Readings:
Isaiah 25: 6-9;
Psalm 24: 1-6;
Revelation 21: 1-6a;
John 11: 32-44

Collect:
God of holiness,
your glory is proclaimed in every age:
as we rejoice in the faith of your saints.
Inspire us to follow their example with boldness and joy;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Reflection

As we approach the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, and look ahead towards Remembrance, we are entering a season of remembering – remembering both with gratitude and with grief those who have gone before us, and remembering too our place within the communion of saints.

I wonder who are the saints who have inspired you on your journey of faith? They might include the well-known saints of history whom the church remembers, or the ordinary, every-day saints whom we encounter in our lives as examples of faith, and of a life well-lived for God. This season of remembrance is a good time to remember those whose example has shaped our lives and to thank God for them. It might also be an opportunity to ask what it is about them, and the way they lived their lives, that we admire, and to see whether there are ways we can incorporate those qualities and attitudes in our own lives. 

But the feast of All Saints is not only about remembering those individual saints – well-known or unknown – who inspire us. It is also about remembering that we too are part of the communion of saints. We, through the life of the body of Christ, are connected with Christians throughout the world and throughout the ages, not only as people who have something very important in common, in our shared faith, but also as members of the same body, irrevocably bound up with one another in the shared life of the Holy Spirit. As St Paul reminds us (1 Corinthians 12), none of us can say to the other “I have no need of you”. The lives of Christians in other times or places (or even closer to home) may sometimes be very different from our own, or we may find them difficult to understand, but this celebration of All Saints reminds us that we are all one in Christ, and all have something to learn from one another, in all our God-given diversity. 

As the communion of saints, we are bound not only to the saints of the past, and of the present, but also to those of the future, to whom we will be examples of faith. That could seem like an enormous responsibility! But as we recall those who have shaped our life and faith, we might notice that it is often the ordinary, small actions and prayers which have the most impact. And, as the commemoration of All Saints reminds us, we are not alone – we live out our life of faith with the support of our local communities of faith, the communion of saints throughout the ages and – most importantly – God who knows all our strengths and weaknesses and loves and calls us as we are. 

I was recently at the funeral of a friend at which somebody said: “for so many of us she was a signpost pointing towards the God for whom she lived.” What a wonderful tribute! And what a great description of a saint: one who, by the way they live their live, points towards God. May God guide us all to become clearer and brighter signposts towards the God for whom we live.    

Ruth Harley