All Saints Day 2025 The Democracy of the Dead

 All Saints Day (Observed) 2 November 2025

St George’s Episcopal, Fredericksburg, VA

“The Democracy of the Dead”

Collect: Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18

In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed. Then he wrote down the dream: I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another.

As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter: "As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever."

Luke 6:20-31

Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now,

for you will be filled.

“Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets."

"But woe to you who are rich,

for you have received your consolation.

"Woe to you who are full now,

for you will be hungry.

"Woe to you who are laughing now,

for you will mourn and weep.

"Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

"But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

All Hallow’s Eve. All Saints. All Souls. Friends, we are in the midst of “thin days.” Days when those once living closer to the earth and seasons felt that this world and the one to come came a tad closer and the layers of separation were thinner, what seemed more distant is lessened to veils.

The days were getting darker and most of the crops were stored away for the winter that was coming on. For us, you probably changed the thermostat in the last few days. I know we did. But for millennia, it was so much more than turning up the heat. People have paused and pondered what was, and is, and is to come. The changing of the seasons and the dying of summer made people think of their own journey to what is to come.

In the church, we connect ourselves to the past in looking at the saints. Those exemplars of the faith who provide not a model for us to follow, but a spirit which we can mimic. In the Apostles’ Creed we confess to believing in the “communion of saints.” They are still a part of what we do.

As followers in the Anglican tradition, note that last word there, we are part of the holy apostolic and catholic church, while being birthed in the hotbed of the Protestant Reformation. We sought a middle way, a via media, where we maintained the structure of archbishops, bishops, priests, and deacons, while embracing reason and the reading and interpreting scripture for ourselves. So we held onto those three strands, tradition, reason, and scripture. We wove them inseparably together. They became the legs of the stool upon which we rest our teachings and practices.

Scripture became the rallying cry of most of the protestant revolts. And Reason the driving force of the Enlightenment thinkers and times. The Roman Catholic Church leaned heavily on what had been calcified over the centuries that they could not respond when the winds of change arrived.

In the Church of England, however, set apart as an island nation’s establishment, they could embrace some change and retain some tradition while all filtered through reason and experience without too much foreign entanglement. Sloppy at times, unwieldy even, it was a system that could change and maintain, evangelize and retain order. I tend during this season to be thankful for the “great cloud of witnesses” that have come before and still have things to teach us and guide us. 

G.K. Chesterton put it this way in Orthodoxy:

• “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” 

• “All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.” 

We can rebel against tradition, or mine its depths and find its riches. 

Our three legged stool asked us to hold onto a seeming paradox: Change and Tradition. Or another way to look at it is to hold onto both truths:

• The Last Seven Words of the Church is “We’ve Never Done It That Way Before.” 

• “Don’t Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater.”

Reason is what helps us navigate between the two.

One way to look at it is to be like St Paul preaching on Mars Hill in Athens. If you are unfamiliar with the story, it shows me the radical transformation possible in Christ, embracing the path established for us and reaching out for the fresh wind that flows from the Spirit. In Acts 17, Paul sets out to preach in the public space in Athens, getting up on their equivalent of his soapbox:

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.

 

At first glance, he was just preaching to folks of pagan beliefs and meeting them where they were. But remember who Paul was, his dead name was Saul, a Pharisee and persecutor of the Church. And now he stands amongst Gentiles (Unclean! Unclean!) and points to an altar (Anthema! Anathema!) and maybe even an idolatrous stone raised and says that this idol is the God he is about to preach about. For a good Jewish boy, a Pharisee, to point to something so pagan, an IDOL!, and say that is about his foreign, wild, desert God is blasphemous or amazing! If that is not an example of the wondrous dance of Tradition, Scripture, and Reason, I do not know what is. He joins the dance of the Spirit working in these exciting and new ways, and holding onto the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jesus, too!

The saints do not want us to be like them, but rather to love like them. They want us to give our complete devotion to God with all we have and to follow the one sent to show us the way home, Jesus the Son. And in doing that be ourselves, who God made us to be! All Saints Day is when we can see clearly how God has worked through the centuries, the “salvation history,” the Heilgeschichte, and how God is at work still.

Gracie Allen told her husband George Burns to not quit living after she died this way. “Do not put a period where God has put a comma.” God has been and will continue to be at work.

For the last few years I have done a daily prayer online, most of which are short histories (often called hagiographies) of the saints in the Anglican, Episcopal, or Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

It is a daily reminder that I am part of something that began millennia ago, and continues on to and through now, and will keep going long after I have sloughed off this mortal coil.

It is not to be morose, pondering my own demise this way. I am part of something bigger, and grander, and greater than myself. Thanks be to God!

Our reading from Daniel was written in a time of worry and concern. People had been uprooted and were far from home trying to wrap their minds around how God could let this happen to them.

Daniel receives this vision:

I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another.

As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter: "As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever."

Daniel was troubled by what he saw, and asked how to interpret these things. These great and horrible beasts standing in for empires of evil will come, but then they also shall go.

These hard days in which we find ourselves with divisions, strife, wars, and famines, these are not to be ignored, but nor do they have the last word. They may come, but they too shall pass. The interpreter for Daniel said as much, but also added this.

But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.

Friends, when the dark clouds are overhead and the path ahead is dark, if we are with Christ and in Christ, if we reside in the Body of Christ communing with the Saints, we will not be forsaken or forgotten. The Kingdom of God is our home. To put it in the parlance of our times, our team wins.  Come what may. Come what may.

[for 10 am Joint Service: For those about to be baptized, we celebrate with you this next step in your faith journey. We stand with you and invite into this household of faith. The cloud of witnesses surrounds us this day, and will be with you in your journeys and invite you home when that time comes as well. Nothing makes me happier as a priest than to see God at work in individuals and seeing the Family grow. For the rest of us…]

This All Saints weekend, this Hallowtide, embrace what has been, seek where the Spirit leads, and do it all for God’s glory. Have hope in the dark days, that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Thanks be to God! Amen