KGL+
Sermon
Trinity Church Boston
All Saints Day Year C
November 2, 2025
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts always be acceptable in your sight, O God our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Unlike some other Episcopal clergy, I received my graduate degree from a Divinity School, not a denominational seminary—Divinity Schools usually comprise students of all faiths, no faiths and the purely academically-driven who were not ministry focused. Twenty years later, I can recognize two pearls of wisdom from that program, both which have influenced me deeply.1 In all truth, attending a Divinity School in the wake of 9/11 (I began the fall of 2002) was a master class in interfaith and interreligious engagement. My roommates my first year were a member of the Unification Church and a Seventh Day Adventist. Later roommates and dear friends would be a former Southern Baptist from Texas studying Buddhist ethics in Thailand; a Mormon studying the New Testament; an American Baptist studying Christian social ethics and political theology; a member of the Assemblies of God studying Christian ethics and gender; UUs, COGIC elders, Muslims, self-identified cultural Catholics and current Catholic nuns; Jain, Hindu and Ba’hai students studying for practical ministry; and a host of those who were somewhere in the middle or with no affiliated faith tradition. I was one of two Episcopalians in my degree program.
First: Don’t preach immediately following any of your Pentecostal friends. The ‘frozen chosen’ will sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher after the Holy Spirit has just brought down the house and set it ablaze, even when they were only announcing the weather. Trust me on this one. Know your gifts, and also when not to use them.2 My friend Mark and I had this exact experience speaking in front of admitted students about our experiences in the program—he was/ is a Pentecostal pastor and preacher in the Azusa holiness tradition, and gave the most stirring speech I have heard about finding one’s feet as a new student. I had to follow him, and it was one of the most poignant moments of humility I have felt. Which then became the moral of my presentation right then—our gifts are incredibly varied, and that is the gift of that program.
Second: A group of people with an idea and bit of funding can make anything happen.
It was the practice of the school to offer each student group formed two hundred dollars a year, and then have us report back on what they did, or didn’t do, at the end of the year in May. There were no contingencies placed on the funds, as long as the head of each organization could vouch that they were used on behalf of the group and its purpose. Being graduate school students studying religion, clearly a significant portion of those funds went towards snacks for meetings. However, even twenty years ago, the two hundred dollars allocated per group didn’t go far. It wasn’t enough to stage a conference; or offer an honorarium to more than one speaker; or for trips to some place which required more than walking across town.
Each student group clearly had a variety of opinions as to how the money should be spent, but one thing was made perfectly clear to all of us: no matter what, we would never have enough money for all of the ideas; all of the things. Our own Anglican Lutheran Episcopal group (which produced a very anglophile ALE acronym) debated whether to invest in a bottle of port instead of the ubiquitous but affordable chalice of Trader Joe’s three-buck-Chuck3 For more of a history of the two/ three-buck-Chuck: https://www.tastingtable.com/1651545/why-trader-joes-wine-cheap-explained/; what kind of bread to use for communion, and if it was to be precut into small cubes; whether we should get cheese to go with the leftover communion bread and wine as enticing fellowship following our evening service. Should we tithe from that gift of funding freely received, and if so, to where? The conversations seem a bit silly repeating them now, but it was always a reminder that no matter how ambitious, how righteous, how prophetic the nature of an endeavor might be, we knew that not everything could be accomplished; that some good ideas were simply not possible given the circumstances.
It feels counterintuitive to preach a ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ or ‘there isn’t enough’ sermon on this All Saints Day when we baptize those who have said yes to becoming part of the body of Christ gathered here, and reaffirm our own baptismal promises together. I do feel like Jesus is generally a cup-half-full savior rather than a hatchet-man, given his history with excess bread and fish; seeking out that one last sheep; the widow’s mite and impossible healing after healing. Jesus does seem to often embody the Improv mandate to respond to any given situation with a ‘Yes, AND’.4 I do believe that there is a hefty overlap in pastoral presence and improv, and that Jesus does usually minister through the ‘Yes, and’ mentality: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/yes-and-improv-rule-77269/
Which is why, I believe, he says no to us in today’s gospel reading.
Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are full now. Woe to you who laugh now. Woe to you when all speak well of you.5 https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaintsC_RCL.html#gsp1
In Jesus’ time there were those who were wealthy, and those who were not. Nothing in between. Wealth, access, power was imagined to be a God-given right, a reflection on one’s character. Wealth was not something to be conscious of, it was a sign of divine favor—it was a sign that you were all good with God.
Maybe that remains true for some not only in Jesus’ time.
In this sermon on the plain in Luke, Jesus controverts that normative framework: if you are full; if you are comfortable; if the right-now suits you and underlines your own access to power and importance, then you probably have no need of a God who divested Godself of power when becoming human in the incarnation. Woe to you, Jesus says to us, if you expect things to go your way. Woe to you, Jesus says, if you can only recall and lament the end of the good old days when girls were girls and men were men.6 This phrase is unabashedly taken from the theme song to ‘All In the Family’, the lyrics are scratched into my brain from numerous episodes watched through reruns as a child (for good or ill), and Jean Stapleton’s screechy soprano. Woe to you, Jesus says, if the state of our souls has a direct correlation only to the days when we feel ‘hashtag blessed’.
The reality of the Christendom into which we will recommit ourselves today, and into which these four beautiful and perfectly imperfect humans will be joined, is that it is not the power source it might have been at other times in the past two millennia. The power-adjacent seat of Christianity is not without consequences, and so the Church we proclaim now, which was built heart and stone after heart and stone by the saints who have gone before us, is no longer the titan of influence it may have been perceived as in previous eras. Proclaiming a crucified God who offers humility and crumbs of bread from a communal basket doesn’t have the advertising cache of the gods we too often make for ourselves and one another; the ones who have passed focus group tests and are innocuous enough to leave no trace of transformation or resurrection in their wake. The ones who align better with bumper stickers than the messiness of sharing food among fleshy hands.
Somewhere along the way, we as the Church have turned the God of creation into a God of convenience.
And today Jesus reminds us that there is not enough. Woe to you who thinks there is. Woe to you, who thinks our work is finished. Woe to you when God is relegated to a magician and divine scorekeeper and not the creator whose love and playfulness made creation ex nihilo, from nothing. Woe to you who don’t think they need confession or grace. Woe to you for whom the phrase ‘not yet’ is a personal affront because you hear it addressed to you so rarely.
Let me also be clear: this ‘not yet’ is not for those who are without—Jesus makes it clear that his admonitions are for those who exploit and retain the differential in power as a God-bestowed right and not a happenstance of situation or the reality of systemic oppression.
Each of the saints we honor and remember as pillars of the church, who had to push back against the notion of a convenient faith, were necessarily scrappy. No one becomes a saint in the name of God because life was good and easy and comfortable for them and they were like, what shall we do today? The saints did not set out to become saints (that might be an actual immediate disqualifier for the role, but also, hey, I’m not in charge of beatification, so maybe it’s an asset, I’ll leave that in the hands of God), yet those saints also set out to use what they had on hand with creativity fueled by the Spirit. They were familiar with the response ‘not yet’, or ‘there’s not enough’ because they understood the kingdom of God to still be ahead of them. The body of Christ is made up of each of you, each of us, because each of us on our own will never be enough, because we were created to be enough only when we are together. Imperfectly together.
The waters of baptism do not level the valleys and mountains for us: the waters of baptism hallow them as we trudge them up and down and up again. The life of the saints before us, and ahead of us, and yes, even among us, are the ones which dance on the line responding yes and to every not yet. The saints gave thanks for the gifts they had, acknowledged the ones they did not, and had the conviction that they couldn’t do all the things—but they could shift us closer to the kingdom of God with what they had on hand.
To our baptizands and their families: this baptism is not the end goal. It is the beginning. The holy water will not solve your problems or turn lemons into lemonade, or even offer the pithy platitude that Jesus gets us. This baptism reminds us that the kingdom of God, that our binding into Christ, is both wholly gifted as grace, and wholly dependent on our own scrappiness and creativity and passion and hope and grit and joy and brokenness to see the possibilities ahead of us even when we have nothing but bread and three buck wine in our hands. But we will have bread and wine together, made real by the saints who are in these pews, who are beyond these pews, and who will keep the prayers in these pews after we are long gone.
There will never be enough. And in that lies the promise, indeed the very grace, of our salvation.
Amen.