A sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at
Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, North Shields, 3 November 2024
Isaiah 25: 6-9; Revelation 21: 1-6a
Watch the whole service on YouTube
Friday just gone – 1 November – was All Saints Day. On that day we are invited to remember all of the saints, both the known, famous ones, the less well known ones, and the unknowns ones. That springs from a conviction that we have a living connection with all of the saints; all of those ones who have ever lived, those who are alive today, and all those saints will who be born and live in future days. And one aspect of that conviction concerning our connection to all of these saints is that at the end of all things we will all be gathered together by God.
And just to emphasise, this is not just the supposedly special saints that we are talking about here; the saints of the Bible, such as Saints Paul and Peter, the Blessed Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene; the saints of later years such as Martin Luther King Junior or Mother Teresa. This is also about the standard saints, the ones like you and me. It’s also about the saints we have known in our churches, our families and our communities.
So, if you tried to imagine all the saints brought together by God would you visualise that gathering as a massive picnic? Well, if you wouldn’t, then you should!
That’s Isaiah’s vision of what happens when God gathers people together. He’s writing with his own time and experience colouring his vision of the future (which is how it is for all of us, of course). He is writing for a people in exile from their home – Jewish people, captive in Babylon. So, not surprisingly he pictures them as brought back to God to Mount Zion – to the ‘mountain of the LORD’ (25:6) – the hill upon which Jerusalem stands.
But, in Isaiah’s vision of gathering people, God declines to limit God’s self to gathering together only the Jewish people. Instead, the prophet reports, ‘the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples’ – all peoples – ‘a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.’ (25:6) When God throws a party it travels some distance – far enough to include all the peoples, not just the one Jewish people that he had specially blessed.
When you try to envision an occasion when God gathers everyone together, imagine your favourite food and your favourite drinks, prepared and provided at a level higher than any you have experienced before. And it’s not that the food and drink are there to cheer you up in your misery. Instead the food and drink are there to reflect the joyfulness of the occasion when a people realise that they have been accepted and saved by God. As Isaiah puts it, on that day people will be saying, ‘See, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.’ (25:9)
On the holy mountain the people will be joyful, and sadness will have ended: ‘then the LORD God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,’ writes the prophet Isaiah. (25:8) And there’s the connection between today’s two readings: ‘God will wipe away the tears from all faces’ in Isaiah, which becomes ‘he will wipe away every tear from their eyes’ in the Book of Revelation (21:4), which, like Isaiah, is a prophetic biblical book.
And now we are moving unto an even bigger platform or setting for God’s great gathering of people. Isaiah prophesied about the nations: ‘on this mountain the LORD of host will make for all peoples …’ (25:6). The prophecy in the Book of Revelation though, is not only about the nations but about the whole world, indeed the whole universe: ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.’ (21:1)
Isaiah, writing in the context of conflicts between nations envisioned God bringing the nations together to establish peaceful relations, expressed in a huge, shared feast on top of the holy mountain. The Book of Revelation envisions the whole of reality – both earth and heaven – being reordered: ‘a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away’. And this is where the phrase that links the two readings, the one about tears being wiped away, takes on a new, additional and wonderful meaning.
On that day, writes the prophet who wrote the Book of Revelation, when God brings everything together, ‘he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ (21:4) In Isaiah, tears are wiped away because peace and freedom have come for all peoples, which is no small thing. In Revelation, though, tears are wiped away because death itself is at an end: death will be no more.
And this is the setting in which we ponder what’s known as “the communion of saints” – our living connection with all of the other saints; those who have gone before, those with us now, and those who are still to be born. So, let’s be grateful for all of the saints of the here and now, both here in this church and much wider afield. And let’s be open to the possibility that some of these saints might not even name themselves as “Christian” for God invites to his picnic who God decides to invite: be grateful.
And let’s be thankful for all of the saints of the past, including the ones whose example of lived-out faith in life has been an inspiration for us. For you, maybe that’s a well-known saint. Alternatively, maybe that’s someone you knew who was special to you, influencing the way you lead your life today, and the faith you hold today: be thankful.
And let’s look forward to being joined together with them and others at that time in the future when God makes all things new (21:5). All Saints is meant to be a time of celebration of all the saints, and of the God of all the saints; our God, who when the time comes, removes all suffering, puts death to death, and comes to dwell with God’s saints – past, present and future. And in the vision from Revelation God does so here on earth. (21:3) And as we look forward to that day, we pray to God who is ‘the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the End’ (21:6) of all things to make it so. Amen.