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Ellen is salt.
John is light.
We begin with salt. Salt is often overlooked, a little canister in your kitchen that hides in plain sight, but salt is everywhere. Just a half teaspoon develops the flavor of your soup, or your cookies. Salt is the base for medications. You use salt when making ice cream to lower the melting point of the ice. Salt preserves food; it de-ices roads and airplane wings. Our bodies require salt to regulate fluids and nerve impulses. We use salt in cleansers. You keep salt on hand for your healing bath, and to soothe your throat. Salt softens hard water. Life on earth began in the salty sea.
And so, in turn, consider Ellen, our salt friend: she is modest and receding, but her influence is everywhere. She draws alongside you with a word, or with her famous side-eye. She quietly reads a library of books and attends countless plays; then she turns that curated wisdom into a lifelong vocation of skillful companionship. She is the ‘fairy godmother’ for countless children and youth; she comes to the aid of foster families; she is a feminist whose chosen full-time job was raising three children; she smiles with mischief when a grandchild says something lightly salty – or whenever they say something that their lightly-salty Nana would have said.
Meanwhile, John blazes. His light is blinding: we all know a polymath when we see one, a dazzling supernova who builds five or six careers just by following his own natural curiosity. In six weeks or so, under the shadows of the winter solstice, the church will once again imagine God as light. (More specifically, we will imagine Jesus Christ as our Dayspring.) ‘Dayspring’ is an older, poetic word for sunrise, for dawn, for a rising light, for a glorious star in the east. Our John shines with the Dayspring of Christ.
Ask John a question about this room, this sanctuary, and John’s star will rise in splendor: he’ll delightedly recount all the stories, all the background details that formed this house of prayer. He knows all about this pulpit, how it’s built like a boat, reinforced for hard sailing. He can tell you how everything works in here, architecturally but also theologically. He treasures hilarious old stories of wild parishioners who paused here. His eyes dance with light as he regales you, as he teaches you, as he makes your day with ideas and images, with stories and insights, with his endless dreams, with his insatiable creativity, in the visual and dramatic arts, but also in music – endless music. But then, to your astonishment, John turns the conversation back toward you: burning brightly with God’s light, John is truly interested in you, his neighbor, his friend, his kin.
Ellen’s salt is everywhere, making life delicious, saving us from loneliness, encouraging and soothing us, delighting us with a word. And John’s light shines into every shadow, every dull corner, every dark day.
Are they saints, these two? Of course! But they are also – and bear with me here: I’m about to say something that Ellen and John might heartily endorse – they are also, by heaven’s standards, not quite newsworthy. They are, in God’s sight, delightfully ordinary. All of you who sing their praises, please know that I share in your song, with gusto! Ellen and John are not newsworthy in God’s sight only because all of us are the salt of the earth; all of us are the light of the world. All of us, together, are salt and light.
The Good News does not belong only to two of our grievously departed friends, as much as our hearts ache with their incomprehensible absence. We join them, we draw alongside them, as salt and light. The salt washes over us at Baptism; the light dances on all of our heads, each of us aflame with the Spirit.
We grieve because these two are so easy to love, so tremendously strong and kind and wise and good. We grieve deeply, for those excellent reasons. But we also know – even if it’s hard at this particular moment to believe – we also know that everything Ellen and John taught us, everything they were and are, everything they showed us in lives of savory goodness and dancing sunlight, everything we grieve today is still right here, always here, close at hand.
You all are the salt of the earth, sent from here to save and preserve; to cleanse and enhance; to regulate and ravish; to deepen the flavors of life on this lovely planet.
You all are the light of the world, sent from here to enlighten those clouded with ignorance; to warm those chilled by the harsh injustice of the world; to delight and even dazzle Ellen and John’s grandchildren – and all children – with the wonders of this life.
But we can all be forgiven for lingering a while longer in God’s garden, to grieve our departed friends. I’ll close with an image of a saint, an image of a woman in Paradise who captures or reflects – for me – the spirits of both Ellen and John. The Anglican writer C.S. Lewis wrote a fantasy novel that takes place at the edge, at the outskirts, of heaven. Lewis describes a saint walking down from the glorious mountains of heaven proper to speak to a poor soul at the edge, someone who isn’t sure he wants to stay.
We readers of the story see all of this through the eyes of a visitor, who turns to his heavenly guide with wonder and disbelief. Here is the scene:
“All down one long aisle of the forest the under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light… Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.
“First came bright Spirits… who danced and scattered flowers… Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys and girls. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no [one] who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done… Only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.
“‘Is it?... Is it [the blessed Virgin Mary]?’ I whispered to my guide.
“‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone you’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’
“[I said], ‘She seems to be… well, a person of particular importance?’
“‘[Yes]. She is one of the great ones. You have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’
“‘And who are these gigantic people,’ [I asked]... ‘Look! They’re like emeralds… who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?’
“‘Haven’t you read your Milton?’ [my guide replied.] ‘“A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”’
“‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’
“‘They are her sons and daughters.’
“‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
“‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’
“‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
“‘No… [H]er motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more… [M]en looked on her [with] the kind of love that made them… truer to their own wives… Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’
“I looked at my Teacher in amazement.” (End quote.)
Ellen and John are great saints – salt not only of the earth but the salt of heaven too; light not only of the world but light that shines even in that heavenly country. Ellen and John show us these delights; they teach us this Way. But like ordinary Sarah Smith of Golders Green, the salt always enriches someone else; the light always shines not on the saint himself but on the wondrous world around us.
Grieve, and keep grieving, for these beloved friends of ours. But hear also these great words of comfort, consolation, and also challenge:
You are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world.
***
Preached at the Holy Eucharist with the Commendation and Committal of Ellen and John Hill, November 1, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Psalm 23
Matthew 5:13-16