Readings for the Feast of All Saints, Year B
-- The Rev. Leslie Scoopmire
November is Native American Heritage Month. In the church calendar, this month also starts with remembering the saints of God, those who embody the Way of Jesus. The next day we remember our ancestors and loved ones who gone before us into the communion of saints through death. That’s perfect too, as the seasons themselves in the circle they trace and retrace practice resurrection again and again.
Toward the end of the month, here in the US, we celebrate Thanksgiving, which should remind us of the fact that it was only though the wisdom and generosity of the First Peoples here that the earliest European ancestors survived at all.
And this year, just a few days after we celebrate the Communion of Saints, we are called to use our privilege of citizenship to collectively choose leaders for our school districts, our towns, our counties, our states, and our nation itself. Choices for leaders and policies that declare who we are as one people. E pluribus unum—From Many, One.
Today, at the start of this month of gratitude, we mark All Saints and All Souls Day, we proclaim and affirm that nothing—NOTHING, not even death—can separate us from the love of God. And if that is so, then we also should stand for the belief that, for faithful people, nothing should separate us from love of each other. I mean, those two things are the core commandment of the Christian faith. Fidelity, Unity. Love.
So why do we tolerate and play into the forces of division that seek to weaken us all, and tear our relationships apart? How can we talk about love of country and love of this land if we do not actually love and care for the land and we do not care for the people who live all around us?
We are bound together. We are woven together as beautifully and as tightly as that Navajo rug I showed to you and the children a few minutes ago. That rug actually symbolizes what the Navajo call “the Beauty Way.” It is a literal tapestry of life and mutual support, starting from Mother Earth.
Jesus walked in the Beauty Way, and we claim to follow him. No time like the present, at this moment, like every moment, when we are preparing to declare what we value as a nation and as people of faith.
We will either live together, caring for each other, or we will perish. You would think the COVID pandemic just four short years ago would have driven that message into the deepest recesses of our hearts and taken root there. To remind us that we are only as healthy as the sickest person among us. That we are only capable of overcoming a scourge like the pandemic was and still is if we take care to care for each other, and make sure the necessities of life are distributed as widely as possible. That’s not just good citizenship and good patriotism—it’s the core of what God in human form, Jesus, came to teach us by first embodying that wisdom in every step he took. And he called us all to FOLLOW.
We are each and every one of us called to remember, especially as we commemorate All Saints’ Day, that Jesus sees the incipient saint inside of all of us. That saints don’t have to perform magic tricks or miracles or even be perfect.
Saints are, as we will sing in my favorite hymn at the end of this liturgy, found in shops or in schools or in trains or even at tea. And saints are found here, in this communion, this fellowship, this community of faith bound together in love, despite our differences. The Saints of God are just folk like you and me—who exercise their freedom through responsibility toward the entire community. Who realize that we are all strongest when we cling to each other, when we celebrate the ties that bind us to each other, and to life itself.
In our gospel passage today, some might think the story of Lazarus is a story about death. If you had been at the 505 last night, you would have heard two versions of this gospel—the one we heard now, and then the one from the First Nations Version of the New Testament, which weaves Native American idiom and story-telling technique into the scriptures we have already translated numerous times.
And one thing I like about that version, and why I like to place it alongside the version we use today, is it actually often reminds us of what names mean. Jesus, in that version, is called “Creator Sets Free.” What might it do to our spiritual life if we remembered that’s exactly who Jesus is? The one that today we remember sets us free from the strangling hold of sin and death and oblivion. And Lazarus actually means “Creator Helps Him.”
Our story today begins with Lazarus being entangled in the cords of death—wrapped so tightly, with such finality, that all hope is lost between his sisters. But Jesus calls Lazarus, like he calls all of us, to realize that death does not get the final word. Lazarus here is a prototype for all of us who want to break the chains of death and division that imprison us, and at the voice of Jesus, instead step into life, and back into the web of community that is the basis of all life itself.
Focus on the last words Jesus speaks in this passage: “Unbind him and let him go.” From death, Lazarus is unbound. But his bonds of love are restored, with his sisters, with his friends, especially with Jesus. In fact, although Jesus himself does the resurrecting through the power of God, it is the community that actually unbinds the one whom God helps, Lazarus. The community frees him from the literal binding of death and frees him to renewed, restored life in community. No longer bound but free.
That word in all its forms--bind, bond, bound—is a powerful word and a even more powerful concept. Bind has multiple meanings. First it can mean to tie together tightly. In chemistry it means to join into a single mass. It can also mean a spot of trouble among my Okie kith and kin, and in this usage someone would usually insert the phrase “in one helluva,” as in “Y’all we are in one helluva bind.” In the law, bind is used to mean a constraint or a legal obligation to another—we bind two people together in matrimony. We bind over a suspect to be arraigned when suspected of a crime.
The past tense of bind is “bound,” and it can mean all the things just mentioned but also more. To be tied together neatly, like a book is bound. Bound can refer to movement—a big hop or leap is a bound. It can mean a limit or perimeter, as in a boundary or being “out of bounds.” It can mean “likely” and in See those thunderheads over there? It’s bound to rain.” It can also mean having a direction or final destination, as in the old song “This Train is Bound for Glory.”
Our western, particularly American mindset tends to a decidedly mixed reaction to the concepts of binding and being bound. Too many of us both chafe at any idea of enforced responsibilities in our relationships with those outside our homes. They want to claim that every man is an island, a law unto himself.
Taken in its extreme, this refusal to be bound the notion of shared humanity bursts forth in a toxic flume of callousness and mockery, Instead of empathy, we get not just apathy but cruelty, detachment, even cold-bloodedness. BUT, as we affirmed in our baptismal covenant last week, (which is why we did not repeat it this week, although that is the tradition on All Saints’ Day) our lives must be dedicated to seeing and honoring the dignity of every person. At the very least, people of faith must be people of our word.
In many indigenous cultures, such notions would have seemed not just nonsensical but downright suicidal. Indigenous cultures live every day with the knowledge that we human beings are bound in the best way to Mother Earth. This binding is one of weaving between generosity and gratitude, woven like a blanket. It is no surprise that in the book Braiding Sweetgrass, which is the subject of the November Native American Heritage Month book study, the word “reciprocity” occurs 91 times to describe humanity’s relationship with plants, with the Earth, and with each other.
We are all Lazarus. Creator Helps Us All, and thereby calls us to reciprocate. This day’s commemoration of the sainsts exists to remind us to embrace community and life abundant and eternal.
Our indigenous kindred practiced a subtle way of living in harmony with nature—one that didn’t mean they didn’t change and adapt nature to aid in their survival.
They realized a truth that western science is just now confirming: that life is only possible through a web of mutuality. All life is connected—and there’s a whole lot we in the West have forgotten about how deep those connections go. In the soil, which is a living thing full of billions of living things, or nothing that we recognize as plants would grow from it. And on and on it goes.
But they lived a life of reciprocity and gratitude. If they took from the earth, they realized that what was given, even if they worked for it, was nonetheless also a gift. As Robin Wall Kimmerer states in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, reminds us, “The essence of a gift is that it creates a set of relationships.” It is this very understanding of gift and reciprocity that God deliberately wove into creation and modelled to us in the life of Jesus. A life—our life too—bound in Beauty.
Food, air, clean water—all gifts from the Earth—the same Earth from which we are formed and to which we return, all of us. Community is a gift modelled by the Earth. And as people of faith, let us commit to God’s faith in us that we can all be saints too. Let us commit to the love that binds us all together—not a squishy, syrupy love, but love in how we live and every choice we make. A Life bound and woven together in Beauty, in Faith, in Unity. Lived as saints of God.
Amen.