Saints Steadfast to the End

If there’s somethin’ strange in your neighborhood · Who you gon’ call? (Ghostbusters!) If there’s somethin’ weird, and it don’t look good. Who you gon’ call? (Ghostbusters!). 

Well Halloween’s over and the vampires, skeletons and ghosts have put their costumes away for another year.  But we continue to live in frightful times.  A lot of scary stuff is out and about – a lot worse than a fantastical 200-foot-tall Pillsbury Dough Boy phantom roaming the neighborhood.

Tyranny stalks the land.  And we’re led by a low-information president with the impulse control of a two-year-old and twisted heart bent on revenge.

President Zelensky comes calling in search of what he needs to defend his country and halt Russian bombardment.  What he gets is a harangue about “making nice” to Putin.  And how much land he will have to cede to the Bear.
I say, let’s give ‘em Florida and call it even; and their soldiers can just go back home to Russia.  Oh, and they can pay for all the damage they did.

Just a fortnight ago Zelensky was told that “you can win this.” In a Face the Nation interview of September 23 Trump says Ukraine can take all their land back from Russia.  Talk about attention deficit disorder. 

Meanwhile the average Ukrainian is being bombed and frozen.  And yet, through steadfast caring for the bereaved, the wounded and the displaced, burying the dead, these Ukrainians endure.  Steadfast in God’s Grace, caring for one another.  They endure.  They abide.  Saints alive!

In America, as SNAP benefits (food stamps) are being cut off, our poor are being starved.  With health care supplements being cut off and the cost of insurance premiums doubling, families are being denied health care.  Even middle-class families, not to mention those barely scraping by.   And not to mention one source of nutrition for our poorest children being cut, free school lunches and the end of Head Start.

Who’s to blame?  What’s the cause of all this catastrophe?  While I don’t believe that any human is absolute evil, some do the most horrid and inhuman things.  In my blessing at the end of the service, along with blessing those present, those they love, those they serve; I also ask a blessing on “those we must resist.”

In today’s Old Testament lesson Daniel reports a dream.  A vision in the midst of the captivity under the reign of King Belshazzar of Babylon. In the precarity of captivity, most dire straits, Daniel has a dream.  “A vision softly creeping.”

Dreams are voices of our unconscious, sometimes of the Spirit, in the midst of the night when our psychological defenses are down.  Sometimes of warning, often the face of night terrors, or sometimes pondering a situation we are facing, sometimes of fond hope we cherish.

With Daniel’s dream, it’s a vision of terror.

“I Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another.  As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me.”  Now let’s get this straight, this vision scared the crap out of him.  “…the visions of my head terrified me.”  Daniel approached one of the attendants of this dream asking of those four horrific beasts.  “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth.  But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.”

Yes, among us perfidious, horrid persons will arise and do evil things.  And I suspect, looking at our contemporary political and economic landscape, we all have our candidates for “the worst person in the world,” as Keith Olbermann would label such.

My mother always told me that you will be judged by the company you keep; or in Putin’s case, shelter.

In a recent article on the missing enforcers of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, it turns out that many have found refuge in Russia.  These are the “the worst of the worst.”  Scores of them safely living with impunity for the most barbaric of crimes against humanity.  Just at random, to take a few:  Qahtan Khalil, an officer in the Air Force Intelligence, the murderer of hundreds of peaceful anti-government protesters.[1] The worst of the worst. One we must resist.

Yassin Dahi, Head of Branch 235, a secret arm of the Asaad regime.  He was responsible for the torture and execution and disappearance of civilians.  The worst of the worst.  There are scores more.  Another we must resist.

They have all vanished into nothing thanks to Putin, who continues to hide most of these war criminals.  Putin, a tyrant the entire world must resist.  As my mom would say, you lie down with dogs, you don’t get a chocolate malt!  Or something like that.  Certainly not a Lvivske beer.

Yes, Syria has endured horrific catastrophe under a brutal dictator, but they are surviving.  When in my Arabic classes we were taught about the fellaheen, the people of the soil, the farmers who tend the land.  They endure.  Today they survive the worst atrocities imaginable.  They persist when the harvest is good and when the rain doesn’t come.  They are the people Jesus preached the Good News to. Here today, here for centuries.  They endure.  And so will we.  Their steadfast caring for the land, their families, their communities is God’s Grace Incarnate.  These fellaheen are the Saints of God enduring, abiding.  Because of them Syria will endure.

These next few days many will lose the very food required to say alive.  They will lose medical benefits.  Their children risk losing Head Start and the meals provided there.  Oh, did I mention the kids who had received free lunches in the cafeteria line?  Gone.  No spaghetti or even tasteless meatloaf for them.  Sorry, kids.

I remember the cartoon of one inner-city kid in a cafeteria line eyeing the glop and smelling the horrid odors wafting from the pots, noting a dead cat sticking out of one of one – he remarked to the slovenly, unkempt cafeteria server: “No thanks.  I think I’ll take my chances with the drive-by shootings.”

No, they won’t even be getting those delicacies.

Good bye, Meals on Wheels for many.  This is “Let them eat cake” politics.  Shut down all because Republicans don’t wish to make medical care affordable for our people.  Get this, the House under Speaker Johnson has been on vacation for five weeks, not wanting to face the music.  Our people are enduring hunger and gross uncertainty, and they’re luxuriating at home on vacation!  Absent because avoiding a vote on releasing the Epstein files.  Your tax dollars at work.

That is why it is absolutely essential that in California we pass proposition 50 this November to win back the House of Representatives — to bring a check to this incompetent, cruel, vengeful and lawless administration.

Marjorie Taylor Green is the last person I thought I would be in agreement with – not in all my born days.  Yet, we’re in perfect alignment on the need for affordable health care.  The other day she ripped Johnson to shreds, saying he is a disaster on health.  He shuts the government down over health care subsidies, yet he has ABSOLUTELY NO PLAN OF HIS OWN!  You go, girl!  God raises up the most unlikely allies.

And, somehow…somehow the American people will get through all this.  Like we always have: watching out for one another and opening our hearts and wallets.  Saints steadfast to the end — we will be the tangible Glory of God for these children and their families.

Just like the fellaheen of the Middle East, we will endure by joining together in deeds of Love.  We tend the land in St. Francis Garden of Hope.  This past Tuesday some six students with their teacher from Aquinas High School came across the street to harvest lettuce, kale, bok choy, and cilantro.  Their teacher Chris Burrows helped organize things and our farmer, Miguel Bonila, with over 40 years’ experience in urban farming, supervised the harvesting.  He was great with the students.  I ask you; how many other Episcopal churches hire a farmer?

A great team led by Peggy Dub-Lutz organized the kitchen crew and kept us on track.  Last Tuesday, my caregiver, Ileen, noted, “What a great team you have here.”  Yes, we do.  Saints of God abiding.  Steadfast for sure!

Our garden is a living sermon you can see, touch and taste.  And. as scripture says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”  Good indeed, manifest in the hearts, minds, wallets, hands, and aching backs of all that make all this happen.  Saints alive!  Saints abiding, right here on Sterling Avenue, San Bernardino!

I love All Saints Day for it is dedicated to the best impulses in humanity.  It celebrates the God-spark in common, ordinary folks who tend creation and bring into realty the Beloved Community.  And unlike Christmas, Easter and All Hallows Eve, our vulture capitalist system has not yet figured out how to monetize it.

Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jain, non-of-the-above — that God-spark resides in each, though sometimes very deeply hidden.  We are commissioned to bring it forth, that all might Taste and See that the Lord is Good.

I close with a quote from a man who dared to get involved, to be in the arena, Theodore Roosebelt.  Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but never the less, he gave it all the good he had in him.  Left nothing on the field.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming.[2]”

Yes, we, imperfect as we are, with soiled faces, aching backs and sometimes tears — you, we, at St. Francis have chosen to be in the arena, making it happen.  Along with our colleagues from Aquinas High.  Steadfast Saints of God abiding, “For the Glory of God and my neighbor’s good,” as Helen’s Church of the Brethren would proclaim it.  Amen.

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[1] Devon Lum, Neil Coller, Christoph Koetti, Muhsen Al Mustafa, “The Vanishing Act,” New York Times, October 19, 2025.

[2] “Citizenship in a Republic“, delivered by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris on April 23, 1910.

November 2, 2025

All Saints Sunday

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18; Psalm 149;
Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31

“Saints Steadfast to the End”