All Saints Day 2025

Today we are celebrating the Feast of All Saints. It is one of our major Christian festivals, and it has been celebrated by Christians for over 1400 years.

Three of the four churches in our benefice are dedicated to saints - Martin, Bartholomew, Philip and James.

Our cathedral is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Oswald and Wulfstan. The lives of the saints are commemorated and celebrated not only because they set us a good example, but because they still surround and travel with us as we seek to follow Jesus.

The letter to the Hebrews teaches us that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and every Sunday, when we recite the creed, we affirm our belief in the Communion of saints. In our Eucharistic prayers we go on to say that we praise God, together ‘with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven”.

So- the church, historically, and today, recognises the reality of our connection with the saints- as our sisters and brothers in Christ, as those who have set good examples for us during their earthly lives, and as those who continue to worship the Lord in the freedom of eternity, with faces unveiled, as they see fully the glory of God.

There is that beautiful verse in the old hymn “for all the saints”

“O blest communion, fellowship divine!We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine

Alleluia! Alleluia!”

As you may know, in September I was fortunate to go on retreat to a Roman Catholic retreat house, where asking the Virgin Mary to pray for us, using the Hail Mary, was a daily practice. This reinforced for me an experience I had had in April at a conference where I had been invited, by some much higher church Anglican friends, to say the rosary with them. It’s not something I think I will be taking up with regularity, but it did make me think.

Very often, in what you might call our middle of the road church of England tradition, asking the saints to pray for us is considered strange, a bit unorthodox, even, to use a very old and rather derogatory word, “popish”. After all, if we have a request to make, we can just address ourselves to God the Father through Jesus the Son. We don’t need middle-men intervening on our behalf. The great tearing of the temple curtain as Jesus gave his life for us on Good Friday means that we can walk straight into the presence of the Almighty and ask, confidently, as sons and daughters, for whatever it is that we need.

For the very earliest Christians in particular, who came from a Jewish culture, in which it was unthinkable either to write or to say the name of God, the invitation from Jesus to call God “Father” was groundbreakingly audacious in ways that I think we probably genuinely are unable to grasp, raised as we all have been, in a culture where we use the name of God just as casually as the names of our dogs and cats.

The privilege of being able to address the Lord not only in person, but as a loving Father, who has adopted us into an eternal community of forgiveness and grace, is inexpressible.  There is a danger that speaking to the dead and asking for their help might lead us into idolatry or heresy, attributing divine powers to those who are not God. All this is true.

But, as my children are very fond of telling me, two things can be true at the same time.

So I suggest that it is also true that asking the saints to pray for us is a blessing of which we should not deprive ourselves. Let me explore that a little:

Imagine that you go to church, with a problem on your mind. Perhaps you, or someone you love is unwell. Perhaps you are facing a financial crisis or a personal disaster- a bereavement or a broken relationship. Some especially unsightly skeleton has fallen out of your cupboard, and you are staring down the barrel of some horrible public humiliation, or you are faced with a challenge or dilemma, and you don’t know how to move forward.

Imagine then that as you walk into church you meet a trusted friend.

Someone who you know has faced similar difficulties, or simply someone whose judgement as a Christian you trust, whose spiritual instincts you know you can rely upon. And so- you speak to them, you tell them what is on your mind and you ask them to pray for you. You know they won’t judge you or gossip about you- they will just, faithfully, pray for you while you go through the storm.

Many of us will have experienced the very tangible comfort that this can bring, and although we might sometimes worry about issues of confidentiality or people judging us, we wouldn’t consider it a spiritually odd thing to do.

In Hallow church, we have a team of people who offer prayer for and on behalf of others during the distribution of communion, and I know that this ministry is very much appreciated.

During the challenging days of trying to lead these churches through lockdown, through the breakdown of my marriage, through the loss of my father, many people prayed for me, and I was so grateful for those prayers- I remain grateful for them today. So- it is normal and right for us to ask for the prayers of other believers.

Equally as Christians we are called to pray for one another. In the letter of James, we read

“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective”

There are many friends who have asked me for my prayers over the years and I offer those prayers with a huge sense of privilege- having been invited to join in their concerns and to help in bearing the burdens of my brothers and sisters.

The Saints, those who have gone before us, are, in eternal and spiritual terms, just the same as those trusted friends at church- except that of course, having passed into God’s eternal presence they have a much greater understanding and experience of the realities of God’s mercy and compassion than we do.

So, I wonder whether we might almost say that, if we are not asking the saints to pray for us, we are missing out on a vast ocean of loving and compassionate assistance in our walk through life, whatever it might hold for us. We might say that the prayers of the saints are a gift which, for many of us, remains wrapped, left unopened and unexplored, in spite of its beauty and its priceless worth. In seeking to avoid idolatry and heresy, I think many of us have probably thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

So, on this All Saints day, I wonder which saints you might befriend, which saints you might ask to pray for you. They may be those who went before who were very well known to you- a beloved godparent, a trusted preacher, a close friend.

Or they may be one of the myriad of Saints formally recognised by the church- Mary, Thomas, Francis, Benedict, Catherine or more recently, Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, or the young man named the first millennial saint, Carlo Acutis .

There is a patron saint for almost every concern – whether you are looking for a patron saint of artists (St Catherine), beekeepers (St Ambrose), women dealing with difficult marriages (St Helena) gambling addicts (St Cajetan), lost objects (St Anthony) or even the patron saint of lost causes (St Jude).

There will be a saint who has, because of their experiences on this side of the grave, a real understanding of whatever concern you bring.

My prayer is that we will come to value and give thanks for, not only the lives the saints lived before we buried them, but for their ministry of love, prayer and grace amongst us today.

May we, like them, be faithful in prayer for one another, rejoicing in our communion and fellowship.

Amen

Revd Kalantha Brewis