Blessed Are Those Who Love: The Grace of All Saints
Sermon for All Saints Sunday
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Nov. 1, 2026)
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all and with all the saints now and forever. Amen.
Good morning again. Happy All Saints' Day. All Saints today, this Sunday, this Sunday morning, is one of the great feasts in the church calendar. It's one of the big celebrations. Somebody downstairs before the church called it kitchen sink Sunday. We throw everything in. So we have a baptism beautifully this morning, and we'll be having communion together. I know it feels just like the morning after Halloween, but actually All Saints is a huge celebration, and it's a three-day celebration, in fact. As some of you probably know, Halloween is All Hallows' Eve. It's a celebration of the evening before this celebration. And tomorrow, November 2nd, is called All Souls' Day, which is kind of glommed on to All Saints' Day in ways that I'll describe later in this sermon.
And for this great feast, when we remember all the saints, we have perhaps a passage from Jesus's most famous sermon, perhaps the most famous passage from Jesus's most famous sermon, the Beatitudes.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed to those who mourn, blessed are the meek. I have other things to say. I just want to say one thing about meek. The word meek here in Greek actually means something more like, "Blessed are those who are calm because of their confidence in God's strength, who don't react too quickly." It's something maybe slightly different than what we think of as meek. All these blessings: the pure in spirit, those who are persecuted, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. It's a series of blessings. They don't sound like blessings. And in fact, in the Greek, again, it's even more acute, the disjunction there. The word that we translate as blessed actually means happy.
So if you're reading this in the original, it sounds something more like happy are those who mourn. That doesn't make sense. Happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. Happy are those who are calm in the face of difficult things, who have confidence in God's strength. It's almost tone-deaf. I teach ministry at the divinity school. I would never tell someone, if you go visit someone who's mourning, don't say to them, "Oh, you must be super happy about things." There's a tone deafness to these blessings. It's provocative. I think Jesus wants it to be provocative, but what are we supposed to do with it?
All Saints is a kitchen sink Sunday. We do lots of things. One of the things we do, we do it every Sunday, but especially on All Saints, is to remember the dead. Remember those we love, but see no longer. Blessed are those who mourn. A few months after my mom died, my dad's here. I'm going to embarrass him a little bit, I guess. I was talking to my dad a few months after my mom died. They were married over 50 years and I was asking him how he was doing, and he said, with a tear in his eye, he said, "I miss her." But then he said, "But I don't ever want to stop missing her. I loved her, and I'm never going to stop loving her. And if that means I'm going to miss her for the rest of my life, then that's just how it is."
Blessed are those who mourn. These blessings are hard blessings. They are bound together by difficulty, by challenge, by things that rend our hearts. But that's also to say that all these blessings are bound together by love because you can't mourn for anything unless you've loved something with your whole heart. You can't thirst for righteousness unless someone you love is being harmed. You can't strive for peace and try to make peace unless you're willing to try to love the person causing that harm.
These are hard blessings, but what binds them together is love. In short, you could say Jesus could have tightened up his sermon a little bit if he had just said, "Blessed are those who love." Love is the blessing, even if it's a difficult one, even if it rends our hearts sometimes. These blessings are classically called the Beatitudes, and beatification is one of the ways we speak about saints, all the saints. We're celebrating the saints today. It's one of the reasons this lesson is our lesson for this morning. Beatification is actually in the Roman Catholic Church, one of the official steps as you approach, as one approaches canonization, it's the point at which the church says this person lives such a holy life. We're pretty sure they're in heaven. They're receiving the beatific vision. And that idea of entering heaven, what it takes to enter heaven, actually is why we have this feast, All Saints, and tomorrow's feast, All Souls.
I'm going to wander into a little bit of kind of the history of church theology, but bear with me. So classically in classic Christian theology, the church has three states. It's called the Church Triumphant, the Church Penitent, and the Church Militant. The Church Militant, that's us. We're down here in this mortal realm. We're fighting it out with the forces of darkness. So it uses this sort of martial language, the church militant. We're still in the struggle. The Church Triumphant. Those are the people who are in the presence of God in heaven, spiritual all stars who were so holy in their lives that they just go right to the footstep of God Almighty. These are like your Francis of Assisi, Paul, Mary, the mother of Jesus, the big ones, the spiritual superheroes. They are the church triumphant because they are there. They're already in the presence of God.
And then the last category is the church penitent. That's the rest of us. The people who struggle it out every day and who know that we should be good, but being good is hard, and we try our best. And just the nature of the thing is that if you go through your life, this is the old theology, just kind of gradually accrete wickedness, you accrete sins, and you die, and you've been promised salvation, so you're going to get there, but you want to look nice before you approach God. You’ve got to clean yourself up a little bit. And so this idea of purgatory was this idea that people who were not the spiritual all-stars would spend some time becoming pure enough to approach God, and that's the church penitent. Those dead who we remember who are not quite there yet, they're good, not great, who are shedding all that wickedness so they can come before God's presence. All saints and all souls, the best of us and the rest of us.
Now, most Christian churches, most Christians don't really care about that distinction much anymore. It's sort of a distinction without a difference, and there's a reason for it. I told a story of my dad just a minute ago. I'm going to tell you the story of another Danny Potts, my son. When he was four years old, he was very naughty. He still is kind of, but he was also philosophical for a four-year-old. I remember because I remember he asked me this right around All Saints' Day. He asked, "Dad, when did God know that he would make me?" That's a deep question. "When did God know that he would make me?"
And what I told him was, "Buddy, God always knew. God always loved you. God loved you before you were. God could not wait for you to be." And I meant it. I think that's true. Now Danny's a special boy. We love him very much, but it's not just him. It's not just how God feels about him. It's not just what God knew about him before he even was. It's how God feels about me. It's how God feels about you, everybody. It's true of all of us. God loved you before you were, because God loved you, you came to be.
Think about how different that is from human love, the way humans love each other. You make a new friend, or you fall in love with somebody; they show up, and maybe they're smart or kind or handsome or whatever, and you fall in love with them. They are, and they show up, and you love them. And we can even get more unconditional, right? Like a new puppy or a child shows up. They don't have to be smart or kind. They just exist and you love them. God's love is even more unconditional than that. God loves you first. God is creator. God loves you first. And because God loves you, you come to be.
God doesn't need you to be anything or become anything or purify yourself in any way before God will love you, before God will bless you with God's love. God's love is not something we can earn through toil. We don't have to persuade God or cajole God into loving us that way. The fact that we exist, just like with Danny, the fact that we exist is the most profound and deepest sign of God's love for us. If, as Jesus says in this sermon starts his most important sermon saying, if as he says, love is the blessing, then all of us are blessed because each of us is beloved.
All souls in that way are saints, the best of us and the rest of us. Now I know what you're thinking because I'm thinking it too. I'm a professor of moral theology, right? Isn't that too easy? Really? Everybody's a saint because I've seen people. I don't know that that's true, but how easy is it really? If we take that teaching to its conclusion, to its logical conclusion, how easy is it? If it's true that everybody is blessed by God's love, if it's true that everybody in that way is a saint, then that means everybody is a saint, is sainted, made holy by God.
That means the person a few pews behind you who you hope you can avoid in the handshake line, that person is beloved of God, a holy saint. That means the chorister you're beefing with, that person is a saint, a beloved child of God. Let's raise the stakes. That means the person who is voting for the wrong people on Tuesday, that person is sainted by God's love. Let's keep going. The people they're going to vote for, that person beloved of God. This isn't easy. And however hard you draw the battle lines, there are places in this world where the contest, the conflict is more acute, where there's violence, hot violence and suffering and death and the people on the other side, beloved children of God, that's not easy. That is hard. And if you read the rest of Jesus' sermon, you can see how hard it is by all the things that he commands us to be and to do, living up to that vision of God's love.
What could be more difficult? What could be more demanding believing that all are beloved that demands something of us in the paradoxical magic of saintliness, when we believe that everybody else is beloved of God, sainted by God's love, then we have to become more saintly. We have to become more merciful. We have to endure more and seek more peace and pursue more righteousness and fight harder for justice. When we see saints harmed, we have to work for them.
We need to make peace with those causing the harm. We have to do all the things that Jesus in the beginning of the sermon says are the marks of love. If it's only the blessed special people, only the superheroes, the spiritual superheroes, the all-stars, if they're the only saints, then it's easy. Then we can ignore everybody else. They'll work it out in purgatory, take care of themselves. But if every single person is beloved of God, that demands something of us, demands a saintliness of us, demands that we bless one another as we have been blessed; it's not easy, but it is our task as Christians, and it is the moral and religious vision of this faith. It's not easy. It's hard, but it is the call to discipleship, the call we have been given in our baptism, the call we will affirm in a few moments when we perform this baptism, the call we reaffirm this festival day, and the call that we will practice in fear and trembling as we leave this place and return to the world tomorrow.