Sermon All Saints’ Day 1 November 2026
Readings: Isaiah 56. 3-8; Hebrews 12. 18-24; Matthew 5. 1-12
Theme: Glowing in the Dark
All Saints’ Day, together with the celebration of All Souls’ Day immediately afterwards, marks a time prior to the season of Advent. It concludes on 22 November with the Feast of Christ the King, and is a period when we focus on the grace of redemption and how this shapes our lives.
The idea of grace can be difficult for us to grasp. So, it can be helpful to think of grace in the two ways of its operations that are mentioned in the Bible. The first tells us what God is like. Grace is God’s loving kindness (hesed). This is what God is like: self-giving infinite love that seeks out those who are lost or entrapped in sin. The story of God’s self-revelation in the Old Testament paints this picture of grace over and over again. As the Israelites wander off, God seeks them out to bring them back into this covenantal love.
The second dimension of grace tells us something about the destiny of human beings. In reaching out to us in loving kindness, God’s grace enables us to participate in God’s Trinitarian life. We are ‘divinized’ as the Orthodox tradition calls this. That is to say, through the gift of God’s grace, we enter into communion with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This Trinitarian communion allows God’s life to flow through us and to restore us to spiritual health, so that we can be of service to others.
In each person this gift of grace takes on a different form. For some, it may be as a helper, for others as a speaker or a teacher, and so on. All these different expressions of grace shape human lives in particular ways which are refracted through our God-given personalities and characters.
The gospel on the beatitudes for this Feast shows the traits that embed themselves within us as we are transformed by this grace. These beatitudes express the many ways in which the grace of God molds us into redeemed creatures.
Through God’s grace, we become “poor in spirit, people who mourn, meek, hungry and thirsty for justice, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, children of God, citizens of the kingdom of heaven.” These divine features embody in us what it means to be redeemed by God’s grace. They form a constellation of holiness which makes the image of God visible in human form.
None of this happens without suffering and sometimes, even persecution. This is the searing fire which bends the material of which we are made into the “spirits of the righteous.” The second reading from Hebrews expresses this in terms of the new covenant made through Christ’s blood. A covenant that now grants us access to God’s inner sanctuary through the perfecting power of God’s grace. This is what it means to share in the inner life of the Trinity, to be divinized.
Such is the new covenantal promise made between God and those who are shaped by God’s grace. Just as in the covenant made with Abraham, though he and his wife Sarah were childless, God promised him to be the source of many nations, so too, as the reading from Isaiah puts it, will this grace of God “gather all the outcasts of Israel into the house of prayer.”
In this restored house of God, the righteous will be gathered from “every race, tongue, people, and nation” to dwell with the Lord forever on the holy mountain of Zion. This is the new covenant of the kingdom of heaven made through the Lamb’s redeeming blood poured out for us through grace (Rev. 5. 9, and 7. 9).
No longer do we enter into a covenantal relationship with God through the theatrics of the drama of the blazing fire and the darkness of Moses’s Mount Sinai as in the old covenant, but now, in the new covenant, we enter through Christ the only mediator of the new covenant. The drama of this covenantal transformation will be played out in the sufferings of Jesus in Jerusalem, Mount Zion, through the passion and death.
Through the resurrection of Christ and the gifting of the Holy Spirit, such a transformation by grace happens to us in our ordinary lives. The way we come to live is how this patterning of God’s grace molds us. We become what we are called to be, and when we die this vocational pattern of transforming grace, which we have known in the flesh, continues in the spirit. That is to say, our spirits join with the risen Lord and await the resurrection of our bodies, when he finally returns.
The lives of the saints make this pattern of redemption glow in the dark. They are the ones in whom the transformation of our earthly vessels into the heavenly treasures has become visible. In them, we glimpse sight of what the kingdom of heaven looks like when earth is transformed by heaven.
The saints have been molded into the creatures God has called them to be. They have been drawn into the inner life of the Trinity and share in the radiant glow of God’s love.
And there is another sense of ‘glowing in the dark’ which it is good for us to note because it traverses much biblical and spiritual literature. While we come to know God in the light of our understanding, we are united with God in the darkness of the blind stirring of love which is the tent of encounter in life’s dark deserts.
This encounter is in a kind of “luminous darkness” that the Bible talks about on such occasions as the meeting between Moses and God on Mount Sinai. God is known in this mystical way through the “cloud by day” and the “fire by night.” This is a way of knowing God which takes us beyond simply knowledge of God to actual union with God through love. God makes God’s camp with us: Emmanuel.
The saints are those who have been given this grace of being united with God through love, and each of us are called to share in this same vocation by virtue of our baptisms. That is why we too are called to glow in the dark, “to shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father,” as we proclaim in the rite of baptism, so that this darkness may become a tent of encounter with the living God for all those who, like our ancestor in faith, Moses, truly seek God’s face.
