2026-11-01 All Saints
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen!
Have you ever noticed that our entire society has shifted towards becoming faster? Follow me down the rabbit hole for a minute. Think about food. We used to have rice. Then, we had minute rice. Now we have instant rice! We have instant noodles. Instant oatmeal. Instant mashed potatoes. Instant soup. Instant pudding. Instant milk. Instant coffee, just to name a few. We’ve even swapped slow cookers for Instant pots! We used to have food. Now we have fast food. We used to have mail, now we have instant electronic mail! You used to write your sweetie a love letter and wait weeks for her to get it. Now you send her a text message or have live video conversations on your phone. Amazon can deliver anything you want in two days. Almost everything in society has gone this way. Faster. Instant. Right now. … The only exception in life is if the CRA owes you money. There’s nothing instant about that!
Generally speaking though, we like this. Who wants to wait for stuff?! I can barely wait at a red light anymore without seething and chomping at the bit! But our instant, high octane society has changed us. We have become a people short on patience. In our quest for instant gratification we now lack almost all desire for things to come. It’s hard to look forward when we are bamboozled by the right now.
But today, on All Saints’ Day, we are doing precisely this. We are shifting our hearts and minds from the cult of instant to the gospel that is eternal. Forever. It is a long, long time. We struggle with is idea. We can barely tolerate the time it takes for the keurig brewer to make our single cup of pod coffee let alone think about forever! We had more time to think about forever when we had dial-up internet back in the 1990s!
The heart of the Christian faith is indeed forever. We confess eternal and forever things. An eternal city. The paradise of the eternal and living God. An eternity of peace and rest. Beholding the our Saviour face to face, all day, every day, forever. Gathering around the throne of God with the great, uncountable number from all nations and tribes, crying out with one voice: “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” (Rev 7:12).
Forever. It seems so far away for many of us though. It gets relegated to the “one fine day” category in the back of our minds. We don’t seem to have all this peace and rest and heavenly joy right now in our instant, every day lives. We tend to think God should bless us and reward this fast paced earthly life with a lack of problems. We shouldn’t get sick. We shouldn’t struggle to pay our bills. We shouldn’t have quarrels with our spouse or fight with our kids. There shouldn’t be wars and conflicts in our world. All the joy and peace and happiness of heaven should be ours, right now. Instantly.
But we notice that this isn’t the case. And when it isn’t we find ourselves drifting away from God. We even blame God for how life is. We become soured by the world. We become unloving to our neighbors. We embrace unbelief, despair, sin and other sources of shame. We wonder why everything is so terrible all the time. We don’t feel very much like saints at all.
Jesus doesn’t sugar coat His words and teaching about this though. The picture that He paints of the life of His saints in His sermon on the mount shows us what the real life of a Christian is like. “Blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake” (MT 5:1-12)
All of the Beatitudes that Jesus proclaims in His sermon describe the life of His saints in this world. It’s not the “one fine day” version. It’s the instant world version. It’s the heavenly comfort, peace and joy that comes from being a Baptized child of God, right now, in the midst of a hostile and sinful world. It’s the promise of forgiveness, life and salvation in God’s Word and His supper that is yours right now, even as you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. St. John records these precious words from Jesus for us: “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (16:33). Saints are people who are victorious over the world because Christ has overcome the world.
We often tend to think of saints as the “do gooders.” Oh they’re nice people. They spent last winter handing out blankets and dinner to the poor! We tend to think of the fruit that comes from being a saint - not realizing they are actually massive trees, deeply rooted in the Savior. The life giving tree that Christ our Lord was crucified on for the life of the world is what gives His people victory. Saints are the holy people who believe this and trust this and seek to live it out.
The victory doesn’t look like victory though. When Jesus was betrayed, mocked, spit on, abused and murdered, it sure didn’t look like victory. It looked like a crushing and hopeless defeat. But indeed it was victory hidden in plain sight. It was the defeat of death, sin and the devil. It was the sacrifice that brought life and light into our dark world. It was an eternal victory that is ours, by grace through faith, right now. Even if the saints are poor, or mourning, or harassed, or hungering, or struggling. In this instant world, the slow and steady path of sainthood is one of hardship and sorrow that does not bring with it the “instant gratification” our world tries so desperately to sell you.
So what does this mean for us? It means we embrace the saintly, forever mindset right now. The victory of Christ Jesus and His resurrection is what matters most, above all things, because it alone gives us the heavenly promise of forever. Heavenly, eternal joy where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. This promise and reality is ours, right now, even in the face of the many difficulties and struggles we encounter daily. Being a saint is no worldly guarantee of a bowl of cherries. Ease and comfort, riches, fame or fortune none of these things are guaranteed. If you want a guarantee, you gotta buy a toaster! All of our first-world, instant-based luxuries could be gone tomorrow, in the blink of an eye.
All Saints Day gives us a heavenly reality check. We look to Christ our Saviour and His people who followed Him and embraced His victory, in the face of terrible persecution and even the loss of earthly life that we call martyrdom. It makes us get our priorities in check too. We bring nothing into this world, we take nothing when we go. But what do we leave behind? What legacy do we leave our family and friends?
We want to leave a faithful and saintly one. We want to tell the world, till our final breath, that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. He offers victory, life and salvation for all who believe. We want them to believe this and trust this for themselves. We want them to be baptized and brought into God’s family. We want them to receive forgiveness, life and salvation in the Lord’s Supper. We want to love our neighbours like Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.
Despite all the darkness that this world can throw at us, it cannot eclipse the heavenly light of Christ. The everlasting city of paradise seen by Daniel the prophet and St. John the Evangelist, with its golden streets and water clear as crystal. Our Lord Himself is its light. All of this and even more that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1Cor 2:9) is what the saints in the Church Triumphant who have gone before us now behold. This is in store for us too as God’s saints in the Church Militant.
For now, we live in Christ, a forever people in an instant world: poor in spirit, mourning, meek, and persecuted. In this life, we hold forth Christ as the One who calls us saints and who goes with us as we walk by faith and not by sight. Then, in the life to come, we shall see Him as He is, for we will be like Him and we shall live forever in a paradise without fear, darkness, shame, sin, death, pain, suffering or tears. This is the joy of the saints who have gone before us. This is our hope and future in the victory of Christ our Messiah. Now and forever more. Amen!
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