Mr. Rogers had a plaque hanging in his office that read, “What is most essential is most invisible.” Of course, Fred Rogers wasn’t saying that the material world doesn’t matter. That the Word became flesh means the physical world matters to God. What our saintly neighbor’s plaque meant was that when it comes to the meaning of life, when it comes to how to treat our neighbors, there is always more than meets the eye.
Other than Easter, All Saints’ is the day on the Christian calendar when we remember and rehearse Mr. Roger’s’ sentiment. Hebrews reminds us, “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us set aside every weight.” Whether we know it or not, those who have gone before us surround us and they make the journey for us less heavy. In our church on All Saints’ Day, we read the names of those who have died in the last year, ringing a bell for each name. At one point during the service I thought about how this year the bells ring louder than ever before.
All Saints’ Day is not just a day to recall who we’ve lost, it is also a day to turn our faces toward what we’ve lost. As I looked out at my lovely congregation, I wondered what million little losses weighed them down. Loss of normalcy. Loss of live music. Loss of jobs. Loss of mental health. Loss of community. I thought also about what I’ve lost as a pastor. I’ve lost seeing members in their 80s and 90s who’ve gone to this church longer than I’ve been alive. I’ve lost, at times, the joy of ministry. I’ve lost looking out at full pews during the big Sundays of the year. I’ve lost touching babies at baptism, and looking squarely into the eyes of church members during communion while I say, “This is the body of Christ, broken for you.” The visible world is heavy-laden with loss this year.
And then here we are in election week. The bells of loss and grief still ringing in our ears. Twitter and Facebook are exploding, the pollsters are predicting and I’m checking my phone every 5 seconds. Soon we will have a new president, or the 2.0 version of the old one. And this matters greatly, matters for policies that matter to people. I have my own political opinions, and so do you. I’m sure right now those opinions rage like a forest fire in your chest, just ready to consume someone on the other side of the aisle.
But thank God All Saints’ Day comes just before Election Day. This morning all I have been able to think about is what my dead grandmother Bonnie would make of all of it. I hear her saying in her sweet midwestern voice, “There is more than meets the eye, Josh.” Some morning soon we will wake up with the election results, yet we will still be left with all of this loss and grief, we will still be left with our neighbors across the street, we will still be left with this deep anger that pulses beneath the surface of our cultural milieu. We will be left, All Saints’ reminds us, with the inevitability of our own death. This reminds me of a great line from a song in the musical Hamilton: “Death does not discriminate, between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes.” The identity of the command-in-chief can’t change for us that to be human is to die. Death comes for us all; it is the great equalizer. But our cloud of witnesses has experienced death before, and since Christ defeated death, grace comes for us all, too.
Perhaps the lesson of All Saints’ Day is that during this election we are to fix our eyes on the elect one, Jesus Christ. For while we were yet sinners, Christ endured the shame of the cross for the joy set before him. The good news is that we are all sinners and saints, we are all broken and bent, we are all capable of immeasurable goodness and insidious cruelty. When it comes to who we are as human beings, there is so much more to us than who we’ve voted for. Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave us the image of the church as a group of people standing in a circle around the cross, holding hands and looking toward the truth of who we are – sinners – and the truth of who God is — gracious. For it was on the cross that Christ stretched his hands all the way up to heaven and all the way down to hell, all the way to the left and all the way to the right. So, this week, I’ll give my vote to Caesar. But I’ll give the rest – my life and death – to the elect son of God.
