All Saints by the Lake
November 9, 2025
The prophet Haggai (James Tissot)
As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here.
“Not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed.” But God says in Haggai:
Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come.
Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on in the readings for today, apparently.
Here we are again in November, that strange little pre-Advent season sometimes known as “Kingdomtide,” when we think about saints and the dead and what comes after death, and also about the end of all things when all creation will be made new – that day that Paul calls “the day of the Lord” in the letter to the Thessalonians.
And it’s understandable that really confronting these topics – our own coming deaths, the knowledge that the cosmos itself is only temporary – might make us a little shaky, so that we need reassurance from our friend Paul who founded our church and told us about Jesus and his victory over death.
Even more so when we add Remembrance Day into the mix, and let ourselves actually think about what those valiant, heartbreakingly young soldiers went through in the trenches, whether or not they made the ultimate sacrifice.
Into this solemn collection of topics comes this frankly ridiculous story told to Jesus by the Sadducees, about the woman who marries seven brothers in a row. It’s a very typical way for Jewish scholars to argue about scripture, this kind of exaggeration for effect; and you can imagine the crowd laughing along as the number of husbands keeps going up – but it’s honestly not all that funny if you think about how it would feel if it happened to real people. The desperate longing for children, the brothers dropping dead one by one, the woman with no choices in the matter and probably hated by both her in-laws and herself – it wouldn’t be surprising if this story first made you giggle but then left you seriously shaken.
And rightly so, because this story likewise carries an important message about all those topics I just named – saints, death, what comes after death, and God’s re-creation of the world.
Jesus’ response might seem hard to hear for those who love and cherish our families. But I think it is actually comforting, because it assures us that our fate in the new creation is not dependent on our luck – or lack thereof – in this one.
The next life is not just a continuation of this one, with the same constraints and unfairnesses and heartbreaks, where a woman can be passed from brother to brother like a malfunctioning appliance and ultimately have her only choice (if it even is a choice) be which one to spend eternity with.
In the next life, each of us is fully and triumphantly ourself, the person God made us to be, having overcome whatever factors warped and traumatized us in life, and we have all eternity to rejoice in being that person and seeing God face to face.
This is what Jesus means when he says that we will be “like the angels in heaven”: not that we will be angels, but that we, like the angels, will be whole and victorious before God.
This is the promise to which we can cling when we are, understandably, shaken by the shocks and sorrows of this life. When we are scared, when we are hurt, when we are grieving, we still know: Jesus has secured for us the promise of the resurrection, and nothing that is good, true, pure, or worthy will be lost.
Because when Haggai recounts the word of God about shaking the heavens and the earth, notice the reason for the shaking: so that the “treasure (not, despite the libretto of the Messiah, the ‘desire’) of all nations shall come, and I shall fill this house with splendour … the silver is mine, and the gold is mine.”
When God shakes us, he may dislodge a good deal of wealth and property. He may need to shake us free from complacency, from despair, from selfishness, from conceit, from falsehood. God may need to shake us loose from unhealthy beliefs, broken systems, and toxic relationships. But those things we have loved, those things we have learned, the ways we have grown, the ways we have served, the gifts we have shared, the help we have given, the truths we have told – those things can never be shaken loose, but abide forever.
“So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast” says Paul to his beloved Thessalonians. “May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.”
“Eternal comfort and good hope.” That is what Jesus promises when he speaks of the resurrection. The eternal comfort and good hope of knowing that God has defeated death on our behalf, that nothing that hurt us in this life will be allowed to keep its hold on us in the next, and that no matter how hard we are shaken, we rest on that promise.
Last night, I did a baptism. A – gasp! – private, home baptism, of a woman whom I’ve gotten to know through another parish member. She is homebound, living with a terminal diagnosis, and while the details of her story are not mine to tell, I can attest that she has escaped from a family situation that makes Greek tragedy look tame, and survived more trauma than any dozen people should have to bear.
As I marked a cross on her forehead with oil of chrism and said, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever,” I could see the weight of decades of hardship and fear lift from her shoulders. She stands now on the firm foundation of God’s victory over death, and of all those saints who have gone before us, who may have been shaken in their turn, but who have showed us how to persevere to the end.
This week on the Global Worship website, I found a poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes. The first verse is about Halloween, and how trick-or-treating can sometimes seem a little bit too genuinely scary, given world events. But here’s the second half of the poem:
That’s what makes it scary, the lie.
But listen: it’s not the end, it’s only the Eve.
On the day after, come all the saints,
the kind and calm and steady,
the hopeful and courageous,
who have faced these monsters before,
who have “come through the great tribulation”
and know how to do this.
And we ourselves, having gotten
the heebie-jeebies out of our system,
join them in the long, hard march
right smack dab through the nightmare
to something peaceful and beautiful.
Stand firm and hold fast, friends, in the eternal comfort and good hope given by the God who is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
Amen.
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