All Saints' Sunday 2025

On All Saints' Day, James celebrates the extraordinary company of the faithful — those remembered and those forgotten — and reflects on what it means to belong to a community that spans death itself.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

And so, Heavenly Father, as we come to reflect on your words this morning, would you reveal to us the glory of your Son, that we may be transformed into His likeness. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Please do take a seat. I must confess this morning that uh today's festival of all saints is uh one of those festivals that gives my inner Protestant the heebie jeebies. Uh grew up in a very low evangelical church. These are the sorts of festivals around the saints that I'm, you know, probably least comfortable with. And I remember uh Hannah and I a few years ago went to Seville in Spain, and I just really couldn't cope with uh all the shrines to Mary and and and kind of all the pageantry. Uh it it we didn't really suit my own instincts. And so um I have come to really love the saints and value their place within our tradition and our church, but um I come with that instinct to these texts and to our worship this morning, and so uh please do forgive me uh if I um uh veer off into itchiness at various points this morning. Um let me start by saying this, uh, and you'll see where I'm going with it. We begin All Saints' Day by remembering the communion of saints, by remembering that we are all saints, that each one of us can look ourselves in the mirror and say, I am a saint of God. And when we think about the communion of saints, we might want to think about it in terms of geography and in terms of time, space and time. We have in, let's start with time, shall we? We have in Revelation 21 this amazing picture of John looking at the end of time, and what does he see? He sees the home of God is among mortals. He sees this vision where the former things he says have passed away, and he lists them. Death, mourning, crying, and pain have all gone. But what remains? Communion. Communion with God and communion with one another. People from every tribe and nation gathered around the throne room of grace in God's presence and in the presence of one another. So at the end of time, we are left with communion, the communion of the saints of God. And in the other thing that we start today is remembering, which of course we're doing this evening in our all-soul service and next week on Remembrance Sunday. But now is also a time to look back, to remember those saints who have died. In fact, that is where the saints, this service came from originally, as early as the second century, Christians as they gathered, remembered the martyrs who had died in faithful obedience to Christ. And so we look back and remember the communion of saints, and we look forward and see that one day all that will be left is communion. That's time. What about geography? We stand here, we sit here with a globe hanging above uh our heads, and today is a good day to remember that we are in communion with Christians around the world. People with whom we have almost nothing in common, people with whom we have huge disagreements. The Anglican communion is fracturing at this time. I won't go into why and the problems with that, but we have to be aware that there are big disagreements with Christians around the world. Christians in Nigeria, Christians in America who share almost nothing in common and have huge disagreements around their sexual ethic. But the thing they do agree on is who Jesus is and their love for him. Christians in China in persecution, Christians in Gaza, Christians all around the world, who, in some mystical way, we are joined in communion with, who we might disagree on almost everything, except who Jesus is. And so that's the communion of saints that we are gathered around the table together. But today is also about the saints, capital T, capital S, those people whose names we know. Saint Mary, Saint Paul, for example, the two saints very particular to this church. Let me suggest this morning that there is no material difference between the saints and each one of us as saints in God's communion. The difference is not material but vocational. The saints were and are lovers of God who have been marked by holiness and are commissioned by God for specific tasks in the world. Or you could say that the saints have a divine vocation to no longer live for themselves, but to birth and serve the church. Or you could say that the saints are helpful because they give us a vision of what we could each be if we were to stop resisting grace. Let me say that again. The saints are helpful because they give us a picture of what it could be like, what our lives could be like if we were to stop resisting grace. And so it's very important that we don't see them as celebrities or superheroes, because that completely undercuts their primary purpose as normal human beings who show us the way of divine life in our life. They have to be like us because that's how they show us what being a Christian can really be like. That's I think part of the fine balance that we need to find this morning as we celebrate this important festival. That we give special attention to the vocation and the unique people, and we but we don't, that the saints are, but we don't turn the saints into celebrities or superheroes, thereby losing the truth that their holiness is deeply human. It's the full flowering of a grace that is intended for each one of us. So, if the saints are reminded are there to remind us who we are called to be, how can their witness actually shape our own discipleship today? Let me suggest a couple of ways. Firstly, the saints of God, capital T, capital S, show each one of us what it means to know. What it means to know. In the saints, we see that to know is to love, and that to be in the world is to know that we are loved, and that there is no genuine knowledge of anyone else, things or people without love for the other. The only way to know them is to love them. I think this is deeply missing in our society today. We try to grasp knowledge without love, and we're left either with this uh insecurity that we can't really know anything, or confidence that knowledge is power. Knowledge without love is cold, technologizing, powerful. But the saints teach us that knowledge divorced from love becomes hollow. And so they don't try to be analysts, but participation, participants in the truth. Saint Francis of Assisi shows us this vividly. He was born in 1181 to a prosperous merchant family. He enjoyed all the privileges of being a young Italian noble: money, fine clothes, admiration, and he dreamed of chivalry, and so he went to war seeking glory. It didn't work out very well for him, and he returned sick and disillusioned. During his long recovery, Francis heard Christ speaking from a crucifix in a crumbling and broken down church. The voice said this, Francis, repair my church which is falling into ruin. And so he took the commandment literally at first and went about rebuilding that very church that he was in. But as he did so, he realized that the church, the voice that he had heard, was calling him not just to rebuild that church, but the whole church. And so he began a radical life of poverty and joy. He renounced his father's wealth, he clothed himself in rags, and he began to live among the lepers, preaching repentance and peace. He becomes the saint of creation, which is one of the reasons I wanted to reflect on his life this morning, and he's known for preaching to the birds and caring particularly for the earth and the world in which we live. He spoke of the sun as his brother and the moon as his sister. Francis knew the creation, but he knew it because he was in communion with it. He did not try to master the world, he belonged to it. And his knowledge was not cold, technologizing, or powerful, it was participatory. He knew the world by blessing it, by speaking to it as his kin, and by seeing within it a divine presence shimmering through it. The second thing that the that the saints, capital T, capital S, help us as saints in the communion of God do is to know and to see, to see the world differently. This is Jesus' vision in the Beatitudes read for us this morning in Matthew's gospel. Jesus looks at the world and he sees that blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed are those who mourn, and blessed are the meek. And you say to Jesus, that's absolutely mad. That's not the world that I see. When I turn on the news and when I open my social media feed, what I see is a world in which the rich are blessed, the powerful are blessed, a world in which the strong and the mighty rule the world. Jesus says, No, I see a world in which the re the meek will inherit the kingdom. Jesus sees a world turned upside down, and if it looks upside down to us, can I suggest that we are the ones, marred by sin, who are upside down? Jesus is the only person who sees the world the right way up. Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta is a modern witness to what that kind of sight can look like. She was born in 1910 in what is now North Macedonia, and she joined the sisters of Loreto, aged 18. She lived in that community for 20 years, living quite a quiet and stable life as a school teacher, until in 1948 she travelled by train to a retreat and she received what she called a call within a call. Christ, she said, spoke to her heart, and he asked her to leave the covenant in which she lived and to join the poorest of the poor. And so she started the missionaries of charity who clothed and fed and cared for the destitute in the streets of Calcutta. Mother Teresa looked at those poor people and she saw something beautiful. She looked and she said, Each one of them is Jesus in disguise. This is the vision of the beatitudes that Jesus gives us lived out for us in real life. Jesus says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn. And he's not trying to sentimentalize suffering, he's revealing, he's showing us, he's asking us to look again at a world, to see it from God's, from heaven's perspective. This is the way that the saints, capital T, capital S, see the world. And they invite us to look again. They look at what is broken and perceive a hidden glory. They look at weakness and see strength. They look at loss and see hope. So Francis teaches us what it means to know the world, knowledge transfigured by love, a knowing that participates in the life of God rather than trying to control the things of this world. And Mother Teresa teaches us what it means to see as a saint, to look upon the world, and especially the poor, with the eyes of Christ. And lastly, this points us to the most important thing that the saints do. The saints, capital T, capital S, invite each one of us as saints of God to see and to know Jesus. The saints, I suggest, are not spectacles to admire, but signposts to follow. They're not spectacles to admire, but signposts to follow. They do not replace Christ, but they reveal him. They are, as one theologian says, living exegetes of the life of Christ. They translate the divine life and divine love into human action. And so when Jesus declares, Blessed are the poor in spirit, if we're struggling to know what that means, we can look to the life of Francis and to the life of Teresa. And they remind us, they show us what it looks like. Saints make us an offer, an offer of a way to live. But it's an echo and it's a shadow of an offer that has already been made to us in Jesus. And sometimes it's easier to hear the echo, and sometimes it's easier to see the shadow, because we live echo echoey and shadowy lives. And so sometimes it's easier to hear the vo hear the offer of grace through an echo and a shadow. And sometimes people would say it's harder and gets more complicated and gets more confusing. I just want to go to the direct source. And that, my friends, is the big disagreement between Protestants and Catholics about the communion of saints. If I could put it as simply in as in those terms, you get to choose. Does the echo and the shadow help you, or would you rather not worry about it? That's up to you to decide. But it's the offer that's important. Live the life of grace. See the world the way it truly is. Know the truth in love, and know the truth by loving. This is the offer of Jesus' life, available to us through his death and resurrection. It is a life of death and resurrection, that by grace and through faith you can die to yourself and be reborn. Dead to your yesterdays, dying afresh each day, so that you might be reborn to new life. A life where you can re-see and re-know the goodness of God and really know what it means to live the blessed life that Jesus describes on that mountain 2,000 years ago. That is the calling of sainthood which is open to each one of us. And the saints, capital T, capital S, give us a picture as ordinary saints in our day-to-day life of what that life would look like. They invite us to follow the person that they are already following. As Saint Paul once wrote in a letter, follow me as I follow Christ. That is the call of the saints. They say to each one of us this morning, Come and drink from the cup that gave me life. Come and eat the bread which has saved me, so that you can be like me in as much as I am like Jesus. Amen.