All Saints 2026

(Revelation 7.9-17; Psalm 34.1-10; 1John 3.1-3; Matthew 5.1-12)

150 years ago this great Cathedral was under construction: the stonemasons and artisans and craftspeople were about half way through the process of erecting this amazing building. 150 years is not that long in the great sweep of Christian history and tradition. The lives of those craftsmen and stonemasons, and that of the architect George Gilbert Scott, though different to ours, are just about imaginable. They lived in an Edinburgh that had already expanded out of the teeming Old Town, the elegant lines of the New Town had been laid down. Even if they perhaps could not scarcely imagine the sprawl of the city now, the dominance of cars and the technologies of the present day, we can imagine something of what life in Edinburgh might have been like for them. We can imagine the pride and delight they took in the hard labour of building this magnificent building.

It was a Cathedral for a newly confident church, but Gilbert Scott was of course looking back for inspiration: to the great medieval Cathedrals of 800 years before; to a time when the mystery and majesty and possibilities of God were encountered in these extraordinary buildings; before the disputes and conflicts of the Reformation complicated that heritage. Gilbert Scott was wanting to bring that past glory to renewed life; with the best engineering and craftmanship that he could muster of his day. He was looking back, but not to replicate, but to renew. to regenerate.

And at the heart of those buildings, those great Cathedrals and churches, was the cross, etched out in the very shape that the buildings took. The cross a man had hung and died on long years before, now become the central symbol of faith, the guiding design of its buildings. The rood cross hanging there so centrally was not part of Gilbert Scott’s original design. The figure of a crucified saviour, hanging on the background of a field of poppies, arrived later – a response to the trauma and grief of the 1st World War. But it was a placing centrally of the animating heart of Christian faith, the crucifixion and death of Jesus still reverberating and resonating through the centuries.

And here we gather, in a building built to last, to showcase the best; under the shadow of that cross. In a building that looks back, but in order to make of us, the best that we might be.

I listened recently to an interview with James Graham, the playwright and dramatist. He is the writer of Sherwood, that explored political division and conflict through the prism of the long legacy of the miners’ strike; of Dear England, the exploration of national identity through the prism of Gareth Southgate, the England football manager; and most recently a play about John Maynard Keynes, which is currently on in London’s West End. In the interview, he pointed out that that play is the only new play to be presented in the West End this season: what is economic, what sells tickets, are re-hashes, re-peats of the familiar, the comforting. In the interview he worries that this is symptomatic of our time, when the algorithms that curate so much of what we consume culturally, are designed to present to us what the algorithm knows we already like. That in such a world, the capacity for the new, the surprising, the strange and the challenging is being lost from our cultural lives. That we are simply finding ways to hear the same story told over and over again without that having the capacity for the new. He worries that we are losing the capacity to imagine a different future.

And that interview got me thinking because it is undoubtedly true that algorithms, in many aspects of our lives, are shaping what we experience, and therefore the people we are becoming. But it also got me thinking about what we do here, every Sunday morning, as we endlessly re-tell the same stories. Are we participating in that same merry-go-round: simply reinforcing what we already think and know; numbing any capacity for the new, for thinking outside the box?

Today we celebrate All Saints. One of my favourite quotes by Rowan Williams comes from his book about saints, the Wound of Knowledge. In that, he writes:
The greatness of the great Christian saints lies in their readiness to be questioned, judged, stripped naked and left speechless by that which lies at the centre of their faith.

We gather here to give thanks, to celebrate, but also to be confronted and challenged by the past, by the figure of the crucified above all. The Feast of All Saints is about celebrating that we are part of a community that doesn’t simply stretch across space, but through time also. Last week, our Vice Provost Mae quoted Dr Martin Luther King Jr describing the single garment of destiny, the inescapable network of mutuality, in which we are woven. But that garment involves us not just in a relationship with our neighbours in the present, but with those who have gone before us too, with the past.

To be part of a tradition, to retell and be reshaped by stories and lives stretching back through time, is to understand that that network of mutuality involves us in an ongoing conversation with the past; that the future is creative when we are engaged in bringing the past into the present. The depth and fruitfulness of any tradition is not measured by how accurately we replicate the past, but how generative it is of new possibilities of living out the faith. To celebrate All Saints is about recognising how people from the past still shape us. Taking those people seriously enough to be inspired by them, marvel at them, and also to argue with them, disagree with them; at times repent for their actions, offer reparation.

In a moment we will celebrate our communion: our communion with one another, with the friends and neighbours you recognise in the seats around you; we will celebrate our communion with visitors and fellow Christians from many parts of the world, gathered this morning online and in this amazing building that brings the past to life in fresh ways; and we will, in the words of our Eucharistic prayer, give thanks and praise to God, with angels and archangels, and the whole company of heaven, singing together the hymn of God’s unending glory. We are not alone, we are not just us, because we are who we are because of all those, known and unknown, the saintly and the sinful, who have shaped us and inspired us. We gather with the whole company of heaven, to meet with the crucified one, with Christ, in broken bread shared out for all; in wine poured out. Christ who in our Gospel this morning reminds us once again who are the blessed; who belong around this table: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. It is with all those we gather; it is those we are shaped by; it is with them that we are numbered; with them that we are woven into a great garment of mutuality, with them that we sing the hymn of God’s unending glory. Amen.