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Humanity longs to be connected—this deep human hunger to belong, to not be lost in the vast machinery of the world. Six degrees of separation, they call it. The church is no different. Even amid a rise in secularism, this All Saints Sunday shows us the relevance of God’s vision of connection, which Presiding Bishop Yehiel Curry is emphasizing this year.
But here is the law, and the law is not gentle. It is not distance from each other that is our deepest wound. It is distance from God. We have built cathedrals of busyness—deadlines, meetings, decent and indecent proposals—brick by brick, until the gap between us and the Holy One yawns wide as a canyon. This is sin, what theologians call our fundamental alienation, and no app, no algorithm of “friends of friends,” can close it. The law strips our illusions of self-sufficiency. It says: You are not as close to God as you think, and you cannot get there on your own steam. That is the bad news, and a gospel too cheaply offered is no gospel at all.
But then—then, beloved—comes the gospel, not a strategy or a five-step plan but an announcement breaking in from outside us, gratuitous and unearned, like grace always is. John, exiled on Patmos, sees a vision: a great multitude, more than the eye can count, from every nation and tongue, standing before the throne and the Lamb, robed in white, crying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-17). They don’t say salvation belongs to their good works or their sophistication. Salvation belongs to God and to the Lamb. Full stop. And that gift names the nearness we cannot achieve ourselves.
The old Latin phrase for this is coram Deo—before the face of God. No degree of separation. This nearness is not achieved; it is received. Martin Luther knew it in his bones—we are simultaneously sinner and saint, simul justus et peccator, bound by the law’s verdict against us and yet freed by the gospel’s verdict for us. Who are the robed multitudes? Not the best, the brightest, the most credentialed—they came out of the great ordeal, bloodied by life, their robes washed white not by their own effort but by the Lamb. Grace meeting us in the wreckage.
Now let me push us further, because the gospel doesn’t let us stop at comfort. We call ourselves a connected church, proudly ecumenical, sitting at tables with 70 million Lutherans worldwide. We have, praise God, majority-minority faces now leading our councils. Yet, the law must speak again: Walk into most of our sanctuaries on Sunday morning and you will find one of the most segregated hours in American life. A Black or Brown face at the head of the table does not undo a pale, monochrome body in the pews. That is decoration, not connection. Ecumenism on paper is not deep democracy in practice.
Racism is not merely a sin out there to critique from a distance. It is lodged in our institutional bloodstream, a degree of separation we have baptized and called normal. We have confused diversity in the org chart with communion in the pew. A church that celebrates its global fellowship while remaining locally pale has not reckoned with its own coram Deo. You can’t stand fully before the face of God while turning your face from your neighbor of a different hue.
No degree of separation—not by race, not by pew, not by pulpit.
But the same blood that washes the robes of “every nation” is not abstraction. It is a summons. If that great multitude is genuinely multiracial and multilingual, our churches are called to be a present-tense rehearsal of that future, not a promise deferred to glory.
What does this look like? First, courageous dialogue that doesn’t flinch—congregations sitting in real discomfort together, naming histories of exclusion and the ways “welcome” has meant “assimilate to whiteness.” Truth-telling before reconciliation; law before gospel, always.
Second, shared power, not shared photographs—majority-minority leadership at the top matched by shared decision-making in worship planning, budgets and pulpits so diversity isn’t tokenism.
Third, pulpit exchange as spiritual discipline: a Black Lutheran preaching in a pale rural parish, a white pastor sitting as a student in a Hmong or Latiné congregation, hymnody cross-pollinated until it sounds like the actual multitude John saw.
Fourth, sustained covenant partnerships between congregations across racial lines—maintained for years, tested by conflict, seasoned by honest confession—because a single “Unity Sunday” changes nothing.
This is what coram Deo is all about—in the committee meeting, the pulpit swap, the uncomfortable conversation about who holds power in this room. The saints did not earn their white robes through comfort; they emerged from the great ordeal. So must we. Our ordeal is racism disguised as fellowship. But the same blood that washed them can wash us clean of our complacency if we name the wound honestly and do the slow, sacred work of repair.
No myth. No kidding. No degree of separation—not by race, not by pew, not by pulpit. Coram Deo, together or not at all.
