All Saints

Today the Church celebrates All Saints, the feast of the whole communion of those whom God has made holy through our Lord Jesus Christ. We honor apostles and martyrs whose names are proclaimed throughout the world; teachers, pastors, monastics, and servants of the poor; parents who taught their children to pray; children who trusted God with undivided hearts; and the countless holy ones whose names have vanished from every earthly record but remain known to God.

Scripture does not present the saints as a group of naturally fearless or flawless people. The Letter to the Hebrews begins its great remembrance with a repeated confession: it was by faith that they lived. By faith, Abraham went out without knowing where he was going. By faith, Moses chose affliction with the people of God over the splendor of Pharaoh’s household. By faith, some that we remember administered justice, while others endured mockery, imprisonment, exile, and death. Their lives were not made one by a common temperament or a single form of service. They were made one by their trust in the God who called them.

Yet Hebrews does not leave these witnesses in the past. God did not intend the faithful to be made perfect apart from us. Their race has become ours, and their hope is bound to ours. In Christ, we belong to the same body. Those who have gone before us live in his presence, awaiting with us the resurrection of the dead and the fulfillment of God’s kingdom. Together we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.

Jesus showed what this life would look like when he blessed the poor in spirit, those who mourned, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness. Together the Beatitudes traced the likeness of Christ in his people. In age after age, the Holy Spirit formed that likeness in persons of astonishingly different gifts, cultures, and callings. Some became visible to the whole Church. Many more spent their lives in hidden prayer, costly mercy, patient repentance, and duties faithfully borne.

In the Revelation to John, the company of the saints appeared as a multitude beyond counting, drawn from every nation, people, tribe, and language. They stood before God and before the Lamb. Their robes had been washed white in the blood of the Lamb. Their holiness belonged to the saving death and risen life of Jesus. The Lamb would be their shepherd and guide them to springs of the water of life, and God would wipe away every tear from their eyes.

The Church first kept the anniversaries of martyrs in the places where they had suffered and died. But the company of the holy was always larger than any local list. By the fourth century, churches in the Christian East celebrated all the martyrs together, often on the Sunday after Pentecost. In Rome, the dedication of the Pantheon as a church of Saint Mary and all the martyrs gave the festival another home in the early seventh century. Churches in Ireland and England came to keep a feast of all the saints on November 1, and by the ninth century that date had spread widely through the churches of the West.

The Episcopal Church receives All Saints’ Day as one of its seven Principal Feasts. It is also one of the days especially appointed for Holy Baptism. These facts belong together. The saints are not a spiritual aristocracy standing above the baptized. They are the harvest of baptismal grace: human beings joined to Christ’s death and resurrection, nourished in his body and blood, restored by repentance, and brought forth by the Holy Spirit into the life for which every Christian was created.

This is why the Church tells the stories of the saints. A synaxarium is a calendar of holy memory and holy people, a gathering of lives arranged through the year so that the faithful may keep company with those who followed Christ before them. It is not a catalog of flawless people, nor a collection of religious curiosities. It tells how the grace of Christ took flesh in particular lives: in prayer and learning, in courage and mercy, in repentance, endurance, hospitality, peacemaking, and costly love.

No single saint reveals the whole likeness of Jesus. One life discloses his compassion for the poor; another his courage before violence; another his patience in obscurity; and another the depth of his forgiveness. Together they teach the Church how varied sanctity can be and how completely every form of holiness belongs to Christ.

It is therefore fitting that An Anglican Synaxarium begins on All Saints’ Day. Day by day, it will remember women, men, and children in whom the Church has recognized the work of the Holy Spirit, drawing especially upon the saints received in Anglican calendars and prayer while remaining attentive to the holiness Christ has given to his whole Church. Some will be familiar and others nearly forgotten. Some will offer luminous examples; others will come to us through difficult histories that require truth as well as gratitude. Each life will be told not simply to preserve information, but to train our sight: to help us recognize holiness, desire it, and follow Christ more faithfully in the circumstances of our own lives.

Today we give thanks not only for the saints whose names we know, but also for those whom God alone remembers. We do not stand outside their company. In baptism, we have been called into it. Strengthened by their prayers and examples, may we lay aside whatever hinders us, follow Christ in the life set before us, and come with them to the joy of his kingdom.