What is All Saints Day?

On the first of November the church keeps one of its oldest festivals, All Saints Day. It’s also where Halloween gets its name, since Halloween is a worn-down version of All Hallows’ Eve, the evening before All Hallows’ Day. The old English word for a saint was hallow, the same word we still use when we pray that God’s name would be hallowed. So the holiday everybody already keeps is the evening before the one hardly anybody notices.

The word I keep coming back to is all. Most of us carry a working definition of a saint, and it usually looks like somebody extraordinary: Mother Teresa in Calcutta, or a grandmother who prayed without ceasing, or that one person in this congregation who shows up for everybody. The church has always counted saints a different way. Everyone baptized into Christ has been made holy, and holy is what the word saint means, since saint and sanctified come from the same root. Luther summed it up in one phrase, at the same time saint and sinner. God made them saints. He doesn’t undo that.

Here at Our Savior’s, All Saints is the weekend we read names, Saturday, October 31 and Sunday, November 1. Our members who have died in the past year are already on the list. If there’s somebody else you’d like remembered, a friend, a neighbor, a relative who belonged to another church, we’d be glad to add them. Just get the name to the church office by Wednesday, October 28 so we have time to work it into the prayers. You can call the office at (507) 847-2856, email officemanager@oursaviorsjackson.com, or sign the clipboard in the concourse.

We’ll say them out loud among all the saints, the ones we can still see and the ones we can’t.