Catching the Light - Matthew 5:1-12
The leaves are beginning to change, saved by late October rains. The sweet gums and black gums are first, their deep reds contrasting with the continued green of the oaks. In my yard, both my elderberry and hackberry trees are turning yellow, their leaves soon to be joined by the orange and red of the oaks in the warm, fire-tinged pallet of fall.
I notice leaves in the fall, their colors and contrasts standing visible in a way they don’t through the green of most of the year. But that color reminds me of the work these leaves have been doing since the spring, the vital job of catching the light and turning it toward life.
Ours is a solar powered world—from oil to breakfast—most of the energy of our everyday lives can be traced back to the sun. But while the sun shines on all planets in our system, all twisting in their oblong orbits around the solar pull of gravity, it is only on Earth that the energy is captured and made available to a host of life. It is leaves that are the center of this work, catching light in their cells, turning it to energy and oxygen with chlorophyl. Without leaves we’d be on another dead planet, but with them we have an abundance of life. In this, leaves are blessed things.
Leaves, and their turning, colorful reminders of their presence, comes each year in Arkansas around the same time as All Saints. It is a fitting correlation because when I hear the word “saint,” I think of that beautiful description from Paul’s letter to the Colossians: “the saints in light” (1:12b). Saints, we might say, are how the light gets caught and turned toward energizing the abundant life of the world.
Like leaves, most saints go unnoticed. They live their green lives of simple work, energizing the world, offering it the necessary oxygen for our every breath, but they are easy to miss unless we pay attention. The saints of past and the present are people like most of us, those who are without all the resources of life, who weep and don’t have it all together. They are people who long for justice and often don’t see it. They are those who pray for peace despite the constant onslaught of violence. What makes them saints, those blessed people who make God’s love visible, isn’t the fact of any of these normal human situations or longings. Instead, it was they have turned their lives and longings toward the light of Christ, basking in His radiance and absorbing it into nourishment for the world. It is in this turning toward the light that they provide an opening for the healing love of God against those forces of darkness that seek to undo love and destroy God’s creatures through pride and shame.
In his beautiful little book, Taize: A Meaning to Life, the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément writes that the only answer to the spiral of evil in the world is “by means of [an] openness of heart which allows God to enter the creation: if men and women open themselves freely to God, then the divine energies (energies of goodness, of love and of true creative power) will be able to spring forth in the world.” These are the saints in light, these are the leaves by which God seeks, in the end, to provide healing for the nations (Revelation 22:2).
Such saints are not significant because of any capacities they possess on their own. They are not the best or brightest, or if they are, that is not what makes them radiant with the truest light. As Jesus makes clear in the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, these saints, these blessed ones, include the broken hearted and frustrated, the despised and the desperate. As Clément goes on to write: “Whoever is the most excluded, whoever is the most forgotten, whoever is the most misunderstood, this is God. He looks and asks if there are any hearts that freely let go of themselves and open themselves to him. For if he can enter the world through them, the world will change.”
This is a reality that extends even into death and necessarily passes through it. Leaves don’t exist for their own sake. They turn colors, blaze forth like fire, and die, becoming the humus soil for new life. So it is with the saints. They catch God’s light and carry it within them, sometimes blazing forth with radiance, but in the end dying in order to welcome the life of resurrection, the life in which God’s kingdom takes root, grows, and flourishes. In that death, following the way of the cross, they bring about the ultimate life and light.
Ours is a world full of evil, the soil bare and compacted, trees cut and forests paved over, hatred and fear turning hearts toward the dark. In such a world, I have no hope in governments or economies, technologies or education. Instead, for my part, I find hope in those things that catch the light and turn it toward new energy for life. I find hope in leaves that give oxygen, and lives that are offered for the soil of a new earth. Planting trees and turning our hearts toward God, that is where I find the answer to an unraveling world. It is through trees and saints, I’m convinced, that the healing of the world will come, just as it always has. Amen.