Tag Archives: All Saints

All Saints’ Sunday, 2025

Posted on by
Reply

All Saints’ Sunday

November 2, 2025

You may have seen the article in the State Journal earlier this week which described the mood at local food pantries in the days leading up to the cessation of SNAP benefits yesterday. Our own Pantry Director, Vikki Enright, was quoted among other pantry employees and volunteers across the county. As we have watched the dismantling of nearly 100 years of federal support for our nation’s residents, and witnessed the effects of those changes on ourselves and our neighbors, we are filled with trepidation as we await the impact of the end of support for millions of food-insecure Americans.

Another recent article strikes an ominous note for our community. As local governments and service providers scramble to secure funding for operations of the new men’s shelter on the east side, there are growing concerns that the shelter will be overwhelmed by the demand. The answer seems to be: “let’s reach out to the churches.” I’ve heard that remark second-hand from several people reporting on conversations they’ve overheard, but perhaps surprisingly, no one has reached out to us. And frankly, I’m not sure what I would say. After nearly 40 years hosting the men’s shelter, and struggling as we sought to provide adequate space and services while also advocating for the need for a new shelter, I’m not sure we at Grace have the capacity or energy to take on the responsibility of providing space to help unhoused people.

All this is taking place against a backdrop of ICE raids targeting vulnerable immigrant communities; the rampant growth of White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism, collapsing institutions, a society and culture in disarray—perhaps best symbolized by the images we’ve seen of the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom. The rubble shown there is a mirror of the rubble that engulfs us all.

Our exhaustion, fear, anger, despair bubble over, overwhelm, render us impotent, keep us awake at night and on edge during the day. As the chaos swirls around and in us, the Church, in all its magnificence, history, and foibles, directs our attention to our fellowship with all those who have come before us and served as models and inspirations, on this All Saints’ Sunday.

All Saints’ is an occasion for us to reflect on that larger communion of which we are a part, not just Grace Church, or the diocese of Wisconsin, or the Episcopal Church, or even the worldwide Anglican Communion, fractured though it may be. All Saints’ draws our attention to the communion of saints, our fellowship with all those who have gone before us in the faith, all those who still surround us as a great cloud of witnesses.

So what, who are the saints? And why All Saints? Today’s commemoration has its origins in the earliest centuries of Christianity. During the Great Persecution, many Christians were martyred for their faith. Of those, some were remembered. On the anniversaries of their martyrdoms, surviving family members and members of the local Christian communities would go out to the graves of the martyrs and have feasts, including Eucharist to commemorate their witness and faith. But the Church realized that there were many martyrs whose stories and names were unknown, so a commemoration of all of those unremembered but faithful saints was created and eventually was observed on November 1—All Saints’ Day. 

Over time, faithful Christians wanted to honor ordinary people as well as the saints, the heroes of the faith. They wanted to remember their loved ones who had passed on, to commemorate them, and beginning in the Middle Ages, to pray for their souls who were believed to be in Purgatory. And so, alongside All Saints’ developed the Feast of All Souls, traditionally observed on November 2, the commemoration of all the faithful departed. With the Protestant Reformation, and its attacks on many traditional forms of piety, The Feast of All Souls was removed when the Book of Common Prayer was published.

So on this day, we do both things. We rejoice in the communion of the saints and we remember the faithful departed. It is a powerful reminder that, whatever our particular concerns and worries at this moment, as individuals and as a congregation, we are part of a much larger whole, one that encompasses all Christians who are worshipping today throughout the world, and just as important, all those Christians who have come before us, and are worshipping before the heavenly throne, as well all those Christians who are yet to come.

In the gospel reading, we hear Luke’s version of the beatitudes. It’s rather different from Matthew’s much more direct and connected with the realities of daily life: blessed are you who are poor now; blessed are you who are hungry now, blessed are you who weep now. And he adds a corresponding set of woes—Woe to you who are rich now, woe to you who are full now, woe to you who are laughing.

This set of blessings and woes, not blessings and curses—It’s hard for us to understand just what Blessed and Woe mean in this context. One commentator suggest we think rather in terms of “satisfied” and “yikes, or watch out” It’s not that one group is “saved” and the other “damned” but that the hungry and the poor receive God’s favor, and the wealthy and well-fed need guard against losing God’s favor.

These are stark binaries; and it’s easy in our world and divided nation to think in terms of such stark binaries as well. But we in the church are a communion of saints, part of a new community, a new social reality called together by Jesus, a new community that crosses every boundary of socio-economic, racial, gender, and ethnic status. It is a community that even breaks down the boundary between the living and the dead. There are no binaries in the kingdom of God.

At a time when people on the margins are being vilified and attacked—just in the last few days we’ve seen numerous politicians scorning food-insecure people who are reliant on SNAP. At such a time, it is part of our witness to the communion of saints to embrace and support all people, no matter their immigration status, their socio-economic position, their race, ethnicity, or gender. The kingdom of God, the communion of saints bears witness to and embodies all of human diversity.

We come together to worship, to be community, to be in solidarity with those whose lives are very much unlike our own. Together, we gather around the Lord’s table; together, we eat and are Christ’s body. Together, we are the communion of saints. 

May we experience that community of all the saints, and may we walk together in mutual support and love, inviting others to join us as we experience Christ’s love.

Saints’ Stories, our stories, God’s story: A Sermon for All Saints’ Sunday, 2024

Posted on by
Reply

November 3, 2024

         All Saints’ Sunday is one of my favorite Sundays of the year. We get to sing one of my favorite hymns: “For all the Saints” Sine Nomine.  In recent years, it’s also the Sunday that marks the end of Daylight Savings Time; not something to celebrate, even if we’re supposed to get an extra hour of sleep. We have cats, so that doesn’t happen. Suddenly, darkness descends earlier in the evening and it feels like late fall, even if the temps don’t. For me, All Saints’ Sunday marks the beginning of the end of the liturgical year; we’re moving away from reading the gospel stories of Jesus’ ministry and over the next few weeks hearing from his final sermons in the temple, full of apocalyptic imagery.

It’s a day when we remember those who have died, and hopefully, baptize people, bringing them into the body of Christ. It’s a day of reflection and celebration, of remembering and moving forward. It’s a Sunday when we connect the body of Christ as we experience it here at Grace Church, with all those who have gone before us in these pews over the last almost two centuries, and those who have gone before us across the globe and across two millennia.

It’s a commemoration that helps us to look beyond our own immediate lives and concerns and to put our lives and the lives of those we love in a much broader context, to see our connections across time and space. That may be especially necessary today with election day two days away—our fears and anxieties running rampant and keeping us awake at night.

However real our fears, whatever happens on Tuesday and the days that follow, today is an opportunity to remember that the Church and its members have survived through two millennia, sometimes in great suffering and against great odds. Indeed, the commemoration of All Saints’ is itself a witness to that untold, unremembered suffering, for it emerged as an occasion to acknowledge and honor those whose memory wasn’t preserved in story, legend, and saint’s cult, unnamed martyrs and eventually, in the commemoration of all souls, even ordinary, unremarkable Christians who lived and died faithfully and obscurely, remembered only by their family members, or perhaps, by no one at all.

On the surface, our scripture readings may not seem to have a great deal to do with the themes of the day. In fact, all three are among the suggestions for readings at the burial office—funerals; and the first, the reading from Isaiah 25, is among my favorites, if loved ones don’t have preferences, I always select it as the first reading.

In fact, something a bit strange happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was in Cleveland for my brother-in-law’s memorial service. My sister had selected readings and hymns, and I had put the service together. But as I listened to one of John’s friends share his memories of John, it occurred to me that I should have overruled my sister’s choices and used this reading. For John was a wine lover. He had cases of it in his cellar. But he was also a tinkerer and experimenter, and at some point he had begun to make wine; an elderberry sherry. 

Now, I love wine and although I’m no wine snob, I can tell a decent wine from a bad one, and I’m very suspicious of the products of amateur vintners. So when John first invited us to try it, Corrie and I were very leery. Boy, we were surprised. It was rich, subtle, complex, good enough to grace the wine list of a fine restaurant.

But the story doesn’t end there. After John’s death, there were about five cases remaining from vintages going back as far as 1980. My sister decided to bring all that wine to the memorial service and invited attendees to take a bottle or two home with them—and at the end of the day, there were none remaining. They will contribute to many feasts of well-aged wines in coming years.

Recently, I also entered into another story, one of Grace’s. I was asked to share a bit about the history of the men’s homeless shelter at Porchlight’s annual gala this coming week. So for the past few weeks, I’ve been digging through our archives, leafing through newspaper clippings, vestry minutes, and other sources on its history from the time it arrived in 1985 until its departure at the beginning of the pandemic. 

It’s a story of the vision and faithfulness of those who came before us: Fr. Wiedrich and the lay leadership who invited it here; to the volunteers who helped out over the decades, and those who defended it against its detractors. There are stories of the lives that were transformed as well as stories of unhoused people who died in extreme weather. And new stories are being written, with the presence of the Off the Square club now occupying the space where the shelter had been, and volunteers from Grace serving lunch at the Beacon regularly.

Today, we are writing the first chapter of another story—that of Leia Waldo who will be baptized in a few minutes. We don’t know what the arc of her story will be, even as we don’t know how any of the stories that we are inhabiting will develop. But even as her story is being written, with her baptism she is entering a much larger story that began with creation and is centered on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

With her family, we will play roles in her story, at least for a short time. She will grow in faith, be nourished by the sacraments, experience the joys and heartbreak of life in community. Her story will be her own to live and to experience but through it all, she will be marked by Christ in baptism. There are many such stories here today, where our lives intersect with each other, and encounter Jesus, for a few weeks or months, or for many years. 

As we face the coming days, and all the uncertainties and anxieties that surround us, may we take heart that we are all carrying with us the sign of the cross, marked as Christ’s beloved forever, and that through his cross and resurrection, there is new life ahead, and that whatever comes Jesus will be with us.