All Saints Day is a day for looking forward to the hope that the Bible holds out for us and for the world; a day for looking forward to the reality described for us in our reading from Revelation 7. 9-17 of all the saints – an enormous crowd drawn from every race, tribe, nation, and language – coming together to worship God our saviour.
Many people think that that vision for the future involves sitting around on clouds dressed in white playing harps and this stereotype is unfortunately reinforced by books like What’s Heaven?, a best selling book by Maria Shriver, wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which she writes that heaven is “a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there. At night you can sit next to the stars … If you are good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven …”
Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, has helpfully pointed out in his important book Surprised by Hope that many Christians have grown up “assuming that whenever the New Testament speaks of ‘heaven’ it refers to the place to which the saved will go after death.” So, for example, when people read Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus is recorded as “talking about ‘entering the kingdom of heaven’, they have their assumptions confirmed, and suppose that he is indeed talking about ‘how to go to heaven when you die’, which is certainly not what either Jesus or Matthew has in mind.”
Wright goes on to say, talking about the visions in Revelation like today’s reading, that “Heaven, in the Bible, is regularly not a future destiny, but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life – God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last, he will remake both, and join them together for ever. And when we come to the picture of the actual End in Revelation 21 – 22, we find, not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven, but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.”
This is the background to our readings today; God’s plan to bring earth and heaven together at the end of time. Being in God’s presence following death, which is described in the Bible as paradise, is a temporary rest while we wait for the new heavens and new earth in which we will ultimately live with resurrected bodies.
So, with that background in mind what can we learn about the saints from our readings this morning? Firstly, we see that the saints are from every race, tribe, nation, and language. The saints are not a small selection of particularly godly people but instead are all of us in all our diversity.
This is the way in which the New Testament consistently uses the word ‘saint’. Letters are written to all the saints in a particular church in a particular place. The New Testament says that all are saints; it is Church tradition that has made a distinction between saints as all of us and saints as particularly godly people. But today, All Saints Day, is a day for remembering and celebrating all the saints as we see them in this reading; people from every race, tribe, nation, and language. And the best way to celebrate that reality is by seeking to genuinely demonstrate it in the make-up of our church here at St John’s.
Next, we see that the one thing that unites this enormous diverse collection of people is worship of God as saviour. Revelation 7. 10-12 says: “They called out in a loud voice: “Salvation comes from our God, who sits on the throne, and from the Lamb!” … Then they threw themselves downwards in front of the throne and worshipped God saying, “Amen! Praise, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving, honour, power, and might belong to our God for ever and ever! Amen!”
We may well differ about all sorts of things in our church and Christian lives – doctrine, mission, activities, events, behaviour - because we are a diverse collection of people but those are not ultimately the things that unite us. What unites us is the reality that we have been saved by Jesus and that we express our thanks and gratitude for that salvation together through our worship of our Saviour. All those other things have their place and their importance but they are not what brings us together or unites us as Church – they may even at times divide us – so we continually need to return to what unites us; our shared salvation and the God who has won that salvation for us.
Then, we learn more about that salvation. The saints are pictured as wearing washed robes made white by the blood of the Lamb. The imagery sounds contradictory but emphasises that salvation comes through the sacrifice made by Jesus on our behalf and not through any righteousness of our own. Again, this is significant in terms of our unity. There is no one among of us that is more deserving than others of salvation. We are all equal in our need of salvation and in our receipt of salvation.
Finally, in verses 16-17, we see that God has a changed future for us and our world. What God desires is to take the kingdom that Jesus began through his life, death and resurrection and extend it to all; a kingdom of plenty and protection with God at the centre where healing, guidance and sustenance are all to be found. What we see described here are the new heavens and new earth that we spoke of earlier; where the dwelling place of God is finally in the very centre of this world and human existence.
In our Gospel reading (Matthew 5. 1-12), Jesus spoke of the values of this kingdom and described them in the Beatitudes. The Beatitudes give us a sense of the radical kingdom lifestyle that Jesus calls us to. It is as if Jesus has crept into the window display of life and changed the price tags. It is all upside down. In a world where ‘success’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ are applauded, and ‘the beautiful people’ are ambitious, accomplished and wealthy, Jesus teaches: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Our culture encourages us to discard guilt and the sorrow that accompanies pangs of conscience. Happiness is everything, entertainment is king but Jesus teaches: “Blessed are those who mourn.” In our competitive world, self-help seminars teach assertiveness and power is to be sought and used but Jesus teaches “Blessed are the meek.”
Jesus calls us to live as people of the kingdom in the here and now. Although the kingdom has yet to come in full, as saints we are called to give people a foretaste of what will be by acting out the upside-down values of the kingdom in all of our life and work. Jesus’ radical heartbeat can be sensed in every word of the Sermon on the Mount. The core of the sermon is a call for God’s people to be entirely different. One writer identifies the key text of the sermon to be Matthew 6: 8, “Do not be like them.” Like lights set on stands (Matthew 5:14), like flavouring salt (Matthew 5:13) or like saints, as children of God we are not to take our cue from the people around us but from God himself, and to be known by our utterly radical lifestyle, our celebration of diversity, and our worship of the God who saves us and brings about the merging of heaven and earth that is the kingdom of God and our true destiny.
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