All Saints’ Day - 2024

Sermon for All Saints Day, Year B
The Rev. Andrew McLarty
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Today, as we remember those we have loved and lost and all the saints within the blessed communion, we are allowed to weep and to be sad. This kind of grief is a sign that we are human and that human connections matter. They mattered greatly to Jesus of Nazareth.

But we are also urged toward hope and not despair. “Did I not tell you,” Jesus reminds the grieving Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”

In Mere Christianity, Lewis highlights the idea of a fuller existence, where true life only begins after death. He writes:

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

In A Grief Observed, Lewis processes the loss of his wife and meditates on the nature of love and reunion after death:

“You have seen only the real world; I have seen it as a shadow, a glimpse through a window, as in a mirror dimly.”

Our greatest problem in believing is that we live within Time and Space, but our dead have escaped these confines. So, we cannot imagine where they are, and how they are. But we trust in him who said, “I go to prepare a place for you.”

On this day, the hope is that we will feel more intensely than ever the reality of the communion of saints and that all in the cloud of witnesses will become real to us as never before. We need to know that we are not alone. Despite disasters and unrest and wars and death, we are not alone. We have the sweet promise that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and death will be no more.

We cling to the assurance of the One who said, “I am making all things new. . . I will be your God and you will be my children.”

Amen.