Deep in the Valley

The Rev. Alissa Newton

All Saints & All Souls (transferred)

Text: Luke 6:20-31

Listen to this sermon here

Listen to How Deep in the Valley, by Sarah Harmer here.

How deep in the valley must you go

To find what your footsteps already know

The way on is the way out

There are signs to follow

There is deep in the valley

And I'm bound to go

How deep in the valley must you stay

To know why your footsteps led you that way

The way on may be truly to stand in one place

And let the deep of the valley

Fill you with grace

-Sarah Harmer, How Deep in the Valley (excerpt)

These are song lyrics, from a song called How Deep in the Valley, by singer/songwriter Sarah Harmer. When I am in a bad place – sadness, anger, just general malaise or heartbreak – one of my coping mechanisms is to go on walk with my dog, put on my headphones, and listen to my sad times playlist and just feel feelings. I’ve been curating this playlist for a while now, when I find a song that seems to fit I’ll put it on. When one of them stops working for me, off it goes. This is one of the gifts of music, at least for me: that when I listen to music like the song I just quoted, I feel like I can hold on better to both sadness and beauty, to both pain and hope, to both the harder realities of life and the joy of being alive. Music helps me remember that these things are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact all tied up together. This song in particular has been on my playlist for a couple of years because it captures this so well for me. It’s a love song to the bad times, a celebration of the deep valleys, the times in life when there is no way out but through, and nothing but grace to sustain us.

Our gospel lesson this morning is its own sort of love song to the bad times. “Blessed are you who are poor,” Jesus says, “you who are hungry, you who weep.“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you because of your Christian identity.” These aren't blessings that we usually long for, or look for, are they? I have yet to see someone post a picture of themselves in poverty on Instagram with a #blessed on it. Yet here is Jesus, telling a crowd of people that poverty, hunger, sadness – that people experiencing these things are blessed, special to God. As if there is value in going through these valleys. This is life, he says to his disciples, and to the multitudes of sick and hopeful people surrounding him as he begins what is sometimes called The Sermon on the Plain. This is a section of Luke that is almost all Jesus talking, about what it means to be alive in the Christian way. This is life – to open ourselves up to poverty and hunger, to let ourselves weep, to cling firmly to our identity as Christian people even when that identity doesn’t fit well in our culture, when it challenges our values, when it feels dangerous to us. How deep is the valley? Well, Jesus says, pretty deep. But that depth? It is ultimately a blessing.

Please know, if you are feeling some resistance to this idea, you’re not alone. In fact, Jesus anticipates our resistance with the series of woes that follow his counter-intuitive list of blessings. Look, he seems to be saying. I know all the tricks you use to keep these blessings at bay. You think that money will protect you from the harsh realities of life. Or, you think that food can be an escape from sadness inside of you, or that laughter is always better than weeping. But that’s not true, or real. Those are short term fixes, Jesus says. The only way out of this life is through it, through all of it, with hearts wide open to God’s grace, given to us where we hunger, where we lack, and when we weep.

It’s a crazy idea, I know. Our scripture this morning goes against everything our culture tells us about how to live smart, accomplished lives, and everything our culture tells us to want for ourselves, for our children. We are supposed to strive for independence, financial security, full cupboards, and dry eyes. We're supposed to be "great." We’re supposed to be afraid of hunger, pain, sadness, heartache, and loss. And please understand I'm not saying we need to punish ourselves or seek these things out. But these woes – money and food, whatever we use to escape from sorrow, pain, and longing – they also help us escape the reality that we need God, and we need each other. Human life, fully lived, is able to acknowledge the valleys of poverty, hunger, pain, and exclusion, and to find God's love and blessing in and through facing these realities.

Today we are celebrating All Saints Day and All Souls Day. And I wonder if one reason we read this scripture on this day, is to because we have a great cloud of witnesses to the Christian life, all around us in our tradition, and in our own personal lives. Just look at the lives of our saints – the sometimes wacky and odd people our Christian tradition holds up as examples and inspirations to us. Francis and Clare, who gave up lives of privilege to live in poverty and work with and for people who were not poor by choice, taking very seriously the words of our gospel that blessed are the poor. Julian who chose exclusion from society in order to seek God, taking seriously the words of our gospel "blessed are you when they exclude you" and ended up with her famous faithful prayer "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Columba, our guy, who left home and country behind to build abbeys, communities of faith and hope where people could come to learn and share and pray. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who encouraged so many people to expose their suffering, through nonviolent protest, and lost his life as a result. None of these saints lived lives free of poverty, hunger, weeping, or exclusion. Each of them changed our world, became manifestations of God's love and blessing. They’re not perfect, our saints, not one of them. But they do show us examples of really living as Christians in the world, lives lived embracing the blessings Jesus gives us this morning as a necessary and important part of human life.

We are not only celebrating the saints of the church today, and the witness of their lives to us. We're also remembering the saints of our own lives – our beloved dead, the precious people whose loss we mourn and whose witness remains with us in more personal ways. All Souls invites us to be present to them, to mourn them and love them and know that someday we will join them. For some of us this is scary to think about. These days we are not so good with death – it is one of those realities of being alive that we avoid talking about it, thinking about it, discussing it with our children, or planning for ourselves. Death, like hunger, pain, sadness, and fear - it puts us in touch with how vulnerable we are. Yet we follow a God who looked death full in the face, was vulnerable to it, and then showed us that not even death can separate us from the love of God. We see this love in the blessings Jesus gives first to the hungry, poor, and weeping among us. We see this love on the cross of Christ. We see this love in our Church’s celebration of all the saints. And we see it on this altar, where we remember our own beloved dead. Finally, today we will see God’s love revealed in just a few moments in the person of our smallest and newest saint, as we baptize little Kenai into the household of God and he is marked as Christ’s own forever.

It may seem odd, at first, that a day when we remember and honor the dead is also a day when we baptize the living, especially someone as new to living as a baby. It is important to know that in our tradition we do not baptize babies and children, or anyone, in order to save their souls. We believe that God holds us, baptized or not, in God’s loving care. We baptize children and infants, and make no mistake this baptism is a symbol of death and resurrection, we are symbolically drowned in baptism and brought to a new life and identity as members of Christian community – we baptize children as well as baptizing adults because we see the vulnerability of human life so clearly in the lives of our newest human beings. We see most clearly in our children – who do not shy away from hunger, fear, pain, or weeping- we see in them these blessings, and that they already belong to God, and with us. We baptize them because we love them, because God loves them, and because their baptism marks them as God’s own, yes, and also marks us as the community of God’s own. And we baptize on All Saints day because we want for Kenai, and all our children, and all of us – lives that are fully lived. We baptize Kenai into our company today in hopes that he will live a blessed life – a life where he loves deeply enough to weep, a life where he dares greatly enough to be hungry, a life where he is willing to face poverty, fear, pain, and heartache for the sake of becoming the person God is already calling him to be.

And finally, we baptize on All Saints because we know that wherever we become God's blessing, whenever we can be vulnerable to God's call to love what is poor, hungry, broken, or excluded in this world, or in ourselves, it is there that God blesses, it is there that God holds us close, it is in that meek, mournful, humble, and vulnerable place that God makes saints of us all.