A Sermon preached on All Saints Sunday 2
November 2025 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Daniel 7:1-3,15-18, Ephesians 1:11-23, Luke 6:20-31
November can be quite a depressing month, the weather is grey, the evenings get dark early, and every Sunday seems to focus on death: All Saints/All Souls, Remembrance Sunday, Volkstrauertag, Totensonntag. And so, I am glad that the readings we had this morning all contain a message of hope!
Hope is a major human driver and motivator, you probably all know the phrase “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” by the 18th century poet Alexander Pope, in is “An Essay on Man.” Hope is a state of positive anticipation that is essential for human existence. Even when people flee from their home countries because of war persecution, poverty, natural disasters, or climate change it is hope that drives them on, hope that at the end of their journey they will be able to find a better life for themselves and their families. Without hope we can become lethargic, depressed, unable to act and when hope is disappointed, some turn to those who offer easy and supposedly quick solutions.
As people of faith, we are also people of hope. Hope is not the most frequent word in the Bible, love and faith are mentioned more often, but there are still many references to hope, both to the one (God, Christ) in whom we set that hope, as well as to what we hope for. That which we “expect with confidence,” to use a dictionary definition of hope, may not be something that we will experience personally. The author of the Book of Daniel, set during the Babylonian exile but written in the 2nd century BC, when the Hellenistic rulers were trying to wipe out the Jewish faith, is trying to instill hope in troubled times. The four great beasts, standing for four kingdoms that have at some point conquered Israel and Judah – Babylon, Medes, Persia and now the Greeks – may seem all powerful. But they have passed or they will pass. “But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever." (Daniel 7:18) Do not give up hope, the author says, God will be victorious in the end and with him those are faithful.
In the letter to the Ephesians, attributed to Paul, the author also writes of hope. Hope does not come to us; hope is an active choice: “We set our hope on Christ.” (Ephesians 1:12) We choose to trust in Him as an expression of the will of God, who has already chosen us. This hope is not in vain: God has already “put God’s power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places;” (1:20) And before that, in Jesus’s word, witness and actions, we have seen God at work in the world. Paul knows how important it is to hope and so he prays to God for “a spirit of wisdom and revelation … so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.” (1:17-18) I love the phrase with the “eyes of your heart,” and we talked a lot about it at our Bible study on Wednesday. With the eyes of our heart we can more easily recognize the beauty and greatness of God and God’s power and actions in the world and in our own lives.
What is that hope to which we have been called? One thing we hope for, and that is a focus of today’s serve when we remember the faithful departed, is the hope of resurrection. Our prayer book reminds us that we are an Easter people and that the liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy. “It finds all meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we too, shall be raised.” (BCP, 507) We also hope for that time – the age to come as Paul calls it – when God’s reign will be complete and Christ will “fill all in all,” or “all things in every way” to use a different translation. In doing so we are expressing our hope for the salvation, that is the transformation of self and of the world, so that we who are made in God’s image will truly live as image bearers, bearing and sharing God’s love.
Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount takes place on the plain and Jesus is not standing at the top of a hill, looking down, but squatting or kneeling and looking up – an image I much prefer. His Beatitudes, in Luke only four of them, are also about hope. When Jesus says that the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are hated are blessed, this is not to console them to their fate, but to give them hope that this must and will change. Poverty, hunger, distress and hate are not part of God’s plan. The idea of reversal, of turning things round, not upside down, but the right way up is a persistent theme in Luke’s Gospel, most eloquently and beautifully expressed in Mary’s song that we call the Magnificat. “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” (Luke 1:52-53) Note the past tense, indicating that this has happened, that this is the right state of the world: The everlasting kingdom Daniel promises, the fullness of him who fills all in all that Paul looks forward to in Ephesians, the good news that Jesus promised when he first preached in the synagogue in Nazareth and, quoting from Isaiah, proclaimed that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” (Luke 4:18)
According to Paul in Ephesians (1:13) we are also anointed with the Spirit: “In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” And so we too are called to bring good news to the poor in word and deed. Jesus’ instructions for doing so, at the end of the passage from Luke’s Gospel, may sound impossible and they are deliberately over the top in their generosity, just like our God. Vania preached all about God’s reckless mercy and unlimited grace last week. In his commentary on this passage, Tom Wright says[1] that “this list of instructions is all about which God you believe in – and about the way of life that follows as a result” and calls on us to imagine living in a society where everyone believed in this God. “Imagine” he says, “if even a few people around you took Jesus seriously.”
We take Jesus seriously, that’s what the Baptismal vows stand for that we will now reaffirm when we promise to try and live as he lived, righting the world and living in hope and love.
Amen.
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