Taylor Mertins

There are lots of liturgical moves that can be made on this day, but All Saints also raises a lot of questions, in fact some of our most profound questions: Who and what are we really? Is there anything permanent in the universe? Do our lives have any meaning?

And those questions can be far more spooky and frightening than anything we might’ve encountered on Halloween.

Where is the hope in the middle of such terrible suffering? What does it mean for us to live in a world where the blind wait by the roadsides for help? Is this all life has to offer?

Jesus’ rebuke of the thunder brothers might sound harsh to our modern and prejudiced ears, but it’s actually a promise. Jesus promises that we need not live in fear, we need not wake up every morning worrying about our security, we need not scheme to accrue as much power as possible. But Jesus doesn’t promise our protection, or our safety, or even our power - Jesus promises us the cross!

The uncomfortable comfort and the impossible possibility of our salvation is that we worship a God who, in spite of our best and worst intentions, desires our salvation even when we cling to the things we know we should not.

In the US there is one divorce every 36 seconds. That’s nearly 2,400 per day, 16,800 per week, and 876,000 per year.

Divorce is one of the most remarkably prevalent occurrences in our culture and society to the degree that most of us have become numb to it, and we almost never talk about it in church.

We don’t take it very seriously.

Food is important!

And yet here, in America, our connection with and to our food is one that has altogether lost its sacredness.

20% of all American meals are eaten in car. And the overwhelming majority of those meals are consumed alone.

1 out of every 5 children will go hungry, multiple days without eating, at least once a year. And among Black and Latino children the rate is 1 in 3.

And somehow (!) we throw away more than 40% of our food every year - a waste of $165 billion annually.

We are what we eat (or don't, apparently).

Prayer is at the heart of the Christian life. It is something Jesus consistently did throughout the gospels, it is something we do here every single week, and I would venture to guess that most of us here, in a variety of ways, pray every day.

But prayer, with all of its prevalence in the church, is something we don’t really talk about. Sure, we might do it, but what is the it we are doing?

For many of us The American Dream has become The American Nightmare when it comes to money and finances. So many of us are unwilling to delay gratification and we use tomorrow’s money to finance today’s lifestyle. Few us us save money appropriately because we keep thinking that tomorrow won’t come.

But then it does.

Over and over again.

In the United States there are more self-storage facilities than Starbucks and McDonalds combined!

With the crazy and ridiculous ways that we are accumulating more items than we could ever possibility need, far too many us us are are focusing on earthly things instead of heavenly things.

Time is a harsh mistress.