I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 2, All Saints’ Sunday, at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 6:20-31.
I read a lot of stuff, such that much of it kind of blurs together. Matt and I donated a few books the other week, and as I was sifting through the stack of titles I thought a few times, “now what was that one about again?”
But sometimes there are particular stories or texts that stick with you and rattle around in your heart and mind. I was looking through some old boxes recently, and I came across one of these on an old photocopied set of pages I’ve been holding onto since middle school. It is the text of a famous short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Are any of you familiar with her? She was a forerunner of many writers these days who combine elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and pointed social commentary. If you know of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Hunger Games series, or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. Le Guin writes in that sort of imaginative, prophetic space.
Anyway, when I was in middle school, our teacher had us read one of her best known short stories, and it has haunted me ever since. It is called, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” If you can get your hands on a copy, I encourage you to read it—it’s not too long, but it packs a punch. I can’t do full justice to Le Guin’s writing here, but the essence is this: there is a fictional, wondrous, joyous city called Omelas, where all the citizens are happy and healthy and blessed. They live simple, lovely, celebratory lives. But there’s a catch (of course). For mysterious reasons that no one quite understands but which everyone tacitly agrees to, the blessedness and the perfection of Omelas depends upon the misery of a single child, who is hidden away at the edge of the city, living in squalor, unconsoled by any human kindness. How the child came to be there, no one in Omelas knows, but they do know that if they were to set the child free, all their perfect happiness would come to an end.
And so they turn back to their festivals and their feasts and learn to live, somehow, with the knowledge of the child’s suffering.
But there are a few people—the ones alluded to in the title—who look upon the suffering child and do not turn back to the bright and beautiful city. Instead, driven by some ineffable word deep within, they keep walking, walking out alone, away from all that they have known and seen. As Le Guin writes, “the place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
I am thinking of Omelas, today, friends, because I fear we are living in it.
I am thinking of Omelas today because children and other vulnerable people go hungry and have their rights bandied about as the collateral of partisan gamesmanship.
I am thinking of Omelas because we live in a society that does a poor job of distinguishing between true blessedness and mere privilege.
And I am thinking about Omelas because it is the feast of All Saints, and I wonder if this story has something to tell us, in a different sort of way, about what saintliness actually is.
I think for a long time, we have been taught to think of saints as the teacher’s pets in the Kingdom of Heaven—those people somehow born reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the Nicene Creed and easily believing every word of it, while the rest of us cross our fingers behind our backs and count down the seconds til recess. Top of the class Christians, those saints. Easy to admire, and easy to dismiss, too.
Because really, who has the time or the inclination to be a cow-eyed innocent, gazing blithely into the sky, when there are too many bills to pay and too many storms to quell and too many hearts being broken all around us?
And if that’s all the saints were, just the untroubled prayerful sort, then our eye-rolling would make sense.
But what if that’s not what sainthood is all about? What if it had nothing to do with being especially well-behaved or pious? What if, in fact, it was something wildly different ? Something far more subversive?
For we have all, I fear, been raised to be good citizens of Omelas, to climb the ladders of towers built on quicksand. We have all been formed by its false pageantry and asked to ignore its real price. Day by day, we are lulled and soothed and distracted, and asked to fix our gaze upon the pleasanter things our systems can offer us.
But following Jesus—which is all that sainthood could ever be about—is not, I am sorry, it is not about blithe piety nor about making an uneasy peace with the costly beauty of Omelas, or America, or wherever we happen to find ourselves.
No, following Jesus is about encountering that point in time when you are standing there, daring to look upon the face of suffering even as the festival flags beckon you back to forgetfulness.
And the saints? The saints are simply the ones among us who walk away. Driven by that ineffable Word, they walk in the other direction. And what we can say of them is this: they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
And if this is what saintliness is all about—not getting a gold star, but a refusal to accept the world’s usual means and ends—then today in our gospel Jesus gives us some perspective on that blessed path which beckons those who dare to walk away.
Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry and the sad and the hated, Jesus tells his disciples today in Luke’s more blunt version of the Sermon on the Mount. He calls these things blessed, not because being poor or hungry or sad are inherently good things, but blessed because God refuses to look away from them. God will not forsake them. Jesus declares that he will call them blessed even if we will not.
So, blessed are the ones we’d rather forget. Blessed are the food stamp recipients and the queer couples applying for a marriage license. Blessed are the Black and brown neighbors and those who speak a different language or worship in a different way. And blessed, too, are all the ones who are your so-called enemies, political or religious or otherwise. Even if we choose not to see that that they are blessed—especially if we choose not to see it.
Because God is not seduced by our necessary evils or our expedient sacrifices. God is not deceived by Omelas–neither by its kings nor its festivals nor its monuments of triumph over its victims. God says either we are all blessed, or we are all lost, together.
And so the ones who walk away, the ones we call saints, head towards this other Beatitude-place instead: this land of unrestrained, unwitheld blessedness, where love does not extract a price, where satisfaction does not depend upon the misery of others and safety does not demand a scapegoat. We may not see it fully in this lifetime, but what a place it must be, that Kingdom of Heaven far beyond the horizon of Omelas.
St. Anne, today the Church remembers those saints who glimpsed that someplace else worth walking towards, often at great personal cost but also with the deep peace and joy of knowing what is true and then acting upon it. I pray that we follow them.
Today, too, we recall our own departed loved ones who have, in the mystery of Christ’s risen life, already been carried ahead of us towards that same true and joyful place. I pray that we will find them there.
And finally, today, we will place our pledges upon the altar of God—our pledges to this place and to one another that, for one more year at least, we will keep walking together, driven by that ineffable Word—that something which we have glimpsed in Jesus and in one another as we go. I pray its beauty and its promise will be revealed somehow, in the very act of walking.
Because they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
And wouldn’t you know—if we do, too, then I guess that makes us all saints.
By Another Road 