All Saints Sunday - November 5th, 2023

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace from God our Creator

and the Human One Jesus the Christ. Amen.

As my grandpa, Darold LaVerne, has been on this winding road that we know as the close of our lives, he has been gathering the harvest of his life – to use the words of my spiritual director. Over the last several months, there has been more affection physically and emotionally than I have ever recalled before, and when I heard “I love you so much” from my grandpa for the first time at the age of 32, I think that it was not only that the moment was right, but I also think that my grandpa was saying those words in the context of generational cycles.

My grandpa came of age in the 1940s and 1950s where the knowledge of one’s belovedness was scarce. Toxic masculinity and its expectations of what it meant to be a man on the farm was that you worked hard, didn’t talk about what you were feeling, and then worked even harder to bury it deep down while consequences eventually come spiraling out sidewards in some way or another. In my grandpa’s gathering of the harvest of his life, I knew some things about his relationship with his own father, Raymond, but not all of them. I also learned this:

My grandfather lost his mom, Harriet, at the age of 10, during an accident on the Cannon Falls Hospital operating table in 1946. Soon after Harriet’s death, Raymond remarried a woman named Pearl, and the relationship between Pearl and Darold was a rocky one – grandpa doesn’t particularly have any fond memories of her. Pearl eventually left Raymond as the farm was struggling as my grandpa turned eighteen, met and married my grandma, and then moved across the field from his dad’s in 1955. Throughout this time, Raymond drank with increasing intensity, mourning the loss of two wives, and the dire state of the farm. One night, soon after my oldest uncle was born in 1957, my grandpa came into the house and found his dad around the dining room table. He was frustrated with his dad, and told him so – “What are you so sorry about? You should be happy – you have a new daughter-in-law and your first grandson!” Raymond was crying, and drinking, and started to tell my grandpa how much the losses weighed on him.

To which my grandpa said, “If it’s so hard then why don’t you just end it?”

Raymond replied, “I don’t have enough bullets in my gun.”

Grandpa came back with, “Well, there’s plenty of rope up in the shop.”

And a few days later, my grandpa found his father, Raymond, dead up in the shop. And that has haunted my grandfather for years: the weight of things left said and unsaid, the crushing feeling of the inability to take words back, the most desperate desire to do things differently. For years, he has rarely talked about his relationship with his father. Life was hard, and my grandpa was hard – on my uncles and on my dad as they grew up.

Which is why I think that now, even at the close of his life, every “I love you” that I hear from him and that I say to him, sounds a lot like a blessing. It is one small step to breaking down the toxicity of the masculinity we were raised in, one small step towards valuing one another in a way that my grandfather and his own father didn’t know how, or couldn’t, or didn’t have the language for expressing. It’s helping my grandpa, I think, understand his own value in ways that he didn’t necessarily receive as a child. My dad has been a student of this moment, and he has taken his homework seriously – he has named the hard things in my grandfather’s generation and in his, and is working to break down the stigma in our family that you can’t be emotional or share what you’re feeling. And as a clergy member, I feel like that is my life’s work – to pay witness to the moments in life that are unbearably painful and disorienting and to hold space for that.

And I think that today, on All Saints Sunday, where we commemorate those who have died among us: those we have loved, those we have looked up to, those we have struggled with, it’s worth naming that all of our lives, and the fact that we are here today, is because our ancestors in family and in faith and in the human circle dared to go on similar journeys. We are the result of not only the love of thousands of people, but also the result of their struggles, pain, heartbreaks, joy, and elation.

There’s a similar dynamic when we consider this passage from Matthew 5: there are a group of people gathered around, and they are trying to learn something from Jesus they haven’t heard elsewhere. This reading takes place in the midst of suffering. This reading takes place in the midst of loss. It’s important to remember that Jesus’ words are offered in the midst of a society that has been structured so that not everyone will have the same opportunities – that named those who were clean and unclean, worthy and unworthy. These are people who decidedly feel on the out and out. These are people who have had hard things happen to them and know little recourse to help. They would have heard “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, “Blessed are those who mourn”, or “Blessed are the meek” and said, “Jesus must be talking about someone else, because I’m not blessed.” And that’s the thing, my friends - what Jesus does with these pronouncements is try to reframe their lives: by instilling value or giving value back to perspectives, emotions, and people who have been roundly and thoroughly unvalued. In the Beatitudes, Jesus seeks to give back agency, worth, and belonging to those who have been routinely denied. Jesus declares that the kindom of heaven does not look like the halls of power of Jerusalem or the Roman Empire but rather that the kindom of heaven is found in seeking and in tears and in an overabundance of mercy. There is where true kinship and power lie.

If Jesus were among us today, I believe Jesus would continue the tradition of blessing those who have been denied: I believe that a blessing would be spoken over the Palestinian children and elderly, and our Jewish friends working so hard to separate state violence from the practice of Jewish faith. A blessing would be spoken over those who pay heed to the sweeping wildfires and rising oceans and the faulty oil lines across our Great Lakes. A blessing would be spoken all people wrestling with their sexualities and gender identities, for their authenticity is fruit of the kindom. A blessing would be shared with those who know the sounds of missiles and the lack of healthcare and food and water and safety. A blessing would be shared over our siblings who are undocumented immigrants because their courage and tenacity is what God works with. A blessing would be spoken over those at the close of their lives, for they have gathered the harvest of their lives as they take a new step into the Great Mystery. A blessing would be spoken, I believe, over all of us. Because in all those places and in all of those people, there is where God dwells. 

My friends, on this All Saints Sunday – as we remember those who have died – it would be good to hold up both the love and the struggle that are a part of their lives and indeed our lives. Because that is what God does – uses the fleshy complexity of each of us to create blessing, beginning with those who have been told they do not belong. And may we use our blessedness and belovedness to dismantle the unjust systems and powers of our times that untruthfully tell us who we are or what we need to be – so that throughout the world and joining with the voices of all of the saints we might proclaim that each person, each creature, and each created good thing has a place in God’s beloved kindom. May it be so, dear church, and may you be well. Thanks be to God. Amen.