November 2, 2025 - All Saints Sunday: Life and Death or Death and Life

November 2, 2025  All Saints Sunday
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Romans 6:3-11
“Life and Death or Death and Life”
Douglas T. King

In her dark, ironic, and compelling short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Conner tells of a grandmother who is prideful, superficial, self-important, and judgmental on her best days.  The story tells of her on her very worst day as she is face to face with a murderer known as The Misfit.  With the Misfit about to take her life, the grandmother has a revelation of shocking compassion and love, announcing to this man preparing to take her life, “Why you’re one of my babies…You’re one of my own children.”  The Misfit, who only knows violence, takes her life nonetheless.  And then he surprisingly pronounces something quite profound, “She would have been a good woman…if she’d only had someone shoot her every day of her life.”

It is undoubtedly a disturbing story but O’Conner is slapping us across the face to get our attention about how the limits of our mortal life create an opportunity for us.  The Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius states it in a much more palatable, and genteel fashion, “Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.” He also wrote, “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

Today is All Saints Sunday, the day on our liturgical calendar when we remember and give thanks for all those who have died and entered the church triumphant.  We also give thanks for all the ways God’s grace will eventually restore and transform each of us into the people God has always created us to be.  We are all on the pathway to sainthood. There is a line in our memorial service liturgy, “whose baptism is now complete in death.”  People will ask about it following a service.  Many of us do not naturally link baptism and death.  Nor do we want to as we watch those adorable little ones cooing as the sign of the cross is placed upon their foreheads.  We heard a similar line in our reading from Romans this morning, “baptized into his death.”  

So, what is this about?  Just as Jesus was baptized, so are we. And in that baptism it is as if the Holy Spirit ties an invisibly thin but unbreakable thread around our wrist.  This thread of the Spirit is gently tugging us forward through every day of our lives.  And in each and every day we are God’s beloved as Jesus was and is God’s beloved.  Each and every day that Spirit thread is seeking to lead us into becoming the complete people God has created us to be.  We are following the path that Jesus laid out.  And that Spirit thread continues its gentle tug upon us even when we die.  We follow Jesus into death, past death, into everlasting life and into our sainthood.

The question for us is, how do we, today, begin to live into the fulfilment of who we will be when God’s grace is done perfecting us.  How do we live each day as if it were our last mortal day?  If I had a solid answer to that question, I would be a much better person.  But I can share an experience I had.  At a previous church I served we had a worship service on Wednesday mornings at 7:30.  One Wednesday, after I finished preaching, I sat down and had this remarkable sensation flow over me.  I felt as if I was dead.  But rather than it being a scary feeling, what I felt was a quiet reassuring elation.  All of the anxieties and worries that normally swirl in my neurotic brain had drifted down like silt settling on the floor of the sea. I experienced a great clarity.  I knew who I was and whose I was.

It was not as if there were no more concerns, it was that they were not all that pressing or immediately relevant to my wellbeing.  I felt completely free because, in those moments, I had no doubt of my secure place in all of existence.  I felt what the zen poet Wang Wie once wrote, “freedom from ten thousand matters.” And what the stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “To practice death is to practice freedom.”

What I had was clearly a mystical experience.  And like the other mystical experiences I have had, the immediacy of it faded over time.  However, the memory of it, and my continuing interpretation of it, continue to shape my life.  I think of it as a minor sneak peek of where this journey of ours is leading us.  It serves as a helpful counterbalance to the cauldron of roiling concerns and emotions which are so easily stirred up by daily living.

When we remember the promise of how our baptism ties us to Jesus Christ and his entire journey; when we remember that invisibly thin yet unbreakable Spirit thread around our wrists leading us forward to what Paul describes as “walking in newness of life…”; we are invited to experience a hint of our future sainthood.  
 
Today is a preview of who we are becoming; the deep peace we are in the process of receiving; the freedom we will be tasting.  Our journey begins by dying.  Not the capital “D” dying but the “dying to sin” Paul speaks of, or what I would call dying to our brokenness; dying to our less than worthy preoccupations. I find “dying to sin” to be a daunting phrase. I do not know about you but try as I might, I know I am not likely to be giving up my career of sinning any time soon.  

But I do think we can try to live into that mystical moment I had of dying.  When we do our best to hold fast to the promises we have received of our ultimate destination in God’s everlasting, ever-loving arms we can begin to lay aside our obsessive anxieties.  It is not that the problems of this life get any smaller.  We just have the opportunity to place them alongside the towering reality of our identity as the beloved children of God.  We can begin to be less self-obsessed.  We can begin to sift through the elements of our lives which are actually important, and those that are far less important.  We can begin to live into the newness of life that is being offered to us.  

As you come forward for communion this morning, and pass the baptismal font, and some of you place names in the baptismal font, remember that in our baptism we have been joined to Christ in his journey.  And that journey will lead us through this life and death and into everlasting life.  Let us allow the inconsequential in our lives to die that we may begin to live into the ways of everlasting life today.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.