All Saints Sunday
Who are the saints, and what do they have to say to us? Rather than being perfect Christians, the saints are people who have been made whole by the grace of God, through baptism into Christ. The communion of saints is a diverse array of witnesses who remind us of God’s continuing faithfulness, past, present, and future. In the picture painted by the gospel reading from Luke, the saints challenge us to embody the surprising, world-reversing ways of the reign of God.
God has made into saints all who have been baptized into Christ, and on the festival of All Saints Day we honor especially those saints who have died in the faith. Their names may be unknown and their lives generally forgotten, but we sing our thanks that they are now held in God.
The custom of commemorating on a single day all the saints of the church, especially the many unknown martyrs, originated in the fourth century. By the eighth century, the festival commemorating all saints had been moved in England and Ireland to November 1 in order to Christianize the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain which marked the beginning of winter and communal attention to the dead. In current Christian use, the day is dedicated to thanksgiving for all the unnamed who died in the Lord. In many assemblies, the names of those who have died over the previous twelve months are read aloud, a practice originally associated with All Souls Day on November 2. The conflation of the two emphases fits with the Protestant beliefs that all the Christian dead are saints, none needs release from purgatory, and it is only to God whom we pray.
