Joining Our Voices with All the Company of Heaven

The Rev. Dr. Karin J Ekholm, Feast of All Saints ~ November 2nd, 2025

“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers” (Ephesians 1:15-16) 

 “Saint” here, in Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus, refers simply to members of the Christian community. Throughout the epistles, this is how the term was used, though later it came to be limited to persons whose lives were perceived as heroic. This morning, we celebrate the Feast of All Saints or All Hallows. Feasts always begin the prior eve, in this case, Hallowe’en, and over time, the Church set aside another day to remember that vast body of the faithful who are unknown in the wider fellowship of believers. These three days of Allhallowtide are a time of remembering those who have passed by lighting candles, visiting cemeteries, and special prayers. In my family, since the death of my grandma, we have added fourth day of remembering on her birthday, October 30th. 

This past week, grandma Elsie would have been 101. My sister, cousins, and I live far apart from each other, but every year, wherever we are, we do one of the things she loved best: we eat ice-cream. This year, my son and I honored grandma with vanilla ice-cream and a pie we baked from apples that we picked at an orchard off I-66. 

Marco is thirteen so he never met his great-grandmother, but I tell him stories about her, how she was born to Swedish immigrants in Minnesota, how her father and brother died from tuberculosis when she was a toddler, how then she and her mother, Karin--a seamstress whom I was named for--returned by boat to rural Sweden where they stayed until grandma Elsie was a teenager. 

I have shown Marco little black-and-white pictures of her wedding day with a big bouquet of roses and grandpa in a WWII uniform. She was only 19, and looking at the pictures I wonder whether she knew of the mental health struggles that plagued my grandfather from the days of the war until he passed. In all my memories of my grandfather, he was contending with depression, but my father remembers him as a strong man who worked for Mayflower moving company, who was active in youth ministry at their Swedish Covenant Church, and who was occasionally hospitalized for depression. Midcentury Swedes didn’t talk about personal matters, and I can only imagine how hard these times were for my grandparents as they raised three children. 

My mother is from rural East Texas, and she was one of eleven children. She tells stories of picking watermelons and sugar cane, bottle-feeding a calf, and how her mother, Fay Nell, sewed their undergarments from flour sacks. Her father was an orphan of the Great Depression. Hard lives and hard work took a toll on her parents, and they died in their early 50s, some years before I was born. Though I never met them, as girls, my sister and I pretended to call her on the telephone and talk with her in heaven. I don’t know we started, but it helped me in my longing for connection with a grandmother I knew only from photographs and stories. 

Many forms of longing attend memories and stories of loved ones who have died: we might wish we could go back in time to be with them again, even for a moment, or that we could show them where we are now. We long to tell them how much we love them, to thank them for who they made us or to apologize. Often our relationships with those who have died were complicated, and a lot was left unresolved when they departed. Knowing what we know now, we yearn for more time to tell them what we couldn’t say back then.

Many of you have related memories of family members and loved ones who have died. It means a lot to me when you share these stories. It’s important we remember those who have gone before and that we recognize how they made us who we are. Talking about the dead is important for our wellbeing, it helps build and strengthen our relationships with each other, and it plays an essential role in how we understand ourselves as spiritual beings and members of God’s Church.

Our culture puts considerable pressure on us to establish an identity as though it were a product that we can construct. The truth is that we are shaped largely by the people we have known and by our understanding of God, who has revealed himself in relationship.

God so loved each of us that he came as a human to show us how to love and live in community. When we celebrate Communion today, we remember Jesus’ final dinner with his closest companions. Our opening prayer recalls that after he was betrayed and crucified, Jesus “overcame death and the grave, and by his glorious resurrection opened to us the way of everlasting life.” The prayer goes on to petition that at the last day we be brought with all God’s saints into joy of his eternal kingdom. Because Christ overcame death, we live with the assurance that we will be reunited with those whom we have lost. 

But this prayer not only remembers Jesus’ sacrifice as we look forward in hope, but importantly, also speaks to the present. We offer praise and proclaim that we join “our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name: Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.”

C.S. Lewis referenced this prayer when he observed that while Christians are divided on “praying to the saints, we are all agreed about praying with them” (Letters to Malcolm, letter 3). I find deep consolation and spiritual strength in knowing that even here and now we are joined with this great cloud of witnesses in song and prayer.

We are shaped by how we pray, and we sound new depths of community when we come together in prayer. In learning about the lives of saints and sharing stories, we discover a magnificent diversity of ways in which to reflect God’s love. As Lewis keenly observes,

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints” (Mere Christianity, 190). 

At the heart of Luke’s gospel is the story of the great reversal by which God scatters the proud in their conceit, casts down the mighty from their thrones, lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty. Every one of us is invited to participate. As nearly 42 million Americans lost access to food aid, affordable healthcare is threatened, and electricity prices soar as the days grow colder and darker, we the Church are the hands and feet and ears and voice of Christ, caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, and walking alongside those in sorrow. 

Beloved community, many of you have experienced the loss of people who were at the very center of your lives. Today is a day to remember them, to share stories about them, to find encouragement in their example, to receive Christ’s assurance that those who weep will be comforted, to pray with and for them, and to give thanks for the hope we find in life everlasting. Join in their song and carry on their ministry by bringing your unique self, shaped by the people you have loved, to reflect God’s grace and mercy, and to participate in the blessing of his great reversal.