Year A: All Saints’ Day | I John 3:1-3
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 1, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.” – I John 3:1[1]
Happy All Saints’ Day! This Church Festival offers us the opportunity to look back at those Christians who have preceded us, thank God for their contributions to the Church, and to remind ourselves that we, too, are part of this Great Cloud of Witnesses. The earliest documented expressions of this celebration, originally honoring martyrs, date back roughly 1700 years, with the standardization of the date going into effect in the mid-700’s, well before the united Church split into the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
There are few different ideas around who—or even what—exactly, a “saint” is. Those of you who grew up under a formal liturgical practice likely think of someone famous like St. Francis or St. Teresa—people known for their holiness and formally honored for their devout lives. Those of us who grew up more Evangelical are less likely to focus on individual heroic figures and emphasize that, according to the Bible, all Christians are saints. While some people like to bring these two points of view into conflict, the reality is that both of these ideas can be true simultaneously. There are certainly stand-out figures of history that provide clear examples of people closely following Jesus. And modeling our own lives after theirs is certainly no sin—the Apostle Paul himself encourages the recipients of his early letters to imitate his behaviors as he attempts to imitate Jesus.[2] Yet Paul and the other early Christian writers also make it clear that all who pledge themselves to God under Jesus’ anointing are saints—or to translate directly from the New Testament’s standard terminology, “those holy.”
Despite how often we use it in church services, “holy” can be a confusing term as well. People use the words “sacred” or “set apart” as synonyms, but those words also tend to hold vague meanings. Probably the closest common concept we can relate “holiness” to today is sort of an amped up purity—something untouched or unspoiled. It’s like a place or object with an essence so clear and bright that you’re afraid to approach it, not necessarily because the thing itself is scary but for fear of adding fingerprints or accidentally lessening or dimming its wonder. Simply seeing it or being in its presence inspires awe, and you’re almost frightened to interact with it lest you somehow ruin the experience for later generations.
In the way we generally think of holiness, it’s something fragile or fleeting. This is the approach we use when we’re worried about defilement, about outside forces disturbing or corrupting the person or object—or the object causing harm to the person who touches it. This is how we generally understand scenes from the Hebrew Bible where someone is told to take off their shoes before entering holy ground or when they approach the Ark of the Covenant or late in Judah’s history when King Manasseh later sets up idols to other gods within the Temple shortly before the Babylonian Exile. There’s a sense that holiness is something that can easily be lost or ruined—something that needs a level of protection.
We tend to take this view within ourselves as well. If I feel like I need to be more holy, I generally stop doing certain things; I may abstain from particular pleasures as a way of ensuring nothing corrupts my soul. That’s part of why different branches of the Church offer penance, confession, or the rite of reconciliation (the Anglican version of confession). People recognize their own lack or impurity and, feeling almost like something is physically clinging to them, want to find a way to clean themselves, to refresh their core essence to a place where they no longer need carry shame, guilt, or fear.
The prophets, however, frequently offer a competing view of holiness. Rather than being a vulnerable state in a world aggressively trying to pollute all it can touch, in this presentation, the holiness is the force that holds all the power.
Our first thought about “powerful” holiness is likely one of burning—the idea that anything corrupt that approaches it is completely consumed and destroyed. But that’s not the way the prophets present it. Instead, like the “justice [that rolls] down like waters”[3] that we’ll read about next week, this form of holiness erupts from a central point.[4] Sweeping along like a flooding river, it purifies everything it touches, purging the world of its impurity. It flows so thoroughly and marvelously that even the most common and basic of objects—the prophet Zechariah gives the example of household cooking pots and bells on a horse’s harness[5]—become as worthy of respect or celebration as the implements the priests use to worship God in the Temple.
This outflow seems to be the understanding the Apostles and Early Church writers promoted. Just as “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it,”[6] Jesus, through his Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, shatters the barriers dividing the Ancient Cosmos, allowing the light and purity of the Celestial Realm to pierce the darkest corners of Earth and the Underworld. Because of this Divine Anointing, we who are faithful to his teaching and example join in that light, becoming participants in the cleansing not only of our individual selves but of human society and eventually of all Creation. We discover that we all are siblings, members of one family with one Head and under one Authority and holding to one common custom—that of embodied love. Infused with the same Breath (or Spirit), we both inherit and imitate the traditions of service, generosity, and kindness that our Father and the Heir themselves demonstrate by their own example. Just as we display the traits and habits common to our biological family, as Christians, our actions, practices, and understanding of the world naturally reflect those of our Celestial forebears. Realizing our union with God and one another, we not only “purify [ourselves], just as [God] is pure,”[7] but participate in the ever expanding bounds of the endless outflow of holiness. We become those who have “clothed themselves in gleaming garments….having washed…and bleached them with the lamb’s blood.”[8]
Famous or not, recognized by history or forgotten to time (though our Father never forgets us), small and weak, strong and great, we, as Jesus’ present body in the world, all flow within and as part of God’s River of Holiness. As such, in the end, we all have the opportunity to live as—and in so doing, to truly become—saints.
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are!”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] I Corinthians 4:18, 11:1; I Thessalonians 1:6
[3] Amos 5:24
[4] often imagined as the Temple in Jerusalem
[5] Zechariah 14:20-21
[6] John 1:5
[7] I John 3:3
[8] Revelation 7:13, 14 | My translation