All Saints Day – A Day for Hope

As many of you know, I grew up as a Roman Catholic, so celebrating All Saints Day on November 1 always included going to Mass. The next day also got celebrated as All Souls Day, although we didn’t have to go to Mass. The difference between those two days? Saints were the people who were “good enough” to go to Heaven, while the following day we were asked to pray for all the rest of those who died but didn’t quite have enough “good” in them to make it to Heaven. They were in a place, the Church taught, called Purgatory, where through some purging of their sins and the prayers of those of us still alive, they might hope to eventually graduate to Heaven.

As I reflect on our own upcoming celebration of All Saints Sunday, I think about how that idea of all the souls in Purgatory formed my own spiritual journey that eventually led me to become a Lutheran. Because in my searching, I realized that God really doesn’t make those distinctions that we make. As Martin Luther put it, we are all simultaneously saints and sinners. It isn’t our own “goodness” that determines our final destination (we could never be good enough for Heaven on our own) – it’s Christ’s love, which calls all of us home to him.

So as we gather this Sunday to reflect on the people in our lives who have, as we Lutherans like to say, claimed the promise of their baptism by passing from this life into the next, I think of all of us too. All of us are a mixture of saints and sinners, all of us need grace and hope.

This year has been a time of great losses for many of us. Whether it was the loss of health, a loved one, of our homes and possessions, or something else, this All Saints Sunday will perhaps be more poignant. A bittersweet reminder of that poignancy will be the fact that this year we are unable to decorate our walls with photos of the saints in our lives who have passed away because, like so many other things in the church, the photos got boxed up and are in a storage pod. Thank God they still exist (at least we think they do!) – I know so many other folks have forever lost their treasured family photos.

This year, our walls will be bare, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be honoring our beloved dead. We will, as usual, be tolling a chime for those connected with our congregation who have passed since last All Saints Sunday. We will also still offer the opportunity for anyone who would like to light a candle in memory of a deceased loved one to do so.

But I’d also like to say that as we light those candles for the dead, we might include a silent prayer for healing from all the losses we’ve endured this year. Because by lighting a candle, we can shine hope into an otherwise bleak situation. And that is what All Saints Sunday is all about, hope that things can and will get better.

Hope you can join us.