All Saints' Sunday: Community and Relationship Forged in Love

Ecclessiasticus 2:1-11
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:27-36

We gather today to celebrate a great mystery, and like so much of Christian mystery and theology we come to grips with it by means of symbols and story, and by discerning the ways the mystery’s truth plays itself out in our lives and experiences. Today we celebrate what we mean when we say, “We believe in the communion of saints.” At the same time, we celebrate the truth of the resurrection in a particular and distinctive way, as well as the truth of God’s providential care. In so doing, we touch on a crucial aspect of what it means to be authentically human. The language and symbols, the inherited traditions of this feast, have a kind of depth which can be almost endlessly explored.

Along with Easter, the early Church saw the feast of All Saints as a very appropriate time for baptisms. Baptism, which marks a person’s becoming a Christian and member of the body of Christ, also points to the reality that in being joined to Christ in his life, death and resurrection, we are also joined to each other. We are brought into full communion with Christ and with his saints, that is, the holy people of God. For the early Church the title saint was not reserved for only those who had died and only afterward been canonised, indeed no such concept existed. For the early Church, as we find witnessed in the letters of the New Testament, “saints” meant all those who were Christians; those who had been called to be a holy people by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. As the author of the first letter of Peter writes: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” (1 Peter 2.9) So Paul writes his letters to “the saints” in a particular place; he sends the greeting of “the saints” in one place to “the saints” in another; and he talks about collections for ‘the saints’ in less prosperous communities. As “the saints”, the holy people of God and members of the body of Christ, they were connected one to another; and nothing, certainly not death, could sever that connection. In baptism we have a share in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we have a share in his victory over death, and through that we are joined to each other. Therefore, as Christ’s people we cannot ultimately be separated one from another, we are all joined together in him; and because of his victory over death, not even death can sever that connection. That is what we are talking about when we say “I believe in the communion of saints.”

In affirming this belief, we also speak to a defining aspect of our humanity. To be an authentic human being means to be a being in relationship. It is relationship that we long for not only from the very start of life, but which we seem to need for our continuing survival. I am told that an infant, while it may receive all the physical nourishment it needs, will most probably still die if it does not receive human touch and affection, if it is not allowed to enter into relationship. The doctrine of the communion of saints highlights the essental truth that our humanity requires relationship; we need to love and be loved, we need to touch and be touched. We need to open ourselves up to others in vulnerability and allow our encounters together to mould and inform our own person. To be the people that we were created to be we need friendship and connection. The doctrine of the communion of saints refuses to believe that what is built up in that process is completely destroyed because those with whom we are in relationship are far away or have died. Were that to be true, then each separation would diminish us as human beings. And yet – the famous words of John Donne notwithstanding – it does not. Yes, we may miss the friend far away, we may mourn the friend who has died, but both those reactions call us more deeply into our humanity. Were we to do neither we would be less human, indeed some might even call us “inhuman.” The very fact that we do miss and mourn, speaks to the fact that we are still connected. We need the mystery of the communion of saints, with its sense of connection and relationship to be human.

If community and relationship are so essential to our authentic humanity, then God’s providential and saving power has to be understood within the context of community and relationship if that power is to be consistent with God’s abiding love for humanity. It seems that if we are to be saved at all, we are saved in community and for community. The kind of individualistic, Jesus-as-my-personal-Lord-and-Saviour theology is not the traditional Christian understanding of salvation. While better known and used for its apocalyptic elements, the Book of Revelation actually graphically portrays this truth of communal salvation: “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” (Revelation 7.9) If to be human means to be in relationship and community, then if we are to be saved as humans we must be saved in relationship and community. To be saved alone is no salvation at all. The images which the writer of the Book of Revelation presents are the images of a people saved in communion with each other and with their God. But too, the promise of resurrection is a promise of new life into community. Note how in the post-resurrection accounts of Jesus, he does the very things which we would consider as central to building relationship and community: he spends time in conversation with his friends, he eats with them, he shares who he is with them, and he builds bridges repairing past hurts. In short, he continues to care for them. Not only in the Book of Revelation and in post-resurrection gospel accounts, in many other places in the scriptures and the tradition are used the language of symbol and story to shed light on the meaning of Christian wholeness, human wholeness and they do so by pointing to community.

At the bottom line what we celebrate today is the abiding mystery that nothing, nothing can break asunder community and relationship which has been forged in love; but also that our wholeness as human beings, our salvation if you will (it means the same thing), is dependent on the communion of saints, on that great mystery of community and relationship. Paul writes to the saints in Rome “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8.38-39) If we believe that in our baptism we have been incorporated into the body of Christ and that we are in fact the body of Christ, then Paul’s conviction of our unity with Christ is also about our unity with each other, with all the saints living and departed. God’s creative love which has forged us into a people, is the same power working in us to form deep and abiding bonds between each other, not only so that the power of love may be made manifest in the world, but that we may grow more fully into the genuine humanity for which we were created.