Today marks the end of Hallowtide, the three days in the Christian liturgical calendar made up of Halloween or All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day. Last Sunday we marked the joyful, mischievous, costumed community celebration of Halloween. During our prayer time today we honored All Souls, remembering those close to us who have passed and there will be another opportunity to remember and honor our ancestors this coming Friday when Jerrie leads a Samhain vespers. But that in-between day, All Saints, isn’t really celebrated by Unitarian Universalists. We don’t formally venerate saints and there are good theological reasons for that. As scientific rationalists we chafe at the miracle requirements of sainthood. The idea that some of us are more holy than others doesn’t square with our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of each person. We’ve been working hard to push back on the toxicity of a belief in human perfectionism and constant upward progress that makes us feel like we aren’t good enough as we are. And the martyrdom so often associated with sainthood brings deep discomfort. A belief in suffering as redemptive has caused so much pain and damage. As UU minister and theologian Rebecca Parker has explored in her work, it has caused people to stay in abusive relationships; to accept violence and oppression with the belief their reward will come in the by and by. We are rightfully cautious about any theology that considers violence and death worth the price paid.
And yet, for me, there are questions in my heart that All Saints day invites me to explore in ways the other days don’t. Whose example do I follow when I’m discerning what it means to live into my faith, to live into my values? How am I called to be better in this moment in which we live? Not perfect of course, but how can I show up with more love, commitment and compassion? I don’t think it’s always a bad thing to interrogate if I’m living up to values I profess. And how do I make sense of acts of self-sacrificial love? We might not believe suffering is redemptive but we all know of people who have suffered, sacrificed, and even died standing up for love and justice. How do we process that? Honor it? What do we take from it? They aren’t easy questions but they are important. And they feel extremely present in these days when so many of our sacred values are under attack. As I watch my colleagues and friends show up with their physical bodies to protect democracy and our immigrant neighbors. As I watch activists arrested and clergy pepper sprayed and hit with rubber bullets. Hallowtide is a time of honoring and remembering, of wrestling with death and celebrating lives lived in love. What better time to reflect on these questions?
In a reflection on All Saints Day, my friend and Episcopal priest Brit Frazier writes, “Saints aren’t perfect people. They aren’t angels or superhuman demi-gods. They are simply people of faith who continue, throughout their lives, to say “yes” to loving God. They may do brave things or smart things or holy things - but all of those things are simply parts of what it means for them to say “yes” when God calls them. They continue in love, and sometimes they stumble, but sanctity is the slow, steady work of a continuous “yes” to the Living God.”
One of the figures from our own history who most exemplifies this definition is Rev. James Reeb. James Reeb was born in Kansas in 1927. He served in the army during World War II and after leaving the army pursued higher education, graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary. Reeb was ordained a Presbyterian minister before eventually becoming a Unitarian in 1957. He was called to serve my home congregation, All Souls Church in Washington D.C.. At the time it was a majority white congregation in a racially diverse neighborhood, and Reeb was active in developing programs focused on poverty alleviation and racial justice.
But Reeb had spent much of his career trying to figure out where he could do the most good and by 1964, he was increasingly convinced that wasn’t parish ministry. He tried to work with the denomination to find a congregation where he could make an impact but wrote to a friend, “the department of ministry assures me they will get my name on lists of desirable churches. If there is anything I'm not interested in, it is joining the list of those looking for desirable churches. What the hell is a desirable church?” So Reeb left congregational ministry and took a position in Boston with the American Friends Service Committee focused on desegregating Boston’s public housing program. Reeb moved his wife Marie and their four children into a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston and enrolled his children in the predominantly black public school. Reeb’s daughter Ann recalled that he "was adamant that you could not make a difference for African-Americans while living comfortably in a white community."
Reeb moved to Boston at the height of the Civil Rights movement, shortly following the March on Washington. On March 7th, 1965, civil rights leaders Hosea Williams and John Lewis led protestors across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma Alabama where they were met with horrific violence at the hands of Alabama state troopers. This day became known as Bloody Sunday and Rev. Reeb and his wife watched the news coverage of the attack from their living room in Boston. The next day, March 8th, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. issued a call to clergy of conscience across the US to join him on Tuesday March 9th for a second attempt at marching from Selma to Montgomery. By evening, James Reeb was on a plane heading for Alabama. This was the last day his wife and four children would see him alive.
There was a pending court order against the Tuesday March and Rev. King, Rev. Reeb and the other demonstrators knew that they would be defying Alabama authorities if they crossed the bridge. They also understood that they were putting their bodies and their lives on the line. When clergy gathered at Brown’s chapel on the morning of March 9th, King told them “I would rather die on the highways of Alabama, than make a butchery of my conscience.”
In the end, the marchers gathered, prayed, and then retreated across the bridge, avoiding a potentially violent confrontation. I imagine Reeb’s wife Marie breathed a deep sigh of relief and prayed a prayer of gratitude when she heard the news. Many clergy returned home following March 9th, but Rev. Reeb, always asking where he could do the most good, decided to stay in Selma until the court granted permission for the march.
Later that night, after dining together at an integrated restaurant, Reeb and two other white Unitarian ministers Rev. Clark Olsen and Rev. Orloff Miller were attacked by a group of white men with clubs while leaving the diner. Reeb died of his injuries in a hospital in Birmingham two days later on March 11th. The page on James Reeb from the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University ends with two matter-of-fact sentences: “In April 1965 three white men were indicted for Reeb’s murder; they were acquitted that December. The Voting Rights Act was passed on 6 August 1965.”
For years, I wasn’t sure what this story meant for me. Reeb was held up as an example of how to live out my faith, but it seemed to me that his life was one of serious sacrifice, and that’s not always an easy pill to swallow. I imagine the Disciples and the crowds gathered listening to Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Plain, our scripture reading for today, thinking the same thing. This passage from Luke is similar to the Sermon on the Mount found in the Gospel of Matthew, but it features fewer blessings and adds in those infamous woes. And those woes are what tend to make people a little uncomfortable. So I’m imagining the gathered crowds standing there like, “wait a minute, to be blessed I have to go hungry, weep and endure poverty? And if I escape those conditions, if I have enough to eat, and some money in my pocket and if I find reason to laugh, I’m supposed to just sit around and wait in fear for woes to befall me? But, like any good sermon, this one is not a passive prediction. It is an active call to discipleship. The Gospel tells us Jesus delivers these teachings after naming the 12 apostles and that he does so standing on a level place. He is not asking anything of them he is not also expecting of himself. Here Jesus says, following my way of peace and liberation will bring blessings but there is a cost and that cost is no more and no less than self-sacrificial love.
In writing about the beatitudes, the father of Latin American liberation theology, Gustavo Gutierrez says they are a call to discipleship and discipleship involves “continuously seeking new forms of loving others.” Isn’t this a beautiful framing of what the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain call us to do? To continuously seek new forms of loving others. The results of that might be sacrifice, it might mean giving up some of our pride or money or comfort, it might mean praying for our enemies and loving those we don’t particularly like much. Sometimes, tragically, it means death. After all, German theologian Dorothee Soelle, who was writing in the wake of the Holocaust, says that the cross isn’t merely a theological symbol but the world's answer, given a thousand times over to attempts at liberation. And yet, we are called to never stop seeking new ways of loving others. The call is never towards death, the call is always towards love.
This framing from Gutierrez, that explains what Jesus asks of his disciples in the sermon on the Plain, also helps me understand what it means to follow in the footsteps of James Reeb. Reeb exemplified sainthood not by dying for a cause but by living for love, again and again and again. In his decision to leave the army and pursue ministry, in his decision to leave congregational ministry and work for affordable housing, and in his decision to go to Selma. Even in his decision, the night of his death to eat at an integrated restaurant. Up until the last seconds of his life, he was “continuously seeking new forms of loving others.”
What I most appreciate about this way of framing the risks and sacrifices we are sometimes called to is that it celebrates life—abundant, creative, and continuously new life—over the forces of death. Yes, the calling led Rev. Reeb to Selma, but it also led him to beautiful new chapters in his life. Reflecting many years later on the six months spent in Boston before Rev. Reeb’s death, his wife Marie said they were the happiest months the family spent together. In a letter to a friend during that time, Rev. Reeb writes that his children were enjoying school and his oldest, John, was eager to help integrate his class. “We are all amazingly well,” Reeb wrote in his letter, “I am faced every day to stretch my mind. There are new problems, new ideas and new experiences to deal with. I have seized the bull by the horns. I am doing what seems important. And let the damn torpedoes come.”
In following this call, Rev. Reeb often found himself in opposition to the powers that be. Whether that be the frustrated and befuddled staff of the department of ministry trying to find him a “desirable congregation,” the Boston City Council, Alabama State Troopers, or angry white residents of Selma Alabama. And the hard reality is that sometimes those forces claim victory. But the beautiful thing about this calling we follow is that it is rooted in creativity. It promises that we will find ways to love that the forces of death have not yet imagined, not yet found ways to thwart or stop.
So we are not called to be martyrs, we are called to be creatives. We live our faith most boldly, most prophetically by saying, “We will not stop seeking new ways of loving others.” And that might entail standing up definitively for our neighbors at an ICE facility. It might mean taking a risk to care for a transgender child or a young woman in need of reproductive health care even though a state legislature says you have no right to do so. It might involve risking arrest or injury at a protest or a sit-in. But it can also mean gathering in community, volunteering at a food pantry, sharing a meal, caring for the earth, and dancing defiantly in the midst of a world telling us there is no reason for joy.
As Unitarian Universalists, as people of conscience, as human beings inhabiting a hurting planet, our primary calling, perhaps our only calling, is to continuously seek new forms of loving others. I can not tell you where that call will lead you, what sacrifices it will entail or what joy it will bring, but I can promise you that it is a call worth following. May this season of Hallowtide give us the courage and imagination to do so.
May it be so.
Amen.
© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2025
