All Saints' Day

November 1 is All Saints’ Day. Although it is one of the seven principal feasts of the Christian calendar, it is easily forgotten because it isn’t usually on a Sunday. Some denominations, wary of abuses that can occur in the veneration of saints, don’t even regard it as a holiday. The result is that most American Christians have lost a specific day to remember, celebrate, and thank God for those who have gone before them in the faith.
 
A number of years ago, I had the chance to visit one of the catacombs at Rome. In the coolness and quiet, deep underground, I came face-to-face with something startling: There were places of worship next to the graves of Christians. Believers would gather at the tombs to celebrate the Eucharist from time to time as a statement that the dead were still members of the Church, that Christ was victor over death, and that the resurrection was coming.
 
The Church is the only society on earth that never loses members. Those who have gone before us in the faith are no less a part of the body of Christ than we are. There is only one body, and it contains the Christians of all ages and times. We need moments to remember this when our view of Christianity starts to get too narrow, too influenced by America or the 21st Century. The saints from ages past worshiped differently than we do and would be rightly shocked at aspects of the American church. We also need moments to remember the entire body of Christ—the body that includes people from all over the globe and spans thousands of years—when we feel isolated or alone. We are, in the language of Hebrews 12, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Joined together with them, we are a part of a great body, united across time and space in the Messiah.
 
All Saints’ Day is a moment to remember these things. It is a moment to grieve for the temporal loss of those who have gone before us in the faith, to remember them in thanksgiving before God, and to celebrate what God will do with them in the resurrection. Even though they are in the presence of the Lord, they are (like us) waiting for the resurrection of the dead, when we will all be joined together in our resurrected bodies in the unveiled presence of God himself.
 
In Christ,
Steven+