November 2, 2025
All Saints’ Sunday/ Year C
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex CT
Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18; Psalm 149; Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31
Several years ago, there was a seminar taught at Yale with the provocative title Christian Theology and Harry Potter. This was at a time when plenty of people were sounding the alarm that Harry Potter, the young sorcerer, only encouraged youngsters to risk their souls by exploring the dark arts and magic. I suppose there are some still who are trying to ban the wildly successful J.K. Rowling series although these days it’s more about Rowling’s anti-trans crusade than ghosts and demons. But this Yale class, taught by my friend Danielle Tumminio Hansen, argued for a different perspective. Harry Potter is about the eternal themes of good and evil, about sacrificing ourselves for our friends, as we see in the characters of Dumbledore, Harry, his mother Lily, and even Snape.
There is another theme that permeates the Potter books, and that is the desire to know, to communicate, with those we love who have died. For Harry, it’s his parents, and the veil between the living and the dead for them is parted in the fourth book in the series, as Harry’s parents are able to speak words of encouragement to him in his battle with the evil Voldemort.
And it’s not just Harry Potter. Popular culture is filled with tales of our longing to know what lies beyond, what happens when we die, from the Life Force of the Star Wars series that allows Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda and Anakin Skywalker to communicate with the living; to Clarence, the inept angel in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. We humans can’t seem to help ourselves! We dream of our loved ones and try to find a message from them; we seek signs in the appearance of a bird or a butterfly or a rainbow. 68% of Americans hold paranormal beliefs, including the belief in ghosts, and that’s more than identify as Christian![1] We want to know the unknowable, to see the un-seeable.
Yet we need not look to the occult or to the paranormal or to fictional characters in books to satisfy our need to connect with loved ones and others who have died. The three days that are known in the Church as Allhallowtide demonstrate the unconquerable connection between the living and the dead, affirming that death does not have the final word.
In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, it is understood that Holy Eucharist, which they call the Divine Liturgy, is quite literally the stepping into a heavenly banquet that has gone on from the beginning of time and stretches forward into all eternity. A veil is opened, and we are participants at the table with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. These are words we hear every week, so often that they likely fail to surprise or shock us. This company of heaven includes all who have gone before us, those who have slipped this mortal coil and who now dwell in the nearer presence of God.
Our celebration of All Saints’ Day, a day in which the veil between the dead and the living, heaven and earth, is pulled aside, gives us an opportunity to stand in the presence of this mystery we call faith, of a God who becomes incarnate, just like us, and yet who continues to move in the world and in each of us by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Nowhere is Jesus more real, in the flesh, incarnate, than in the scene we just read from Luke. He does not go up on the mountain to gather his followers around him like some great sage. No, after calling the twelve disciples, he brings them down to a level place and the crowds gather around. Jesus is with them. And then, “he looked up at his disciples…”(Luke 6:20). This is no position of authority, a superior looking down on his underlings. This is a man who is one of them.
When Jesus tells the poor and the hungry and the weeping that they are blessed, it doesn’t mean that he thinks poverty and hunger and sorrow are good things. No, he means that he is right there with them in it. Their blessedness is not about their hardship; it is about Jesus’s preferential option for the poor, as liberation theology puts it. In two years out of three in our lectionary cycle we read these beatitudes (either Matthew or Luke), and it is impossible to miss the connection between Jesus’s presence with the poor, the sick, the suffering, and the persecuted, without also realizing that the saints we remember, that named host of people whom the Church has designated as somehow set apart, these people, too, suffered and sacrificed and endured hardship, all in the name of the Gospel. And Jesus was, and is, with them, too.
Last year, I walked part of the Camino de Santiago, the medieval pilgrimage route to the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. For many people like me, this is a spiritual pursuit, a time of prayer and silence to spend time listening for the Spirit’s voice, away from the noise of everyday life. For others, it’s a holiday. I encountered a couple who had just been married in Vigo, Spain, who took their parents and the entire wedding party on the Camino for their honeymoon. There were families and couples and youth groups with their tunes blasting from their phones, and yes, there were pilgrims walking alone or in twos and threes, seeking connection with something sacred.
No matter one’s motivation for walking, there is a custom that everyone follows: when passing or encountering another person along the way, you greet and are greeted. Hola. Buenos días! Buen Camino. Good walk. Have an easy path. Whatever it is this Camino is for you, may it be what you seek. It doesn’t matter how many times you encounter the same person along the way, you stopped to rest and they passed you or vice versa, the refrain is the same. Hola. Buenos días! Buen Camino.
There are not many – if any – places in this world where everyone is headed in the same direction with the same goal in mind. The Camino de Santiago actually has 7 main routes and more than 200 recognized routes ranging from 60 to 2,800 miles, and they all converge on this one place, the Catedral de Santiago de Compostela. Its symbol is a scallop shell which shows all of these pathways converging at a single point.
Where else can you find such a thing? Certainly not in sports where one side wants to win. There are rivalries in our workplaces and in our families. Even Christian communities committed to following the way of Jesus can’t seem to agree on the way to do that or where we are going or what it looks like when we get there.
But on the Camino, there are many paths but one destination, and everyone encourages everyone else along the way. It isn’t a competition (well, maybe some of the youth were making a race of it prancing up steep inclines like mountain goats). On the hot days when someone takes a break in the shade, there is always someone else to ask if they are okay, if they need help. It’s the kind of encouragement that made my heart sing. Buen Camino.
After a couple of days of this, I actually thought of this day, All Saints’ Day, when we celebrate this great feast day of the Church, remembering the saints through the ages who have born witness to the love of God in Christ Jesus, often to forfeit their lives for the Gospel. Every week when we gather at this table, we invoke saints and angels through the ages who are gathered around the throne of God singing a song of praise, and I imagine them surrounding us with encouragement along our own way, whispering buen camino as we sometimes muddle along through our days.
In a reflection on All Saints’ Day, Andrew McGowan, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School, wrote,
But the communion of saints is not about me, or even me and God; it is about me in relation to others, to the company of all those servants and friends of God whose work and witness has contributed to my being here, and will contribute to my future, just as my own life contributes, however imperfectly and falteringly, to those of others.[2]
Yes, we travel this Camino, this road, not alone but together with all those who came before and all who ever will be. Buen camino, my friends.
[1] According to a Daniel Wise Facebook post of 10.31.2019. His PhD studies were in the paranormal.
[2] Andrew’s Version, October 27, 2025.