Introduction
As an Anglican priest, one of the things I get asked about a lot is what Anglicans say about the saints. What better day is there to address that particular question than All Saints’ Day?
I want to preface my answer by saying that I’m going to try to give what I consider the classically Anglican answer to that question, but there are good Anglicans who would disagree, probably on all sides. In the classical Anglican way, I’m going to try to walk a via media between two polar options. This is not to say that you can’t be an Anglican and hold one of those two options. It simply means this is the classically Anglican answer to that question.
Most of us carry a picture of a saint in our minds. The picture usually includes a halo, a stained-glass window, and a spiritual biography far more impressive than our own. Saints are the people who sold everything, died for the faith, or spent forty years in the desert eating locusts. We admire them, but we do not imagine ourselves as them. We think of them as substantially different from ourselves. We see what they did, what they gave up, and how they lived, and we think, “Well, that’s great, but I don’t know that I have that in me.” It feels like they had some superpower, some kind of special gift that enabled them to live that way.
Paul does not share this understanding of a saint. Writing to the church in Ephesus, he gives thanks because he has heard of “your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints” (Eph 1:15, ESV).
Paul is not describing a handful of spiritual heroes doing things the rest of us ordinary Christians aren’t capable of. He is describing ordinary Christians in Asia Minor: merchants, slaves, widows, and households that met in someone’s living room. Paul calls each and every one of them a saint. He even uses the same word to describe the church in Corinth, which was hardly a congregation of spiritual giants.
The word “saints” means “holy ones,” yet their holiness is not their own. The holiness of the saints belongs to and comes from the God who has claimed them. Paul prays that the Ephesians would grasp “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints” (Eph 1:18). The saints are God’s inheritance, the portion he has set apart for himself, as Moses sang:
“But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” (Deut 32:9).
No one earns the status of being a saint, being treasured, or being part of God’s people. A person can only receive it. The holiness isn’t ours. Nobody earns the title of saint. It comes from God.
The Thirty-Nine Articles say the same thing in sixteenth-century English. Article XIV denies that anyone can do more than God requires and thereby accumulate merit for others. The saints are not spiritual millionaires with surplus holiness to lend. They are sinners saved by grace, just as we are. When the church honors them, it praises the Craftsman by admiring his handiwork.
One Assembly
The collect for All Saints’ Day prays to the God who has “knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship.” We experience this here on earth. We can gather in church, share meals, and feel this oneness. But that union is not merely a oneness here on earth, for death does not unravel this knot.
Psalm 149 calls for “his praise in the assembly of the godly” (Ps 149:1), and John sees that assembly:
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands” (Rev 7:9).
John sees the great assembly of the faithful praising God in the eternal dwellings. And look at what they are holding! Palm branches were associated with the Feast of Booths, when Israel lived in tents for a week to remember how God had cared for them in the wilderness (Lev 23:40–43). Zechariah saw a day when the nations would go up to Jerusalem “to keep the Feast of Booths” (Zech 14:16). John sees that day arrive and says that God “will shelter them with his presence” (Rev 7:15). The Greek verb there is the tent verb, the same verb the Fourth Gospel uses when it says that the Word “dwelt among us” (John 1:14). It is the word for tabernacle, used as a verb. The wilderness journey is over; the saints are home in God’s own tent.
Every time we come to the Lord’s Table, we join our voices “with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven.” We are not singing a different song from the one in Revelation 7. We are joining their song and echoing their words. And we “lift up our hearts” because the wall between the two assemblies (the one on earth and the one in heaven) is thinner than we think. We are knit together with them forever and ever, and death cannot separate what God has knit together.
Following Them, Not Praying to Them
If the saints belong to the same body, what do we do with them? The collect answers plainly. We ask God for grace “so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living.” The saints are examples for us to emulate.
If you are saying to yourself, “I don’t need to worry about the saints because I have direct access to God; I have direct access to Christ,” my answer is, “Yes, you do!" But you are also cutting yourself off from thousands of years of examples of people who have faithfully followed Jesus Christ in this world.
Dunstan, the patron saint of our parish, spent his life as abbot of Glastonbury and as archbishop of Canterbury, calling the English church back to prayer and holiness. We remember him not for his sake but so that we might follow him on the way of the cross.
Notably, the collect does not encourage us to pray to the saints. That omission is deliberate. Article XXII calls the “Invocation of Saints” a “fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture.” In Tudor English, “fond” meant foolish, not affectionate. The Reformers had no quarrel with honoring the saints. Their objection was to treating the saints as go-betweens, as if the Father were too distant and the Son too busy to hear us. Paul’s prayer goes straight to “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory” (Eph 1:17). The multitude in Revelation does not field requests. It worships.
Bernard of Clairvaux, preaching on this feast in the twelfth century, said that the saints need no honors from us. The benefit of remembering them is ours, because their memory kindles in us a longing to be with them.
So take a moment to think of a particular person whose faith made Christ more believable to you. It could be a major saint, if you want, but it is probably better to think of someone in your life who has passed on: a grandmother who prayed through a long illness, a Sunday school teacher who kept showing up, or a friend who forgave what you could not. Their memory does not give you a channel to God. Instead, it offers you a pattern to follow and should make you hungry for the place where they already are.
The Hunger That Will End
Both Luke and John use the word “hunger.” Jesus says:
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh” (Luke 6:21).
The word “now” is significant. Jesus does not pretend that his disciples are full now. Instead, he blesses them amid their hunger and tears.
John shows us the promise kept. The elder tells him what the white-robed multitude is:
“These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev 7:14).
If that isn’t backward, I don’t know what is. How do you make a garment white? Certainly not by washing it in blood! But that’s exactly how the blood of Christ works. His blood makes our garments clean.
Then the elder describes their future:
“They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev 7:16–17).
The saints in glory, those who neither hunger nor thirst, are the hungry and weeping ones of Luke 6, now on the far side of God’s promise. That’s who we should be looking to. That’s who we should be admiring in this world. That’s who we should be lavishing our affection and praise upon. But instead, we tend to turn our praise elsewhere.
A Warning and a Center
But Luke includes something that John does not. In Luke, Jesus pronounces woes alongside the blessings:
“Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets” (Luke 6:25–26).
We tend to honor those the world already admires: the rich, the powerful, the influential. Honoring the saints reminds us that what the world defines as success, what the world defines as a person living their best life now, is radically different from the way God has called us to live.
Francis gave away everything he had. That’s not how the world defines success. That’s not the kind of person the world tends to admire, maybe not until long after they’re gone. But in this life, no one says, “That’s who you should live like.” Yet that’s exactly what the history of the Church calls us to. That’s exactly what the mission of Christ calls us to.
Jesus regards the world’s applause as a poor measure of holiness. The saints in Revelation emerged from tribulation, and many of them were almost certainly never admired by anyone but God.
Psalm 149 records the same reversal:
“For the LORD takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with salvation” (Ps 149:4).
He adorns the humble (not the rich, not the proud, not the successful, but the humble) with salvation. In Revelation, he dresses them (the humble, the meek, the hungry, the weeping) in white, and their robes are white, not because of any holiness or righteousness they have earned, but because of someone else’s blood.
The white robes, washed in the blood of the Lamb, draw us to the center of the feast. Even on All Saints’ Day, the saints are not the center; the Lamb is. In John’s vision, the Lamb stands “in the midst of the throne” and “will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water” (Rev 7:17). The multitude does not sing of its own faithfulness. It cries, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev 7:10). Paul prays that the Ephesians would know “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph 1:19), the same power that raised Christ from the dead. That power is at work in all of us, each and every one of us, to make us the people God has called us to be. Every saint who tries to follow Jesus in this world, denying themselves and walking the way of the cross, is evidence of that power.
So we give thanks today for all the saints. We follow them, long to be with them in joy and peace, long to be reunited with those we have lost, and, above all, worship the one who made them saints. The grandmother, the teacher, the martyr, and the person in the pew beside you all belong to him. They are all saints. One day, hunger will end, tears will be wiped away, and the whole company of saints will sing the same song before the same throne forever and ever.
Amen.
Life Group Study Guide
Intro Prayer
Heavenly Father, we come before you today as your people, gathered in the fellowship of all the saints. As we open your Word and reflect on what it means to belong to you, we ask that you quiet our hearts and open our minds. May we not simply hear what we expect, but receive what you desire to give us. Holy Spirit, guide our conversation, stir our affections, and draw us closer to the one in whom all holiness is found, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Ice Breaker
Think of someone from your past, perhaps a grandparent, a teacher, or a neighbor, whose faith left a lasting impression on you. What single word would you use to describe them?
Questions
Paul addresses the ordinary Christians in Ephesus, including slaves and widows, as saints. How does this challenge or change your understanding of what it means to be a saint?
Holiness is something received rather than earned. How does that truth affect the way you see yourself in relation to God and to other believers?
When the church honors the saints, it is “praising the Craftsman by admiring his handiwork.” What does this image suggest about how we should regard the remarkable Christians who have gone before us?
The Anglican tradition deliberately omits encouragement to pray to the saints, while still honoring them as examples. How do you personally find a healthy balance between drawing inspiration from the lives of faithful Christians and keeping Christ at the center?
Bernard of Clairvaux said that remembering the saints “kindles in us a longing to be with them where they are.” Who in your life, now with God, makes you long for eternal life? How does their memory shape how you live today?
In Luke 6, Jesus blesses the hungry and the weeping while warning those who are full and comfortable. In what areas of your life might you be tempted to measure faithfulness by the world’s standards of success rather than by God’s?
The white-robed multitude in Revelation sings, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (Rev 7:10). What does it mean to you that the saints are not the center, but the Lamb is?
Paul prays that the Ephesians would know “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph 1:19), the same power that raised Christ from the dead. That same resurrection power is at work in every saint striving to follow Jesus. How does that reality encourage or challenge you in your own walk of faith right now?
Life Application
This week, take a few moments to write down the name of one person whose faith made Christ more believable or more worth following for you. Reflect on one specific way their life pointed you toward God. Then identify one concrete habit, practice, or act of faithfulness from their example that you can begin to imitate this week, however small. Let their memory kindle in you not only gratitude but also a renewed hunger to follow Christ more closely.
Key Takeaways
Every baptized believer is a saint, not because of personal spiritual achievement but because God has claimed them and set them apart for himself. Holiness is received, not earned.
Death does not dissolve the communion God has knit together. The church on earth and the saints in heaven are one body, and we join their eternal song whenever we gather at the Lord’s table.
Anglicans honor the saints as examples to follow and as a source of holy longing, while directing all prayer and worship to God alone through Jesus Christ, consistent with the 39 Articles.
The saints in Revelation are not the world’s successful or admired. They are the humble, the hungry, and the weeping, clothed in white robes washed in the Lamb’s blood, pointing to a radically different measure of faithfulness than the world offers.
The saints are not the center of the feast. The Lamb is. All salvation belongs to God and Christ, and the whole company of heaven sings of his glory, not their own.
Ending Prayer
Heavenly Father, Lord of all saints, we thank you that holiness is your gift, not our achievement. We give thanks for every faithful soul who has walked this road before us, whose lives were a pattern of grace and whose memories stir in us a longing for you. As we leave this time together, may we carry with us a renewed hunger for the life you have called us to, one that looks less like the world’s success and more like the way of the cross. Keep our eyes fixed on the Lamb, who stands in the midst of the throne, who shepherds his people to springs of living water and wipes away every tear. Bring us at last to that great assembly, where we shall hunger no more, and where the whole company of heaven sings that salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb, forever and ever. Amen.