November 1, 2026 – All Saint’s Day
Blessed in the Middle
Ecclesiastes 3:1-15, Matthew 5:1-12
Rev. Caitlin C. T. Johnson
If you are arriving here this morning carrying a heavy exhaustion – not because of the time change, or a wild Halloween night, but just because of life – you are in the right place. On this All Saints’ Day, we gather in a culture obsessed with options. We can optimize our calendars, customize our morning routines, and consult artificial intelligence to plan out our ideal week in seconds. We live with an unprecedented illusion that everything is up to us: where we live, how we work, who we hang out with, how we curate our lives. We can do it all. And yet, if we are honest, most of us walked into this sanctuary completely worn out.
Because beneath the illusion of endless choice lies a quieter and deeper truth: the most defining parts of our lives are usually things we never chose. We didn’t choose our family of origin. We didn’t choose the body that gets tired or breaks down. We didn’t choose the diagnosis, the layoff, or the phone call that changed everything. Limits aren’t always options we select — more often, they are conditions we are handed.
The writer of Ecclesiastes — who calls himself Qohelet, the Teacher — ran an experiment on this very dynamic. He had all the power, wealth, and freedom in the world. In the first two chapters of his book, he tries everything: wisdom, luxury, pleasure, and ambition. And his conclusion to total freedom and endless choice? The Hebrew word we learned a few weeks ago: Hevel. It means Breath. Vapor. A puff of smoke. Meaningless. Hevel is the painful distance between what we expected our life to look like, and what actually happened. It is the wisdom that comes after a hoped-for story falls apart, and a new one is being built in its place.
In the movie Boyhood, which follows a boy from about age six until he leaves for college, there is a scene near the end that captures this exact ache. His mother is watching him pack up his room, and after an exchange, she sits crying at the table. She laments in a tone that many of us can identify with:
“This is the worst day of my life. I knew this day was coming, it’s just… I didn’t know you’d be so happy to be leaving. You know what I’m realizing? My life is just going to go…. …You know what’s next? Huh? My funeral! I just… thought there would be more. “
We can do all the things and still find ourselves unfulfilled, or at least differently filled than we had expected. We just thought there would be more.
Today, on All Saints, we are given space to sit with our limits. We don’t have enough places to be honest about what we’ve lost, what has stayed out of reach, and who we grieve even years later. Today we are also given the freedom to ask what it means to be fully alive, right now.
Because the life God gives us — our particular life, in our particular time, with particular people, in a particular place — might just be what it means to be fully alive. It might just be the “more” we’ve been looking for.
Listen again to a few lines of the poem: A time to be born, and a time to die… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance… a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. Those are some hard pairings. The Teacher is telling the truth. Life, no matter what you’ve heard, is not a board game. You can’t roll a six and skip ahead. You take each square as it comes, not in any standard order, on the board you’ve been given, in the life you’ve been given. And goodness, that makes some of us want to protest.
The poem isn’t telling us there is a good time for each of these things. It is simply noticing that each one has its time, an unavoidable time. There isn’t a good time to mourn. The phone call comes, and we wail. Nothing is left out of this list. There is a time to kill, a time to throw away, a time to hate, a time for war. This isn’t the creation story. The poem does not call these things good. But it names them true. They are part of time.
Then the Teacher writes: “God has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, God has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
There is a sense of the whole placed in our hearts, the Teacher says, and yet we cannot see it all. We are given this longing for a larger story, and we can’t satisfy it. But goodness knows, we want to. It’s as if each of us is handed a piece of a puzzle, yet none of us gets to see the picture on the box.
And a few lines later, he adds: whatever God does endures; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. There is no editing God’s work.
This is what the Teacher tells us about God. God holds every season — the ones we would choose and the ones we never would. And we don’t get to see the whole picture. Notice what he does not say. He doesn’t say everything happens for a reason. He doesn’t say it was just their time. He only says that God holds the times, and we cannot see how it all fits. Some hear no choice at all in a text like this. Others hear one small, but enormous, choice: how we meet what comes.
Qohelet takes us right to the edge of human capability. He shows us the frame of our lives — held by God, full of seasons we didn’t choose — and reminds us that we cannot optimize life to get the “more” we long for. All we can do, he says, is receive the ordinary goodness of today: eat, drink, enjoy your work, and receive it as God’s gift.
Where Qohelet leaves us holding our limits, Jesus steps directly into them. When Jesus sits on the hillside in Matthew 5, he looks out at a crowd of people who know all about limits. Imagine the scene: families settling into the grass. Children running through, laughing. Teenagers leaning against their parents, pulling up grass one blade at a time, searching for stories in the clouds. The adults leaning in. We don’t know much about them, but they are seekers, and they are carrying real lives — chronic pain, financial anxiety, broken hearts, and unfulfilled dreams.
We sometimes hear the Beatitudes as a list of ways to live in order to have a blessed life, or to be worthy of being called a saint. We resonate with that. Qohelet knew that kind of promise too: if you do this, that will happen. But when he tested that formula against the real world, it collapsed. He found that striving after perfection was just another way of chasing after the wind. And so do we. We can do all the right things and make all the right choices, and still look over our lives and whisper, “I thought there would be more than this.”
But Jesus isn’t giving exhausted people a to-do list. Jesus looks at their actual, unoptimized, limited lives — and before they change a single thing, he speaks blessing right into the middle of them.
To be fully alive is to be fully alive in your body, in your time, in your family, in your city, with your work — maybe even with your weird hip, and your hard-to-talk-to daughter-in-law, and your children who do not sleep at sleeping hours, your sleep apnea, your fear, your nagging worry that shows up every day without fail. To be fully alive is not to try harder to optimize them.
You are aware of your limits, I know you are. You are a person, and that means you will die. You have a body, and some of your future is out of your control no matter how well you eat, or how many supplements you take, or how faithfully you see your therapist. You have people you are responsible to, by blood and by choice.
But Jesus does not let that be the final word. The people living inside limits are the ones Jesus calls blessed. You see, the God who holds every season didn’t stay out of them. The apostle Paul writes that when the fullness of time had come, God sent the Son, born of a woman (Galatians 4:4). The God who created time stepped into time. The God who holds every season entered this one. God took on a body that got tired, lived in a particular town, with particular friends, inside really human limits. That is the God who meets us here – right in the middle of our time.
And Jesus steps right into our partial, limited lives… and speaks something over them…
There is a time to mourn.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Not blessed are those who are finished mourning. Not blessed are those who can hold their tears in, or who are back to normal by the first Christmas. Some of us are in that season right now. Some of us have been in it for years. Jesus doesn’t hurry us out of it. He speaks a blessing right into the middle of it.
There is a time to lose.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
For the ones who lost the job, or the marriage, or the version of yourself you thought you’d be by now. For the ones running on empty this morning. The kingdom isn’t a prize for getting it together. It is yours now.
There is a time for war, and a time for peace.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Not the peace-lovers. Not the peace-keepers, who keep things quiet so no one gets upset. The peace-makers. Peace is something you make, with your hands, with your heart, and usually when it would be easier not to.
This is for the ones breaking generational cycles, who decided the yelling, the silence, the contempt stops with them. For the ones who will spend this Tuesday working the polls, signing in their neighbors and handing out stickers, so that people who disagree can still decide things together, peacefully. For the ones who stay at the Thanksgiving table. For the kid who sits down next to the one eating lunch alone. For the ones who get the call at two in the morning, and go without a second thought.
They aren’t just keeping the peace. They are the ones reflecting the very heart of God.
And finally… there is a time to be born, and a time to die.
There is a beginning and there is an end. The Teacher doesn’t pretend otherwise, and neither should we. But “a time to die” is not the final word: Because Jesus entered our time. He took on our mortality. And God raised him from the dead. Resurrection means that death is a threshold, not a wall.
In a moment we will say the names of the saints who have died this year. Every one of them lived the life they were given, just like you are. They didn’t get to skip squares on the board, no matter who they were. They had their own limits and their own gifts, their own particular people and their own particular place. They wept and they laughed. They planted, and they pulled weeds.
And over every one of their particular lives, Jesus spoke the same word he speaks over yours.
So as we hear their names, listen for it underneath each one:
Blessed.
We thought there would be more. Jesus doesn’t come offering more options, or more productivity, or some kind of more optimized version of your life. Jesus offers blessing. He offers his presence right in the middle of the life you actually have.
And maybe today, we can begin to hear that word spoken over our own lives, too. Not in spite of our circumstances — but blessed, right in the middle of them.