All Saints and All Souls
Reflections on the Lectionary for November 5th
While there is a lectionary slate for November 5th, I’m assuming that most churches that use the lectionary will be celebrating All Saints’ Day on that day, so I’m using the texts that are unique to that focus instead.
All Saints’ Day is one of those days of the Christian calendar that I was unaware of for most of the early part of my life. I didn’t grow up in communities that did much with the liturgical year. If the church I attended as a teenager ever had an All Saints Day service, I don’t remember it, and the evangelical subculture I was a part of ignored it completely. It wasn’t until I was working in my first ministry job, at a United Methodist church, that I became familiar with the tradition of All Saints Day as it appears in the mainline Protestant context. It has quickly become one of my favorite parts of the liturgical year.
While some traditions celebrate two moments in this part of the calendar—an All Saints Day or All Martyrs Day to commemorate saints and martyrs, and an All Souls Day to remember all of those who have died—my sense is that mainline Protestant communities often conflate these two celebrations into one, calling it All Saints Day but really celebrating it as if it were All Souls Day. The churches I have been a part of don’t really spend any time thinking about the canonized saints and officially recognized martyrs, but instead the day is given over entirely to remembering the people who have died in the past year, who were either within or connected to the community. It becomes a very intimate and inward-looking time for communities to name their grief and process it, and to commemorate the lives of friends and loved ones in a ritual way.
My hunch is that as Christian congregations age and dwindle, this All Saints Day (which is also really an All Souls Day) is becoming more and more important. I know that in the church where I spend most of my time, the day feels like it becomes more solemn every year, as it indexes the steady drumbeats of loss that have accompanied our life together recently. Maybe the pandemic intensified that feeling too, making us more aware of connections and the loss of connections, and putting distance between us as we tried to navigate grief. All Saints Day becomes a kind of release valve for the pent-up sorrow and angst of decline and loss.
That kind of perspective helps me make sense of the passages that are in the lectionary readings for All Saints Day. The passage from Revelation 7:9-17 is alternately moving and strange, as passages from Revelation tend to be. On the one hand, it’s a beautiful vision of a time when pain and suffering will have passed away, when the faithful from all over can join as one. On the other hand, there’s the part in 7:14 about washing robes white in the blood of the lamb. What can make sense of such an odd juxtaposition? I think it has something to do with that experience of grief and loss that I was talking about in the last paragraph. We don’t know a lot about the community behind the book of Revelation; scholars debate who wrote it, and why, and to whom. But it does seem clear from the text itself that Revelation presumes that its readers have passed through some great trial, maybe a violent one—the “great ordeal,” as it is put in 7:14—and that the experience of that trial has shaped them. The vision of people from everywhere joining together across differences, then, starts to make some sense as a response to the kind of trauma the community might have experienced. And the description of blood washing robes white might be a poetic and symbolic way to talk about the ways suffering has brought a new kind of holiness to the community. Those of us who are part of struggling communities today probably cannot relate to the violence and trauma that’s reflected in this passage, but perhaps we can find hopefulness in the images that the author of Revelation gathered together to speak about loss. We too can think hopefully about a future unity across difference, because we too have seen and felt communities fracture around those same differences, and erode away as a result.
The passage from 1 John 3:1-3 is playing in the same kind of themes: community, trials, and purity. Scholars debate the origins of 1 John (and the other Johannine epistles too), but one major possibility is that these letters reflect the later life of the same community that gave rise to the Gospel of John. If that’s true, then we can start to trace the outlines of a group that felt like they were on the outside looking in, that experienced displacements and disagreements, and that came to see the only safe place as inside their own community. When 1 John 3:1 says that “the world does not know us,” that might reflect the way that community saw itself in the context of a broader world. They felt misunderstood and mistreated. We might know something about how that might feel. When they insist that “we are God’s children now,” they might be saying it out loud as much for themselves as for anyone else, insisting to themselves that it is true. When I think about churches and traditions and denominations in decline, the same kinds of themes come to mind for me. Those groups often think of themselves as misunderstood and imposed upon by outside forces; they need to insist first of all to themselves that they have a holy purpose. And so the first Johannine letter might have something to say to those of us today who feel like we are on the outside of things, looking in.
The final passage in the All Saints Day readings is a very familiar one to a lot of people: the Beatitudes from Matthew. I suspect that this passage is here because of its reassuring message about who will be the beneficiary of all of God’s work. Who will “inherit the earth,” and to whom goes the “kingdom of heaven?” The poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the ones who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Again, like the previous passages, this passage is reassuring people that they are on the right side of things, that they will not be forgotten by God. “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven,” Jesus says in this passage. Things might seem bad now, but a better day is coming.
Each congregation and every tradition is at a different point in its life. For some, remembering loss and grief won’t be important. For others, it might be one of the most important things. For the congregations I know best, which are living with a pervasive sense of decline, a day like All Saints Day becomes a ritualized moment for naming grief and loss, and for remembering it in community. When we remember the ones who have come before us and who have passed out of this life ahead us, we are remembering something about ourselves, and insisting on something that reminds us of who we are. All Saints Day is a way to reaffirm the things we think are important about our life together, in the way the passages from Revelation and 1 John are doing, and to speak to the living about the witness of the dead. All Saints Day turns into an occasion for reflection on the past but also for dreaming about all the possible futures, sorting among them to decide which ones feel most true. And so memory becomes a language of affirmation, not only for the past but also for the present and the shape of things to come. When we name our griefs and losses, we pay honor to the past. But as these passages show us, the past is sometimes the very thing with the most to tell us about the future.