God Has Swallowed Death (Isaiah 25:6-9)

November 3, 2024

All Saints’ Day 

Three days following the death of Mandy Mildon, two days before election day, and ten days before to the State of Idaho’s scheduled execution of Tom Creech.

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There is a verse in the Psalms, Psalm 16:3, that says,

As for the saints who are in the land,

they are the noble, in whom is all my delight.

The psalms are prayers. Here, the person praying is thanking God for the presence and work of saints in the place that she lives.

In both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, the word translated into English as “saints” comes from the adjective “holy.” The saints are, literally, “holy ones.” Holiness has to do with devotion, being set apart for something particular, being wholeheartedly committed to a single purpose.

Psalm 16:3 describes the saints as “noble” – some other translations say “excellent.” That word’s root meaning is wideness. It’s a word used to describe the grandeur and expanse of the sea. Something is excellent or noble because it inspires us, fills us with awe.

So, the saints feel big. Which is not to say famous or proud or removed from ordinary life. The saints don’t necessarily fill up a room or draw attention to themselves. No, they are right here, walking among us every day. But if you’ve ever been in the presence of a person who delights and inspires you with their purity of heart, clarity of vision, and commitment to mercy and justice, you’ve probably been in the presence of a saint. The saints don’t lecture. They live. And by living they make us want more for our own lives.

When the scriptures speak of saints, they almost always refer to people in the here and now, those who are in the land. For example, the Apostle Paul regularly addresses the recipients of his letters as saints. The saints in Rome. The saints in Ephesus. Yet Christians also believe in what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the communion of saints,” which includes the saints who’ve gone before us in life and in death. The departed saints are still with us. They continue their life in God, and God is with us here and now. Through memory, story, and, in some traditions, prayer, the departed saints continue their presence with us. They encourage, challenge, and inspire us.

The prophetic vision from Isaiah 25 tells of a time when all humanity will come together for a joyful and extravagant feast. All people will be God’s guests, and therefore they will be one another’s tablemates. All people will be fed with the best that God can give, “rich food filled with marrow” and “well aged wines strained clear.” It won’t matter whether they were rich or poor, Republicans or Democrats, foreign born or native born. It won’t matter if they had clean records or criminal records. It won’t matter where they fell on the spectrums of ability or skin tone, dialect or gender identity. All people, Isaiah says, will be gathered to the mountain, seated at the table, and fed with God’s food.

I think that a saint is made when this vision gets planted deep in a person’s heart and imagination. Saints are people who have glimpsed the glory of God’s purposes. And once they’ve glimpsed it, they find they’ve been grasped by it. Humankind gathered around the abundant table – that vision won’t let the saints go. They begin to place their whole lives in service of that vision. What they want most of all is to experience and help others experience the joy of God’s table in whatever ways they can. We are called to be saints. We are called to catch this vision. It’s what we practice seeing and enacting whenever we gather around this table.

For us to do this table-setting and community-creating work, we need to trust God to deal with death and all the ripple-effects of death – despair, agony, guilt, and disgrace. God needs to do what none of us can do – tear off the heavy weight of hopelessness, wipe tears from our eyes, get rid of our shame once and for all. This, too, is part of the vision. God will destroy the things that keep us from the feast.

There is another verse in the Psalms, Psalm 69:15, that says.

Do not let the floodwaters engulf me

or the depths swallow me up

or the pit close its mouth over me.

The psalmist is describing what it feels like when we are touched by death. It is overwhelming, engulfing, subsuming. When we are in the raw emotional states of grief and fear, it is as though something wants to drag us down into a bottomless place. We can feel like there is not room for anything else; our pain consumes us. The psalmist describes depths that swallow, a pit with a mouth. Malice and menace. And all she can manage is a desperate plea: “God, don’t let it happen.”

If we are going to eat at God’s table and not be consumed by death, then God needs to deal with death. And Isaiah says something startling. He says that God will “swallow up death forever.” So while we feast on rich food and well-aged wine, God dines on death.

God will eat death. God will take death into God’s own being, God’s own body. God will consume death and metabolize it into something new. God and death do not stand on equal footing. Death is within God. God has set a boundary for death, a limit for death. Death can’t take us away from God, far from God. To die is to continue in God. There is no death or diminishment we can experience – grief, sickness, displacement, imprisonment, guilt – that happens outside of, beyond, or without God. God has swallowed death.

The saints are those who trust that God has swallowed death in Christ. This part of Isaiah’s vision has come to pass. Jesus emptied himself of divine power and privilege. He took on the frailty and beauty of human life. He joined us on the ground. And he suffered. He suffered temptation and disgrace. He was lied to and lied about. He was threatened, hunted, and schemed against. He was betrayed by his friend and sold for silver. He was sentenced to death in a sham trial, and then imprisoned, tortured, and executed. He was abandoned by his friends and even forsaken by God. In all this, God in Jesus was swallowing death, taking our pain and suffering into himself, becoming fully united with our whole experience.

The saints know that because of the Jesus’ complete solidarity with us, in life and in death, there is now no God-forsaken person or God-forsaken place. And so they can carry their vision of the feast into the houses of the bereaved. They can testify to and demand abundance in places of despair. They can go into nursing homes, hospital rooms, prison cells, war-torn countries, dangerous neighborhoods, hostile school board meetings, or ravaged ecosystem and work toward the promise and possibility of God’s feast.

Friends, a beloved member of our church who worked for the church died this week, and her family is reeling with guilt and grief. This week we will vote, and no matter what the outcome is, there will be an outpouring of anger from nearly half the country. In ten days, the State of Idaho plans to ritually kill an old, repentant man. And that is to say nothing of the burdens each of us is carrying.

As the Church, as the Body of Christ, we have to keep our hearts and imaginations fixed on the feast, and we have to remember that Christ has taken death into the life of God. He is there, before the throne of the Father, interceding for us. His body still has the wounds and the scars. No matter what happens, nothing happens outside of or without God. We are called to work for joy and belonging and abundance, to manifest these things in the world, knowing that God has swallowed death, and we are the Body called to metabolize it into something new.

Amen.