Collect
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: grant us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living that we may come to those inexpressible joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
or
God of holiness, your glory is proclaimed in every age: as we rejoice in the faith of your saints, inspire us to follow their example with boldness and joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Post Communion
God, the source of all holiness and giver of all good things: may we who have shared at this table as strangers and pilgrims here on earth be welcomed with all your saints to the heavenly feast on the day of your kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Readings
Old Testament – Isaiah 25.6–9
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.
It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
Psalm 24.1–6
1 The earth is the Lord’s and all that fills it, ♦
the compass of the world and all who dwell therein.
2 For he has founded it upon the seas ♦
and set it firm upon the rivers of the deep.
3 ‘Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, ♦
or who can rise up in his holy place?’
4 ‘Those who have clean hands and a pure heart, ♦
who have not lifted up their soul to an idol, nor sworn an oath to a lie;
5 ‘They shall receive a blessing from the Lord, ♦
a just reward from the God of their salvation.’
6 Such is the company of those who seek him, ♦
of those who seek your face, O God of Jacob.
Epistle – Revelation 21.1–6a
I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne 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;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’
And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.’
Gospel – John 11.32–44
When Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’
Sermon on All Saints
When we think of all the saints, do we have in mind the book of Revelations? Don’t we rather think about the letters of Paul which speak of the saints in Jerusalem, or the beatitudes which extol the blessed for their virtue. We don’t have visions and portents in our minds’ eye when we think of holy people and those influencers of our lives who have died.
I and many others find the book of Revelations one of the most difficult to understand. The writer gives us prophesies of a future when the Lord and Saviour of all will return in power and might, a figure about whom the gospel of John says
“God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
This adventist Son of God who is to come in the judgement of salvation is also called the Son of Man, a much more understandable image of the person of God. We see Jesus as an incarnate being, just like us – flesh and blood, experiencing the highs and lows of life as we do.
How does this very human picture of Jesus become that very awesome God who terrifies humanity with the end of time and space the end of all life as we know it? How does our meek and mild Jesus, the Lamb of God, become just like the Hindu Shiva, the god of destruction of all created things, or an Oppenheimer who said “I am become death?”
The descriptions of these apocalyptic figures of the end of the world might help us to understand some cosmology from astrophysics in which the scientists speak of the big bangs of many billions of years in the past and the end of the universe as we know it many billions of years in the future. The imagery of eschatological events is scary, beyond our everyday imagination. So monsters come to mind, or the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Does the creation of the world billions of years ago make sense to us in any real way? What about that far distant future? For me, cosmology just sets me in the middle of time and space – it places me here and now. I must act in a way that all remains in a balance between the two “thens”, that very long ago past and the yet to come distant future.
This is a much more philosophical view of time and space than most people have, isn’t it? No one else whom I know takes this long view of life, balancing the weight of all time and the ever-expanding height, depth and width of space.
It places me right here and now and I begin to hear the voices of tradition and the silent future speaking to me. I have to listen because of my being at the very centre of all space and time. When “the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new’”, I am convinced that this renewal is happening here and now. After all, there are wars and rumours of wars and all manner of destruction of all the things we know? Aren’t the four horsemen running amuck right here and now and that is a prelude to the final judgement of creation which is to say, each and every one of us, just as the good book tells us.
Who knows when the King of Glory will enter into this world I inhabit? I certainly don’t know the when of the revelation of all things, when that book with the seven seals will be opened by the one innocent and all powerful Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. When will that judge make an appearance for the final moment of our salvation.
Back to that voice of tradition which speaks through this morning’s reading – Who is seated on the throne? Who speaks with such authority? However, I want to ask this question, “Who listens?” Is anyone else interested in that voice I hear? Perhaps you are and you have never admitted it to anyone else. Perhaps I am deluding myself as I listen to the fantastic ramblings of St John the Divine, as that monk in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” did. These particular voices of tradition are the more outlandish ones people hear, aren’t they? But there are other voices in the tradition, the ones which hide away in tomes in the library skulking behind the dewey decimal numbers between 100 and 300. The philosopher has written at length about how we have gone along one way of thought since the Pre-Socratics, and the same might be said of the theologians of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, that they have followed one particular route through history with a particular view of God’s interaction with the creation.
The philosopher wants us to begin thinking for ourselves, to go back to the beginning and evolve thought anew in, and for, every generation. There are also theologians who have considered the same enterprise within the Church, to think through the notion of salvation anew – to present the message of God to this generation here and now at the centre of all time.
In the 1970s there was radical liberation theology, but what renewed thought has happened since then? Have we started our thinking again lately? What has marked our renewal? Lately, I have been thinking about the Incarnation and how we should look at it again, because of the image of the body our society has. I wonder whether we look at how we are in the world in a balanced way – to get back to that more philosophical understanding of life, where and how we are in space and time. We should consider that we are at the centre of time and space and we are responsible for remembering past tradition and handing on our hopes to future generations. How many generations we look back will give us a more penetrating gaze into the future. Our life binds us to history and our place in the world.
So, you have listened to me prattle on about metaphysical concepts of space and time because we have read a very impressive vision from St John the Divine’s Apocalypse. What does this have to do with All Saints and All Souls, the Sunday we celebrate today? And we haven’t touched the story of the resurrected Lazarus which was our other reading.
I think we have to take the past seriously, to understand the people who have led to this unique point. Here and now we have to remember them all. The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church has called all believers members of the cloud of witnesses, and from the beginning they were called “saints” – so many unnamed and unrecognised people who have propelled us to this moment. We have to remember that we are “the saints” as well, for we have been set apart from the mass of humanity, because we rise up and follow the Lord, making way for all to join in this happy fellowship.
The forgotten of this generation have had a hand in the here and now we experience. They may be as insignificant as I am on the world stage, but they have touched our lives somehow. Years ago a preacher spoke about the irascible saint, the fellow who was spiky and hard to get on with, but he was a saint – we need only consider St Augustine whose Confessions shows just how difficult saints can be. I’ll leave that book for you to read at some point. Perhaps I will take it down from my bookshelf, dust it off to read it again – perhaps I will write a little about it in the new year.
Who are the saints we are asked to remember today. The saints generally are un-numbered and un-knowable, just like us, but they will be remembered. Someone remembers them. We remember our friends and sometime we call to mind strangers whom we have encountered. We call to mind the meek and the powerful in our experience. We may have a moment of remembrance when we look at graves or hold in our hands things that have been given to us. We will remember them. I would like this Sunday to be just the start of our calling to mind and thinking anew which Jesus asks us to do when we love one another. Here we are at the centre of time with all the saints surrounding us. Let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord of time and space whose hand hovers over us at every moment, just as those who might benefit from us hover in witness to our lives.