All Saints Sunday

 

November 2, 2025

+ Yesterday—November 1—was, of course,  All Saints Day.

It is one of the most very important days in the Church.

It is the day in which we commemorate all the saints who now dwell with God in heaven.

It is a beautiful feast.

And we, here at St. Stephen’s, have been celebrating this feast day for a few weeks already.

We celebrated several new saints.

Well, kinda new saints.

New saints to us, anyway.

Over these last few weeks we have been burying the ashes of several individuals whose ashes were unclaimed, some for over 40 years.

(Your priest has been busy digging graves over these past weeks—something they do not teach a priest to do in seminary).

And today, we will do it again.

After our Eucharist today, we will process out at the end of the service to our memorial garden, and we will bury the ashes of George Smith.

George died on February 19, 1984.

1984.

Just think about that for a moment.

I’m going to read you his obituary

 

 From the Fargo Forum, Tues,. Feb. 21, 1984

 George E. Smith

 George E. Smith, 62, 839 23^rd Ave. S., Moorhead, died Sunday.

 Mr. Smith was born Jan. 29, 1922, at Brantford, Ont, and received a master's degree from the University of British Columbia. He was assistant professor of education at the University of Victoria and at Moorhead State University from 1968 to 1980. He married Rosemary N. June 12, 1967, at Seattle.

 He is survived by his wife; two sons and two daughters, three who lived in Bellevue, Wash., and a another who lived in Seattle.

 It seems Rosemary moved shortly after his death to Tacoma without claiming his ashes.

 There appears to have been no funeral, no memorial service for him.

 (until today—41 years later)

 Just cremated.

 And 41 years on a shelf at Korsmo Funeral Home.

 He was just kind of forgotten.

 Until now.   

 Now he is one of our own.

He along with Thomas (a homeless man who also died in 1984), Baby Matthew  (who died in December 1986) and Kimberly  (who died in 2023 and whose ashes were buried last Wednesday), are now a part of our community.

And a reminder that we are all part of the community of saints in this world and the next.

We Episcopalians do these things well.

We do funerals well, we do commemorating our deceased loved ones well.

We celebrate the saints—those who are both well-known saints and those saints who might only be known to a few—very well as Episcopalians.

And when anyone from St. Stephen’s dies, or when anyone close to someone at St. Stephen’s dies, you will always receive an email with a request for prayer.

And the request for prayer will usually begin with these words:

“The prayers of St. Stephen’s are requested for the repose of the soul of …so-and-so.”

Occasionally, someone will ask me about that prayer request.

Someone will ask,

Why do we pray for the dead?

Why do we pray for the repose of their souls?

After all, they’ve lived their lives in this world and wherever they’re going, they’re there long before a prayer request goes out.

It’s a good question.

The fact is, we DO pray for our dead.

We always have—as Anglicans and as Episcopalians.

You will hear us as Episcopalians make the petition for prayer when someone dies that you won’t hear in the Lutheran Church, or the Methodist Church or the Presbyterian Church.

Praying in such a way for people who have passed has always been a part of our Anglican tradition, and will continue to be a part of our tradition.

And I can tell you, I  like that idea of praying for those who have died.

But, I want to stress, that although we and Roman Catholics both pray for our dead,  we don’t pray for people have died for the same reasons Roman Catholics do.

In other words, we don’t pray to free them from some sort of mythical purgatory, as though our prayers could somehow change God’s mind.

I want to stress that our prayers do NOT change God’s mind!

Rather, we pray for our deceased loved ones in the same way we pray for our living loved ones.

We pray for them to connect, through God, with them.

We pray to remember them and to wish them peace.

Still, that might not be good enough answer for some (and that’s all right).

So…let’s hear what the Book of Common Prayer says about it.

And, yes, the Book of Common Prayer does address this very issue directly.

I am going to have you pick up your Prayer Books and look in the back, to the Catechism.

There, on page 862 you get the very important question:

Why do we pray for the dead?

The answer (and it’s very good answer): “We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God's presence those who have chosen to serve [God] will grow in [God’s] love, until they see [God] as [God] is.”

That is a great answer!

We pray that those who have chosen to serve God will grow in God’s love.

So, essentially, just because we die, it does not seem to mean that we stop growing in God’s love and presence.

I think that is wonderful and beautiful.

And certainly worthy of our prayers.

But even more so than this definition, I think that, because we are uncertain of exactly what happens to us when we die, there is nothing wrong with praying for those who have crossed into that mystery we call “the nearer Presence of God.”

After all, they are still our family and friends.

 

We still love them!

They are still part of who we are.

Now, I know that this idea of praying for those who have died  makes some of us very uncomfortable.

And I understand why.

I understand that it flies in the face of some of our more Protestant upbringings.

This is exactly what the other Reformers rebelled against and “freed” us from.

But, even they never did away with this wonderful All Saints Feast we are celebrating this morning.

This morning we are commemorating and remembering those people in our lives who have helped us, in various way, to know God.

As you probably have guessed from the week-long commemoration we do here at St. Stephen’s regarding the Feast of All Saints, I really do love this feast.

With the death of many of my own loved ones in these last few years, this Feast has taken on particular significance for me.

What this feast shows me is what you have heard me preach in many funeral sermons again and again.

I truly, without a doubt, believe that what separates those of us who are alive here on earth, from those who are now in the “nearer presence of God” is truly a very thin one.

And to commemorate them and to remember them is a good thing for all us.

Now, I do understand, as I said before, that all this talk of saints makes some of us a bit uncomfortable.

But…I do want us to think long and hard about the saints we have known in our lives.

And we have all known saints in our lives.

We have known those people who have shown us, by their example, by their goodness, that God works through us.

And I want us to at least realize that God still works through us even after we have departed from this mortal coil.

Ministry in one form or the other, can continue, even following our deaths.

Our witness has followers of Jesus can continue on.

Hopefully, we can still, even after our deaths, do good and work toward furthering the Kingdom of God by the example we have left behind.

For me, the saints—those people who have gone before us—aren’t gone.

They haven’t just disappeared.

They haven’t just floated away and dissipated like clouds out of our midst.

No, rather they are here with us, still.

In these last few years, after losing so many people in my family and among close friends, I think I have felt their presence most keenly many times, but often times most keenly here at this altar when we are gathered together for the Eucharist then at any other time.

I have felt them here with us.

And in those moments when I have, I know in ways I never have before, how thin that veil is between us and “them.”

You can see why I love this feast.

It not only gives us consolation in this moment, separated as we are from our loved ones, but it also gives us hope.

We know, in moments like this, where we are headed.

We know what awaits us.

No, we don’t know it in detail.

We’re not saying there are streets paved in gold or puffy clouds with chubby little baby angels floating around.

We don’t have a clear vision of that place.

But we do sense it.

We do feel it.

We know it’s there, just beyond our vision, just out of reach and out of focus.

And “they” are all there, waiting for us.

They—all the angels, all the saints, all our departed loved ones.

And so too are Thomas and Baby Matthew and Kim Meissner and George.

So, this morning—and always—we should rejoice in this fellowship we have with them.

We should rejoice as the saints we are and we should rejoice with the saints that have gone before us.

In our collect this morning, we prayed that “we may come to those ineffably joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you.”

Those ineffably joys await us.

They are there, just on the other side of that thin veil.

We too will live with them in that place of unimaginable joy and light.

WE are all the saints of God, here and now.

And that is a reason to rejoice this morning.