For All The Saints

The Four and Twenty Elders, William Blake

All Saints Day remains one of my very favorite days of the year. These ruminations are an edited version of a sermon I preached a dozen years ago on All Saints Sunday at St. Francis Church in Holden, where I was serving as rector at the time. The lectionary is on a three-year cycle, so the texts are the same this year as they were twelve years ago for this coming Sunday, including the one from the seventh chapter of John's Revelation.

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“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) If you sit down to read the Bible and start at the very beginning (a very good place to start!) then those are the very first words you will read. What follows is really a prayer; a litany that makes the theological claim that in spite of the chaos we sometimes experience in the world and in our own lives, God is still creatively ordering that chaos. God speaks the Word and worlds emerge: sun and moon and stars and oceans and deserts and mountains and wildflowers and trees and sparrows and turtles and whales and every living thing. And God saw that it was good.  And there is evening and there is morning, the first day; the second day, the third day…until finally there is a day of rest. And God pronounces that it is all exceedingly good.

At the other end of the Bible—in the final chapters of the last book of the Bible, we hear in the Revelation of St. John about a new creation: “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” John lived in the midst of a decaying Roman empire. The world around him was literally coming apart at the seams. He knew chaos! But contrary to the ways that this book is sometimes read and interpreted, John isn’t looking for the rapture. He isn’t looking for a divine rescue attempt that will beam him up to heaven. John of Patmos is a mystic who believes the prayer Jesus taught his disciples: “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” At the end of days, as John imagines things, it is not human beings who will join God in heaven, but God who will join human beings on earth:

I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…and I heard a loud voice…saying: ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples and God himself will be with them….

On the Feast of All Saints we read from the seventh chapter of that oft-misunderstood vision. John offers us a glimpse of his vision for community, a vision of heaven that is meant to challenge us here on earth.

After this I, John, looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!"

Like John of Patmos, we live in between that first good creation and that second new creation. We live in a world that sometimes feels like it is coming unglued and we sometimes live lives where the chaos threatens to overwhelm whatever order and pattern we may try to bring to our daily lives. The mystical vision shared with us in the last book of the Bible is not meant to predict the future like some reader of Tarot cards or palms might do. Nor is it meant to instill fear in our hearts. Or, worse still, to assure us that we are right and our neighbors who disagree with us will be tossed into some fiery lake or “left behind.”

Rather, this vision is given to the Church and shared down through the ages to encourage us to keep on keeping on. It is given to instill hope in our hearts by encouraging us to keep moving toward that New Jerusalem and that new Washington, DC and that new Massachusetts. We are meant to imagine that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us down through the ages cheering us on: Peter and Paul and Thomas and Mary Magdalene and Martha and Mary; Justin and Clement and Agnes and Irenaeus and Jerome and Augustine; Benedict and Dominic and Francis and Clare and Julian and Catherine and Columba and Cranmer and Luther and Calvin and Ignatius—right down to this present day.

When we die, life is changed, not ended. So those saints who left a mark on our lives are still with us today. For they lived not only in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still. The world is filled with the saints of God and you can meet them at work or at school or at play and even over tea (or a cup of coffee or a single malt scotch, neat.) This Feast Day is a wonderful celebration of what the Celtic mystics sometimes call a “thin place”—that place where the gap between the living and the dead feels smaller. Our annual All Hallows Eve celebrations invite us to ponder the great mysteries of life and death by remembering the ancestors who have gone before us and giving thanks for their lives and their witness. We feebly struggle while they in glory shine; yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. Alleluia! Alleluia!

We know how the story ends. Not the details, of course. The Book of Revelation isn’t some secret code that needs to be broken so we can be sure to be ready for Christ’s return on January 4, 2025 or October 16, 2027. It is a vision given so that we might not lose heart, a vision given so that we can become more faithful and courageous disciples in this time and place, by bearing witness to the new creation that God is bringing about. Above all else we are meant to remember that nothing can separate us from the love of God made known to us in Jesus Christ. Nothing. Not even death.

The Book of Revelation and this Feast of All Saints are given to the Church so that we will not be afraid to do the work God calls us to. This vision is given as a gift that allows us to peek at the end of the story so that we will be less afraid to live these days with courage and boldness. Those white-robed martyrs knew the costs of discipleship and some of them paid with their lives for insisting that Jesus is Lord. But now they sing because what else do you do in the presence of God but feel true joy? If you listen closely you can hear them singing with the angels and archangels, a heavenly chorus: Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!

That is the Church and that is what the Church is for: not a collection of individuals, each of whom stands alone, but a Body with many members stretching through time and around the planet. A choir of the living and the dead. We need each other to sing those rich, complex harmonies that God so adores. We need each other to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God. We need each other because sometimes when life is scary, you need to hold on tight to someone’s hand to make it through.  

We are on a journey together toward that vision John has of a great multitude that no one can count from every language and tribe and people and nation. And our work is to get used to the fact that everyone in the Kingdom of God doesn’t look like us or speak the same language or sing the same songs or agree with our politics. Our job, as the Church, begins with the practice of hospitality and openness and love until we start to get it right, so that when we find ourselves among that cloud of witnesses we won’t be too surprised by the richness of it all.

We need the Church, not to be an institution that perpetuates itself or a security blanket, but to be a living Body with many members that is moving toward God’s new creation. We live between the Garden of Eden and the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, in the midst of extraordinary challenges globally, nationally, and locally. But we face those challenges with hope.