The Saints Worship with Us
Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis
November 3, 2024: All Saints’ Sunday
Scripture: Revelation 7:9–10, 13–17
On this All Saints Day, I’m reminded of the losses we have experienced in the last year. We’ve said our farewells to many of our beloved members and friends, and we’ve intentionally named the grief we are carrying, making space for prayer, reflection, and community to respond to the loss. We do so because the witness of Scripture is that death is not the last word, and deep down in our souls, we know we are not left alone without God’s protection and provision. The promise of faith is existence beyond this plane in the enduring presence of God.
Can we allow ourselves a moment of complete trust in that promise to imagine not a material heaven saturated with the images of the luxuries we see in our current cultural imagination but a mode of existence for our loved ones who have become saints whereby they continue to be a gathered community in God’s presence even as we gather here? Can we conceive of our saints in a new way that allows us to feel their presence and experience them as witnesses and guides, especially in worship? I’m talking about daring to linger on the experience of a sense that they are with us, see us, and minister to us. The book of Revelation, which offers us images and visions that affirm God’s vindication of the faithful, may be a helpful resource to help us take what’s left of our fading memories of them or the stories we tell about them, to find connection and continuity with the saints.
In a recent scripture study on apocalyptic literature, I promised our study group that I would preach from the book of Revelation the first chance I got. There is no more appropriate time to do so than All Saints Sunday. The images and visions therein have much to offer for this day’s invitation to honor and remember the saints of the faith. Unfortunately, the book of Revelation has been highjacked by “theatrical merchandising of apocalyptic images.”[1] But we don’t have to just read the graphic, violent parts. The book of Revelation can also be read and used as a book of worship. That may be hard to believe given the images of beasts, angels, and cosmic war that confound modern readers and that are misused and misinterpreted by people preoccupied with the Rapture and Armageddon. Still, the book overflows with songs, prayer, doxology, and benedictions, familiar elements of worship we practice today because God is good and fights for God’s people.
When the evangelist John is exiled to the Island of Patmos, likely for the practice of prophecy, by the Roman Emperor Domitian in one of his anti-Christian persecutions, John experiences the presence of God’s spirit, which gives him a vision. In his vision, John saw a great multitude that could not be counted, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, all standing before God and Jesus, the Lamb who was slain. There, this great multitude of people stand together, one body, praising and worshiping, attributing to God blessing, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving, honor, power, and might. They cry out that salvation (liberation or victory) belongs to God.
One of the elders who is present at this worship service John is describing asks him, “Who are these white-robed people singing and praising, and where did they come from?” When John demurs in his answer, the elder answers his own question: These are those who died in the faith, those faithful who endured life with its ups and downs, its successes and failures, its struggles and hardships, and yet held on. These are they who did not lose hope or faith when the persecution got more violent and deadly. These are the ones who did not escape the fate that all humanity must encounter—death. These are they that we now call the saints, for they have “overcome the world,” and now gather around God and Jesus, worshiping day and night. These are they who have transcended what divides the living—race, sex, gender, religion, and ethnicity—to be the united, one people of God in the heavenly congregation. Although we may grieve their absence, it is a comfort to consider how John envisions their experience: the body of the faithful with God who will hunger and thirst no more, from whose eyes God will wipe away every tear.
In John’s vision, the truth of God’s presence is laid bare, not just for the living currently trying to be faithful, but for those who came before him, his ancestors who died before God reconciled all things to God in a new heaven and a new earth. John is not careful with the meaning of his tenses, so what if John’s vision is not about a future event, not a vision of what will be, but testimony about what is happening now, where, and whenever God is? John testifies that singing, praying, praising, and worshiping did not end with their earthly existence. Instead, they now do so in the ongoing presence of God and the Lamb that was slain. If they are in the presence of God, who are they praying for? What are they praying for? Could they be praying for us and with us? Can we imagine that they are worshiping as we worship? Praying as we pray? Singing as we sing? What if they are worshiping with us for us?
When I was a child, when the worship service got exceptionally high and intense, filled with ecstatic praise and worship, I often heard an adult say that the saints were worshipping, too. It would be years before I could see and understand that testimony. Just the other day, when I joined a family at Lakewood Cemetery for a service of committal for their loved one, when we paused between the prayers and readings for a time of silence, the veil was the thinnest I’ve ever felt. It dawned on me that we were in communion with the saints at that moment. Through our prayers, sacred readings, and silence, we had, in some sense, experienced connection and continuity with those who were no longer with us. I remember feeling that before . . . On plantations where the enslaved were quartered; at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers that the Dakota people call Bdote; at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC; seeing the panels from the AIDS memorial quilt; and yes, even at historic battlefields . . . All places where the saints appear to whisper their legacy and surround us with their prayers.
I know. I can appreciate the distance we have from those white-robed saints that appear out of nowhere in a strange, mystifying book of the Bible that we’d rather avoid or don’t care to read. Oh, but on this All Saints Sunday, let us embrace their witness anew. Let us take a chance on the possibility that our spiritual forebears are worshiping with us to inspire and prompt us to endure the struggles and troubles of the current time. Let us embrace John’s vision as a testimony of our ancestors’ witness that there is something higher than us and more powerful than death so our hope is not disappointed, and love and justice will prevail even if there are no signs of it on earth. Let us embrace the understanding in the image of these saints that there are no meaningless deaths with nothing to show for our lives because God has already vindicated us and opened up the heavenly sanctuary for our continued participation in beloved community.
When the Apostle Paul did his roll call of our spiritual forebears who endured their times with unwavering faith, he testified that they were a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, encouraging us to keep the faith, to persevere in our life’s journey, and to see in Jesus’ confrontation with the cross our pathway to God’s promise. There is continuity with those who came before us, that something of what they left us is not just material but also spiritual, that we carry a portion of their hopes and dreams, aspirations and possibilities in our current existence, that they remain a source of enduring wisdom from which we can draw new wisdom to meet our current moment. Let our memories and memorialization of them spark a new determination to embody God’s reign while we yet live.
No, we haven’t endured the kind of religious persecution that John’s vision seeks to redress and overcome for an oppressed people. But we do know what it’s like to struggle, to confront the scourge of illness and sickness, the violence of war, the injustice of a range of isms visited upon our society, and the ever-present reality of death. The world keeps turning. The faults and failures of a broken world will continue to exact a fatal toll. Death will still make its appointment with each of us.
Now, we have the saints as our cloud of witnesses. They gather and worship day and night, worshiping even as we worship. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, we know that after failure, disappointment, and death, our story only just begins. What our ancestors endured and what we have been through won’t be for nothing. So, when we call out the names of the saints, we are going up in praise and worship with them as one body in blessed community and fellowship divine, ushering in God’s spirit to inhabit this space and make our hearts brave and our arms strong. May it be so.
[1]Fred B. Craddock, “Preaching the Book of Revelation.”
