his wife that she’s simply imagining things. She begins to question her sanity, which is exactly what her manipulative husband was aiming for.
Gaslighting can be a very dangerous tool used by abusers, making their victims doubt their otherwise clear sense that something is wrong. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “You’re overreacting and being too sensitive,” “that never happened,” “you’re imagining things,” or “that doesn’t make any sense,” then you’ve heard this technique being deployed. And why this concerns us, as followers of Jesus, is because Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Which means that the opposite is not knowing the truth and being captive to lies.
And we hear these gaslighting lies all around us. It often sounds like “Love God, family, and country first, and if anything is left over, then you can think about neighbors.” Or “Maybe that’s how unenlightened people interpreted the Bible, but now we know better.” Or, “You haven’t been to seminary, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Or it sounds like “Well, if you just prayed more or were a better person, then God would help you.” Or “Sure, maybe you were wronged, but you just need to forgive them and move on and not make a big deal about this.” Or “You only talk about inclusion because you’re a people pleaser.” Or “Politics has no place in the church.” Or “Sure, Jesus might have said that, but this is a different context.” These are lies that come from the very pit of hell.
This sort of gaslighting in the Church is how we end up with abuse scandals, Christian Nationalism, and closed-mindedness running amok in the Body of Christ. In seeking to keep us as quiet and compliant consumers and voters, many use the power of lies to obscure the beautiful and searing truth of Gospel. Corporations, politicians, and even clergy gaslight the people of God to make us question what is real, to sow doubts about what faith means, to compel us to be obedient to their will instead of following the loving, liberating, and life-giving way of Jesus.
We heard in the first reading from the prophet Daniel, who was also dealing with gaslighting. He saw a vision of the sea being stirred up by great beasts coming out of it, and he is told that these beasts represent kings that shall come into power. In Daniel’s day, the sea was a symbol for chaos, for disorder that is opposed to the will of God. We, too, live in a chaotic world; in a society that is confused about how following Jesus is supposed to make us blessedly different.
The relief that is offered to Daniel is offered to us as well – “But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive and possess the kingdom for ever.” As one of the Psalms puts it, “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” In other words, yes, there may be chaos, we may be told lies, we may be misled, but as the abolitionist hymn of the 1800s put it, “God’s truth is marching on.” God’s truth is always with us in Jesus, the Truth of God in the flesh, to free us from gaslighting lies that seek to divide and devour us.
And this is where the church’s celebration of All Saints and All Souls helps us to cling on to the reality of God’s all surpassing and redeeming love. These are separate commemorations that are sometimes combined, but each loses its distinctive gift when we do so. All Saints falls on November 1st and is a triumphant day in the Church in which we celebrate that the Body of Christ is united across time and space as the Kingdom is coming further and further on earth as it is in heaven. On All Saints, the trumpets blare as we remember and thank God for lives who witnessed to the shining light of Christ. We celebrate people like Mary, Cuthbert, Harriet Tubman, and Oscar Romero.
November 2nd is All Souls and has a very different mood. It’s a day not for trumpets, but stillness. On All Souls we focus not on the Church Triumphant, but our own dearly departed. We remember people like grandma, not St. but Aunt Mary. We remember spouses, children, parents, and friends whose loss we still grieve. However, as St. Paul writes in one of his letters, “We do not grieve as those without hope.” On All Souls, we name that death separates us from our loved ones and that separation is painful. But we do so in the expectant and audacious hope that we shall see them again in the love of God.
Going forward, we’ll mark these two days separately, on the actual dates of November 1st and 2nd. I often tell my students at Hood Seminary that “We have to keep our calendar, because the world won’t keep it for us.” Imagine our society if we got rid of all our holidays, our “holy-days.” If we no longer celebrated Memorial Day, Independence Day, Juneteenth, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving, who would we be? Slowly, but surely, we would start to lose our sense of identity, and our common life would be eroded. Or imagine your household without the traditions of birthdays, anniversaries, and Christmas morning. Eventually, you’d forget who you are and those that seek to gaslight us would have a far easier time. Is marking Epiphany on January 6th when it falls on a Tuesday or the Ascension on a Thursday the most convenient timing? No. It’s not. But following a crucified Jewish peasant as our Savior isn’t about convenience, it’s about salvation. One of the gifts of the Church Year is that it puts us into a sacred rhythm that helps us to remember who we are.
Still, these two dates, even when marked together, help us to hold fast to the truths of God. The truth that All Saints helps us cling to is that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. When we hold onto this truth that we are a part of the Body of Christ, we are able to resist more easily the lies and temptations of individualism and isolationism. Today’s Psalm proclaimed, “Sing to the LORD a new song; sing his praise in the congregation of the faithful.” And as we hear each week before we sing the Sanctus, “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven.” We are part of something bigger and we never have to go at it alone.
This is one of the many truths that Baptism proclaims and which St. Paul refers to in the letter to the Ephesians. Our English translation obscures it, but all of the verbs are in the plural. Baptism does not confer some status upon an individual; it binds us to Christ and one another. Baptism brings us into the Body of Christ, into something big enough to withstand the constant gaslighting that makes us forget who we are. It really does take a village, and thanks be to God that’s what we have in one another.
In his letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, a saint of the Church, wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Or as the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “My humanity is bound up in yours; I am because we are.” It’s not about independence, but rather, interdependence. It means that we belong to one another, we are responsible to and for one another. And that’s hard work, but it can make all the difference. All Saints celebrates this mystic sweet communion, this diverse and beloved community that God is assembling through the love of his Son.
This is a reality and attitude that I hope we at Grace and St. Stephen’s can begin to cultivate as we grow in the areas of inviting and welcoming more of our community to this place of relief. We seek to grow and have fuller pews not so that we can be proud of having a bigger church or larger budget. No, that’s idolatry. Instead, I hope that we can authentically say to our community “To become us, we need you.” It’s not about assimilating people into being like us, it’s about welcoming the gifts that others will bring so that we can grow into the Church that, together, God is calling us to be. When we forget this and privatize and individualize our faith, factions form and well, that’s when the lies are able to take root. All Saints helps us to hold fast to the truth that we are made for one another and that our salvation is something we hold in common.
What All Souls gives us as a gift is the assurance, to quote our funeral liturgy, that “life is changed, not ended.” There is more to see than meets the eye. There are realities that the senses do have direct access to. There are truths that we can trust but not explain. All Souls opens us to enchanting and deeper possibilities that keep us grounded in the truths of God, despite the gaslighting all around us.
These sorts of truths are what Jesus speaks about in the passage we heard from Luke. “Blessed are you who are poor; blessed are you who are hungry; blessed are you who weep; blessed are you when you are persecuted.” The world gaslights us all the time by rejecting such wisdom. We are told and trained to believe that the poor are lazy, not blessed. That those who are hungry should try harder. That those who weep just need to get on an anti-depressant. That those who are persecuted need to get with the program.
There’s a phrase that I picked up a while ago that helps me to remember that following Jesus is supposed to be strange, weird, and holy. That phrase is “the difference Christ makes.” Jesus should make us different. Jesus should put us out of step with our society. Jesus should make us odd.
One of the central themes in Luke is “the great reversal.” We see it in Mary’s Magnificat, “He has cast down the mighty and lifted up the lowly.” And it’s a consistent theme throughout – Jesus turns things upside down, which is actually right side up. These blessings are an incredibly different and radical way of viewing reality. Jesus makes us ask the question “what is real” because we don’t typically think of these sorts of people as being blessed, and yet Jesus bestows that upon them.
In that culture, the particular word for “blessed” that is used here was associated with wealth, status, and contentment. Blessedness was a sort of unbroken joy that was applied only to deities and the dead, because they were beyond the cares and worries of the world. The last word that anyone would choose to describe the poor, hungry, weeping, and persecuted was “blessed,” and yet, that’s precisely the word that Jesus chooses. Jesus is helping us to interrogate our world, to see beyond the categories, assumptions, and prejudices that gaslight us into seeing things dimly instead of through the light of Christ. Jesus is showing us the difference he makes – that the lowly are closer to God than those the world elevates. All Souls reminds us that God is able to do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, and that as followers of Jesus, we should trust more in God’s promises than in our abilities, more in how God sees the world than how we do.
Like Daniel, we live in a chaotic world that can look more like a nightmare than the dream of God. All Saints and All Souls gift us with the relief of knowing that our belonging is secure in the Body of Christ and that belonging gives us a blessedly different truth to abide in. If you’re ever in doubt, this is why we celebrate the Eucharist each week, to assure us of what is real: the love of God in Jesus Christ that makes us one and make all things well.
