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Last Sunday, at the Come As You Are All Hallows’ Eve service, I watched as people of all ages gathered around the big wooden table in the Great Hall during the Prayers of the People. Most were in costume, and we had everything in the mix from a skeleton and a jack o’lantern to a gum ball machine, Star Wars character, and K-Pop demon hunters. They patiently took turns writing their fears on tiny slips of paper. After a moment of reflection, each person was invited to prayerfully hand over the fear to God, drop it in a big bowl of water, and swirl it around until the fear literally disappeared.
I love how Seattle neighborhoods seem to embrace this holiday every year with spider webs, ghouls, ghosts, and lawn decorations of the macabre variety.
All Hallows’ Eve is a thin space bordering on the edge of fear, when we face our mortality with honesty and name our fears. The lawn decorations are a symbol of how we confront universal fears as a community this time of year, reckoning with things like silence, loss, endings, even death itself. For when we speak our fears into existence and hand them over to God, they lose their power over us.
Here we sit in the midst of the Autumnal Triduum, a sacred three days in which we celebrate All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. On the calendar, these days span October 31, November 1 and 2. In our worship, we are observing each at a regularly scheduled Sunday service. Similar to Holy Week’s Triduum, these three days are like a play with three acts. It is one arc as we move from fear to hope to love that never ends.
And that brings us to this morning, Act Two: All Saints’ Day. This is where the Christian story anchors us. Yes, death is real, but it is not the end.
This day is all about hope. That is why we have baptisms. We proclaim resurrection. We name new saints, not perfect people, but ordinary lives marked by love. This day reminds us that we are sent into the world to live like these saints, with mercy, courage, and joy.
In today’s reading from scripture, we have a wonderful selection from one of Paul’s letters. Oh, Paul. With his mixed metaphors and eternal sentences, he can be tough to understand. Let’s break this down a little.
In the first few verses, Paul is praising God. In the Greek, it is ONE very long sentence cascading with gratitude and awe. He is also drawing our attention to the idea we are claimed as God’s own people, drawn into Christ’s story of redemption. This passage is about belonging before believing. The saints of the church already live in this reality both in the past and the present. They already belong to God. And we know this because the Holy Spirit is a seal, a sign that we already carry this inheritance within us, because the Spirit marks and secures our identity.
Paul shifts into a more pastoral tone in verses 15 and 16, praising the community for their faith and love for one another. He writes, “I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints…” Paul doesn’t mean canonized saints. He means ordinary believers. Paul is naming what God’s Kingdom looks like here on earth. It is faith in Christ and love among people, to put it simply.
And he addresses the soul next. “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ… may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation… so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know the hope to which he has called you.”
I want to stick with this short phrase, “the eyes of your heart enlightened.” “The eyes of your heart…” What is this? It is inner vision, spiritual perception. The eyes of your heart are your ability to see reality as God sees it. That is the hope of All Saints’ Day.
And yet, the hope of All Saints’ Day is tied up inextricably with grief. While we strive to see as God sees, we are human. To skip grief would be “spiritual bypassing” and denying the heart of our humanity.
We move through grief, swim in it even, on our way towards seeing with the eyes of our hearts enlightened. This morning, we step into the universal grief of the church. And tonight, at the All Souls’ Requiem, you will be invited into personal grief as we mourn individual souls whom we have loved and lost.
I was talking with a newcomer the other day about the pervasiveness of tissues on this campus. As she told me a story about her life right now, tears welled up and she reached for the tissues on the table beside her in my office. Those tissues are there because people are always crying in my office. We laughed as we talked about the tissues in every pew in this church.
This is all wrapped up in the eyes of our hearts as they are enlightened in this space. When you come through these doors and sit down to pray, you enter a time outside of time, a place where our hearts are in charge of perception and they see with love, mercy, and grace, not logic. In this space, tears are often near.
Anglican mystic and writer Maggie Ross writes about tears as a divine gift. She names tears as a sign of God’s presence especially when we feel abandoned, lost, or alone. As a gift, we can choose whether to accept them or not. Tears fit into the stream of unceasing prayer and can nurture us if we let them. Ross writes about prayerful tears as “an ‘ambient’ grace.
She says, “It is not the special possession of a spiritual elite but always available, waiting to find us receptive. It is an ineffable gift, and one of its distinguishing marks is that it always points us away from our selves even as it illuminates our selves.” <end quote>
Tears are a gift in the stream of unceasing prayer. In the Sermon on the Plain, which we heard from earlier, Jesus blesses the poor, the hungry, and the grieving. He doesn’t bless them because their sorrow is good. He blesses them because God is near, even in their suffering.
Our world values strength, success, and achievement while Jesus blesses vulnerability and loss. These aren’t opposites because the human experience isn’t a dichotomy. The human experience is complex, layered, and varied. If you have participated in RELATA, you have seen how our stories of suffering, vulnerability, and loss are actually the things that unite us. And so, when we mark universal grief on this All Saints’ Day, we are practicing resurrection sight with the eyes of our hearts.
In a few moments, we will baptize the two newest Christians in the world, Robin and Joseph. On this Feast of All Saints’ Day, the eyes of our hearts cling to hope. Similar to our prayer station last Sunday, when we handed over our fears to God and watched them disappear in a bowl of water, we hand over our fears to God in this moment.
The baptismal water dissolves all fear as we witness these baptisms and renew our own. The baptismal water claims all of us in resurrection.
As Paul encouraged the Ephesians, so I encourage you today,
May the eyes of your heart be enlightened…
To see saints where others see strangers; not perfect people, but ordinary lives marked by love.
May the eyes of your heart be enlightened…
To see hope where the world sees loss, because the bad thing is never the last thing.
Cited:
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-tears-of-things-weekly-summary