For All the Saints: The Faith Lives On

One of my favorite hymns of the church is generally only sung once a year—“For All the Saints,” set to the Ralph Vaughan Williams tune Sine Nomine. The hymn is epically dramatic with it’s grand intervals, vaulted Alleluia chorus, and extensive seven verses. It’s a hymn fit for a celebration! Today we mark that celebration in the solemn Feast of All Saints.


The hymn begins “For all the saints, who from their labors rest.” The Feast of All Saints is the time in the church year that Christians remember the triumphant faithful who’ve died in the past year—and in some places, even longer before than that. All Saints provides a chance to celebrate the rich history, deep roots, and intimate connectedness with the whole cloud of witnesses that surrounds the church—past, present, and even future.

The author of Hebrews writes:

And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fire, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, -Hebrews 11:32-12:1, NRSV

Ours is a faith rooted deeply in the past. In many ways, we are hugely indebted to those who’ve gone before us for persevering in the race set before them—the race that Paul speaks of when he tells his faithful disciple Timothy to “fight the good fight of the faith.”

Before us today have gone countless saints of the church who’ve witnessed by their lives of the Spirit’s wondrously mighty and mercifully gracious power in their lives. The fact they called themselves Christian alone is testament to the mighty deed of God’s conversion in their lives. “For,” as St. Paul writes to the church at Corinth, “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

We who, although we will die in this body, find hope and receive faith by God’s grace poured out to us in the sacrificed life of Christ on the cross so that we, strengthened by God’s promise of life abundant and eternal, might fulfill our Godly commission to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that Christ has commanded us. Only rooted in the promise of Christ, revealed and glorified in the cross, are we empowered by the Spirit to make that witness to “all nations.”

It’s in vogue in the church today to have a scorn for tradition.

It’s in vogue in the church today to be critical of too much reflection on our roots. There is even in some corners a scorn for the past, for tradition—as if it were a set of shackles keeping the church from moving forward into new, brighter, and more exciting “nations” where disciples hunger to hear the Word of God’s good news.

This criticism is at times fair—the church cannot remain beholden to the past. At the same time, a church that forgets its roots, forgets where it’s been, forgets the lives of the countless saints who’ve run the race set before them—that church does itself a huge injustice and robs itself of the richness and abundance Christ promises us when we were baptized into him and all the faithful—past, present, and future.

The one-time Lutheran, later Orthodox theologian Jaroslav Pelikan remarked concerning tradition—“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” That is to say, the traditions of the church nourish us and give us examples to set before us for our lives. When we make tradition into the object of our faith, it becomes traditionalism and becomes an idol. We preserve tradition at the expense of the gospel.

But tradition, the devoted contributions and lives of the faithful who’ve gone before us since the time of Abraham and Sarah, Phoebe and James, Luther and Mother Teresa,

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. -Jaroslav Pelikan, 1983 "Jefferson Lecturer"

and countless others through the ages—that kind of tradition speaks to the transforming power of the gospel in the lives of people like you and me. Tradition is one thing we can point to and say, “God does break into our lives and act.” Without the tradition of the past generations, our lives of faith would lack a kind of richness that we are truly blessed we have with it.

Today as we commemorate the great saints of the church we name and all those other great saints who go down without a jot or tittle in the annals of history, let’s keep in mind their great contributions to our faith lives. Let’s keep their faith alive as a testament to the living power of God’s word to transform lives. And let’s, as the striving faithful of this age, take heart in the words of the hymnist, who writes—“The golden evening brightens in the west; soon, soon to the faithful servants cometh rest; sweet is the calm of paradise the blest.”

Finally, let's find hope in these words that the race set before us ends in “paradise the blest”—a paradise marked by eternal communion with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and all those saints triumphant who rise in bright array as the King of glory passes on his way. The faith of our forefathers, the faith of our foremothers, our faith, and the faith of later generations is centered on this—on Christ the Lord of Lords, the King of kings by whose death we live. Thanks be to God for all those faithful who laid a foundation for our faith and by whose lives we see displayed the truth of Christ’s transformative life sacrificed for us.

-DS