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God knows who you really are, who you truly are. God greets you in heavenly peace – the real you, the authentic you, your true self that others don’t completely know or fully understand, your true self that even you may not fully recognize. The true you belongs to God.
Other people often tell you who you are. And often enough, you may happily accept their judgment. For more than three decades, a number of people have been calling me “Uncle Stephen.” I am an uncle: I accept that identity, and hope to honor it with my nieces and nephews. As their uncle, I belong to them. But is “Uncle Stephen” truly me, in my essence? When God meets me and gathers me into Paradise, will God say, “Welcome, Uncle Stephen?”
Someone calls you mother or papa, Grandpa or Oma, and maybe your heart surges with delight: yes, that’s me. But is this identity truly you, in your essence? “I am somebody’s mother,” you may say. And so you are, to the depth of your very being. But — do you, in your essence, belong to your children?
Belonging to others can be, and often is, a good thing. But belonging can be problematic when it shapes a person’s essential identity, and destiny. Sometimes, belonging to others reinforces unjust power structures. Consider the Sadducees, trying to lure Jesus into a trap. Their hypothetical is absurd: seven dead husbands, one wife — whose wife is she? That’s their chief concern. Not “does she have food and clothing and the ability to live and thrive,” let alone “does she… have a grief counselor?”. Forget about what her name is, or her vocation. Just this narrow, cynical question — “to whom does she belong?”
Maybe it doesn’t surprise us, this assumption that a woman must belong to a man, must receive her ultimate identity from a man, does not truly exist as a full individual without a man. We haven’t shaken off patriarchy and misogyny in our culture: we see this kind of thing all the time. But Jesus sets her identity above and beyond a marriage contract. In heaven’s reckoning, God blesses her with identity, dignity, and integrity all her own. Belonging only to God, she occupies a few square feet of heaven.
And lest we assume we are more enlightened today than those ancient Judean Sadducees, we live in a time when our government empowers officers in burglar masks, with no identification or warrant, to seize people and incarcerate them only because their skin is brown or black, or their first language is Spanish. ICE does not see persons of color as human beings, never mind their citizenship status, let alone their unique identities, their life stories, or the kin to whom they belong. ICE asserts that they belong to the government, as owned property.
In the midst of all that, and in prophetic defiance of all that, we keep coming here to pray, to serve our neighbors, and to protest, week by week, during these dark and darkening days. We come here to discern who we are, in our essence, as people who belong to God; and what we therefore must do in these days of anxious turmoil.
We recently finished celebrating Hallowtide, a micro-season of the church year when we pray for our beloved dead, and also the dead-serious reality of our own mortality. Hallowtide starts on Hallowe’en, a festival that borrows creatively from Celtic Samhain harvest rituals to make gentle fun of death. We carve squash lanterns in cheeky defiance of death, as the world around us (in the northern hemisphere, at least) dies back, as the wind strips the leaves from the trees, as the atmospheric rivers return and the floodwaters threaten.
Then we celebrate All Saints, a major feast on our calendar; and All Souls, another chance to walk down to our burial garden and make our song of alleluia. Hallowtide: as all God’s creatures prepare for winter, we prepare for our own endings, and we attend to the remains of all who have gone before us.
Hallowtide may have just ended, but as November grows older, our focus on death, endings, and end times continues. This is one of the reasons why we open Luke’s Gospel this morning to the scene where the Sadducees test Jesus. Even though they are being cynical, they ask him an intriguing afterlife question. We can be serious and ask Jesus even better questions, ultimate questions, Month of November questions.
Questions like: To whom do our beloved dead belong? Who are they, really, in the eyes of God? Who are we? What is the depth and breadth of our shared identity, as we all huddle here together under the shelter of this roof, with that baptismal font back there and this Eucharistic table up here, and our loved ones at rest in yonder garden? How does our essential identity form and send us into the world, with so many of our neighbors in peril? And if our neighbors belong to God, in their essence, what, then, shall we do?
I want to share a short reflection about one of my own beloved dead, to deepen your reflections on your own identity, your real self, the true you, in God’s sight.
My mother has been gone for twenty-nine years, long enough for me to reflect with some balance and distance on her departure. One day, in a quiet moment of meditation, I visualized seeing her again, after my own death, the two of us reunited at last.
New to the afterlife, I was just exploring the territory, and I came upon my mother in a forest glade. I approached her from behind and called out to her. I simply said, “Mother.” But as I called out to her, I noticed with surprise that her hair was auburn and youthful again, and it was tied in one large braid that reached the middle of her back. (This being heaven, her back was no longer broken by childhood polio. She was healthy and whole.)
The problem is, my mother, in her earthly life, never wore her hair that way, long and in a big braid! Why would I imagine her looking so different, now that she is beyond death?
Here’s my explanation: Even now, on this side of death, I already perceive that my mother, in her essence, is not my mother, or at least not just my mother. She has other identities, of course. Wife, union boss, sister… But more crucially, she is not any of her various roles. Like the woman widowed seven times over, she was far more unique than anyone knew. The real person who happened to be my mother transcends any and all identities given to her by others, or by her actions, or by herself.
But I called her “Mother” anyway, because to me, that’s who she was. I said “Mother,” and she turned toward me. Then she said something she once said to a person who, when first he met her, greeted her as “Mrs. Crippen.” When he addressed her that way, I remember her saying, “Hello! My friends call me Nancy.” And that’s what she said to me, her son (!), in our meeting in that country where there is neither sorrow nor crying, but fullness of joy with all the saints. “My friends call me Nancy,” she said to me, with kindness, with empathy for my understandable mistake.
Every person in your life — even your parent, or your child, or your most intimate companion — every person in your life is someone you do not fully know. And that includes every person here, in this faith community. God knows each person here fully, having formed us from the earth. Christ meets us, and changes us, painfully, in baptism. The Spirit descends on us as a hot pillar of fire, stirring and sending us in mission. The Holy Three know each of us fully. But everyone else just meets parts of us, shards of us, pieces — true pieces, but pieces — of us. Even we ourselves are only partially self-aware.
A shard or piece of the person called Nancy gave birth to other persons: that is part of her story. A good part, a major part, a part of her story that she treasured deeply, all the days of her life! But the person doing the treasuring runs deeper than the part of the person doing the mothering.
If this sounds to you like a doctrine of individualism, let me rush to assure you that the Holy Three always, relentlessly gather we who are many into one Body. The Father who forms each person from the earth forms them from the same earth; the Son who goes before each person in the baptismal waters drowns and rescues all of us as his own Body; and the Spirit’s fire descends on whole communities, not just individuals.
But the individuals are all unique. They — you, we — are all wondrously, astonishingly unique. And so, whenever we say, “We who are many are one Body,” that is quite a thing to say. Nancy — also known as my mother — is, like you, endlessly elusive, impossible for other people to fully understand, delightfully unique, wondrously and singularly the beloved of God. Your father, my niece, your grandchild, my second cousin once removed: all of us, a jumble of people with complicated inner lives and a kaleidoscope of inner identities — we all come together as one Body, and we will spend eternity getting to know one another.
All of this should inspire in each of us a holy humility: whether friend or foe, family or stranger, that person beside you will always, forever be out of reach, beyond your grasp, impossible to fully understand. I pray this inspires empathy and compassion in each of us, particularly with those we find hard to know, or hard to like. Perhaps one of the main purposes for this wondrous and troubled universe created by God is to give us all an eternity of time to truly meet, and get to know, one another.
I hope to see you along the Way, and truly come to know you.
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Preached on the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27C), November 9, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Haggai 1:15b-2:9
Psalm 145:1-5, 18-22
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38