All Saints Sunday, November 2, 2025 – St. Paul’s Cathedral, Des Moines
The Rev. Lori Erickson
Grace and peace to you on this All Saints Sunday. I bring you greetings from New Song Church in Coralville, where I serve as deacon. It’s a privilege to join you this weekend, both for yesterday’s retreat and for this morning’s celebration of the feast of All Saints.
On this day, we remember the many ways God’s grace shows up in ordinary lives — through people who listen, serve, and show compassion in the midst of daily life, in the past and today.
In my work as both a deacon and a writer, that truth often feels close to home. I’ve long been drawn to the thin places where the sacred and the ordinary meet — where grace wears work clothes, so to speak.
Sometimes my two callings intersect in unexpected ways. Take, for example, an email I received several years ago out of the blue.
“I had a disturbing experience as I was driving to work this morning,” a woman wrote to me. “I’d like to ask your advice.”
Then she told of taking an exit off the interstate in Atlanta, Georgia, where she spotted a man by the side of the road. He was dressed all in black and had a serious expression on his face. He wasn’t hitchhiking, as she first thought, but simply standing there. And as she drove by him, he looked her straight in the eye, held up his arm, and tapped the watch on his wrist.
“This totally freaked me out,” she wrote. “And when I got back to my office, I typed in ‘grim reaper’ and ‘near the exit’ on my computer and you came up. What do you think?”
It was certainly an interesting pastoral situation. She’d obviously run across my name because of my book Near the Exit: Travels with the Not-So-Grim Reaper, which is about places around the world that have taught me about mortality. I was as mystified by her experience as she was, but I knew she needed reassurance. It seemed like too much to handle in an email, so I asked if she’d like to talk on the phone.
We ended up having a half hour of conversation. I talked her down from the ledge, assuring her that I didn’t think her experience at the exit was an omen of her imminent death. Whatever the man intended, I said, I advised her to take it as a reminder that for all of us, the clock is ticking — and that we need to use each day well.
She said she’d read my book. We said goodbye. And I don’t know the rest of her story, but I sometimes wonder about her. How curious that incident was. How odd.
I tell this story, of course, because today the Church turns its attention to the mystery of mortality. We remember the saints and the souls who have gone before us, now gathered in the communion of heaven. Once, these were two distinct feast days — All Saints and All Souls — but their boundaries have softened through the years, so that now we remember them together, united in the same great cloud of witnesses.
However we name the day, it comes down to this: remembering the people who’ve shown us what love looks like.
All cultures have ways of remembering the dead. I got the chance to explore some of these customs while writing my book Near the Exit. I visited fascinating places, from cemeteries in Rome and Mayan temples in Mexico to an open-air cremation ground in Colorado. But in many ways, what stays with me the most are the personal stories people told me along the way. Because when you tell people you’re writing a book about death and mortality, people either edge away, or lean in close to share some of their most tender memories.
All of you here today have those stories in your hearts as well. Many of you have brought pictures of loved ones who have died. These photos are here today as silent witnesses of lives that touched yours, of people you honor and, at times, still grieve.
Like many of you, I’m thinking today of the people I’ve loved who have died, including my parents, my brother, and friends whose kindness and laughter still echo in my heart. They’re part of me, part of that mysterious communion we celebrate on this day, this love that reaches across the boundary between heaven and earth.
Many of us come to church today carrying both gratitude and grief. This feast has always held that tension—the bright alleluia and the quiet ache, mingled together.
The truth is, All Saints’ Sunday can stir up a lot of feelings. It can make us miss people fiercely. It can make us ponder our own mortality, something our culture works very hard to help us avoid. We live in a world that sells anti-aging creams but not many tools for accepting aging. A world that hides death behind hospital curtains and euphemisms.
But All Saints Day asks us to face mortality not with fear, but with honesty and even gratitude. Knowing that our time is limited changes how we move through the world. It softens us. It teaches us to see beauty in small things, to speak kindness while we can, to hold one another with gentler hands.
After losing someone we love, for a time the ordinary world feels different. The morning light seems more golden. A familiar laugh can bring tears. Even the simplest moments pulse with meaning. That, I think, is part of the mystery we honor today: that love deepens in the face of loss, and that the knowledge of death can make life more precious.
And so today we remember. We light candles and read names, not to keep our loved ones frozen in memory, but to acknowledge that love never really stops. The saints are not gone; they’ve simply crossed a threshold. They are part of that great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, cheering us on as we stumble and shine in turn.
And one day, we’ll join them — not as strangers in some foreign land, but as travelers coming home. Because that’s what our faith teaches us — that death doesn’t get the final word. The final word is love, and love endures.
This morning’s Gospel gives added depth to this witness.
In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus stands before a crowd of people who, by any worldly standard, are not blessed. They are poor, hungry, grieving, and despised. And he looks straight at them — the ones most likely to feel forgotten by God — and says, “Blessed are you.”
It’s a strange and beautiful reversal. The kingdom of God turns our assumptions upside down. Those who seem least fortunate are called blessed. Those who mourn are promised laughter. Those who hunger now will be filled.
And then comes the harder part — the call to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, to do unto others as we would have them do to us.
This is not a sentimental faith. It’s a faith that asks a lot of us. It asks us to look at suffering and not turn away. It asks us to live in a world that breaks our hearts, and still believe in blessing.
So on All Saints Sunday, this Gospel is made visible. It’s the day we see the paradoxes of the kingdom lived out in flesh and bone — the joy and the ache, the mourning and the laughter. The saints were not perfect people; they were people who learned, somehow, to live in those tensions. They trusted that love runs deeper than loss and that in God’s strange arithmetic, even our tears are not wasted.
And let’s be honest: the saints were (and still are) a motley crew. Every family has its characters, and the household of God is no different. When we talk about “the saints,” we’re not just talking about the serene faces in stained glass. We’re talking about the whole messy, complicated human lot — the cousin whose politics drive you crazy, but who donated a kidney to his sister without hesitation. The mother who loved fiercely but not always wisely. The friends who are there when you need them, and sometimes when you don’t.
That’s what holiness looks like: not shining perfection, but ordinary faithfulness. And the courage to love anyway—in spite of the disappointments, the losses, and the wounds that never completely heal.
And so to say the saints surround us is not to imagine a distant host singing in some far-off heaven. It is to recognize that the beatitudes still walk the earth—the merciful, the mourners, the peacemakers, the pure in heart. They are among us, sometimes unnoticed, always faithful.
As we remember the saints this morning, and as we ponder mortality, I think of a story a friend told me about her mother, a woman deeply loved, who was surrounded by friends and family as she neared the end of her life. They were taking turns keeping vigil at her bedside, not wanting her to be alone when she died. But in her final hours, she made a surprising request.
She asked them to leave the room.
She said she wanted to die alone — not because she didn’t love them, but because she did. She knew that if they were there, she would be thinking of them. And instead, she wanted to be fully present to what was coming — to the mystery of death itself, to the wonder of what God would reveal.
That, I think, is an act of remarkable faith. To trust that in our dying, something sacred is unfolding.
To me her story is a reminder that our prayer should be to live—and to die—with open eyes and open hearts: to recognize the holy mystery that surrounds us, and at the end, to listen for the voice of God calling us home.
Because this is what our faith proclaims: that love never ends. Death is not a darkness to dread, but a threshold to light. Beyond it are the saints and our loved ones waiting to greet us with joy.
So may we live with gratitude, tenderness, and courage. May we see the world as a gift constantly being offered.
And who knows—maybe when we reach that final exit, there will be someone waiting by the roadside. He’ll look us straight in the eye, give us a loving smile, tap gently on his watch, and say, “It’s time to come home. Welcome.”
Lori Erickson is an author whose work focuses on the intersection between travel and spirituality. She serves as a deacon at New Song Episcopal Church in Coralville, Iowa, where she combines her vocation as a writer with her ministry in the church.
