Sermon 1st November 2026 – All Saints Day Text: Revelation 7:9-17 – Gathered before the throne

 Sermon 1^st November 2026 – All Saints Day

Text: Revelation 7:9-17 – Gathered before the throne

 

Today is All Saints Day—a day when the church remembers those who have gone before us in faith. We give thanks for the continuing communion we share with all God’s people, on earth and in heaven. For some of us, this is a joyful day.  We remember people who have fought the good fight and achieved the crown of victory with eternal life in heaven. For others, it is a tender day filled with grief; whose absence still hurts. Perhaps the passage of time has softened the grief, but it has not erased the pain.

 

All Saints Day reminds us that the church is larger than what we can see. We confess that in our creeds – we believe in the Communion of Saints – we declare that when we share Holy Communion – with the angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven. We are not only the people gathered in this church. We are joined to a communion that stretches across generations, nations, languages, and centuries. And in Revelation 7, God gives John a vision of that great communion. John writes:

 “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”

 

This is one of the most beautiful pictures in all of Scripture of the true life God has prepared us for since before creation began. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians chapter one. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. John sees a crowd so large that no one can number it. It is not a select few. It is not limited to one nation, one culture, one generation, or one kind of person. It is a multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language. God’s salvation is wider than we imagine. The saints include people whose names are remembered in history, but also countless people whose names are known only to God. They include the famous and the forgotten, the powerful and the poor, those who preached before thousands and those whose quiet faith was lived out in ordinary homes and ordinary lives. The saints are parents and children, teachers and laborers, doctors and farmers, artists and caretakers. They are people who lived courageous lives, and people who simply held on to God through difficult days. They are people who got many things right, and people who needed grace every day—just as we do.

 

What makes them saints is not that they were without sin – because that would be no one.  What makes them saints is that they belong to Christ. They have been made Holy by God through Jesus’ death for their sins. John says they are “standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”  At the center of this vision is not the greatness of the saints, but the greatness of Jesus. They are gathered before the Lamb—the One who was slain, the One who gave himself for the world, the One who conquered death through love. They wear white robes, and John is told that these robes have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. It is a striking image: robes made white through blood – which doesn’t make sense in a world where we live in fear of disease through blood. But then again, a God who gives the life of his Son for sinful human beings also makes no sense as the Psalm and book of Hebrews says: What is man that you are mindful of him.  But the point is clear.  Their holiness is not something they achieved by their own strength. Their lives have been cleansed and made whole by the grace of Christ.

 

That is good news for us, because we too are invited into this company—not because we have lived perfect lives, but because Christ is merciful.  The saints are not people who never failed.  They are people who trusted the One who never fails. They hold palm branches in their hands reminding us of Palm Sunday, or as we refer to it – the Triumphal Entry. But the triumph is not Christ’s alone but ours also. But the triumph is not victory as the world usually understands it.  It is not victory through domination, wealth, or power.  It is the victory of humility and sacrifice. A victory of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The victory of sacrificial love, the victory of faithfulness, the victory of life over death. The saints cry out: “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Notice where the praise is directed.  They do not say, “Look what we accomplished.”  They do not say, “Salvation belongs to our discipline, our goodness, or our strength.” They say, “Salvation belongs to our God.”

 

All Saints Day is not a celebration of human achievement. It is a celebration of divine grace. That is important when we remember those we have lost.  We may remember their goodness, their generosity, their courage, and their faith.

But we entrust them to God’s mercy. Their hope—and ours—is not in being good enough. Our hope is in the God who saves. John is then asked, “Who are these, robed in white, and from where have they come?”  The answer is: “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

They have come through suffering. Their faith did not exempt them from hardship. They knew grief, persecution  illness, loneliness, and death. They came through “the great ordeal.” This does not mean that every saint experienced the same kind of suffering, but it does mean that faith is not a promise that we will never suffer. It is a promise that suffering will not have the final word.

 

Some of the people we remember today knew great ordeals.  They faced sickness and hardship.  They knew times of fear and doubt.  They carried burdens that others may not have seen.  Some died peacefully; others died after long and difficult struggles. Yet God’s word tells us that their suffering did not separate them from God. Indeed, the vision of Revelation does not pretend that suffering is unreal. It does not minimize the pain of this world. It looks directly at suffering and then gives us God’s promise: “They are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them from further suffering. As John will later reveal: Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

 

This is the heart of Christian hope: Jesus is both the One who suffers with us and the One who leads us through suffering. He knows the wounds of the world because he has borne them in his own body.  He knows death because he entered death and he leads us into life because he rose again. God does not dismiss our grief but wipes away our tears.  God comes close. God sees every tear. God remembers every loss. And God promises a day when sorrow will be healed—not by forgetting, but by redemption. The vision in Revelation reminds us that we do not walk alone.  We belong to a multitude no one can count.  We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.  We remember that we are part of something greater.

The church may seem fragile but God’s people are more numerous than we can see and offers hope the world cannot in death. This vision calls us to live now as people of that future.