November 1, 2026

I always breathe such a big sigh of relief when we finally get out of this nonsense daylight savings time and we're actually back in real time again. I was particularly salty back in 2005 when our federal government in their infinite wisdom decided to extend daylight savings time, and it now actually ends on the first Sunday in November. You may remember it used to end on the last Sunday in October.

But I was thinking about that this week. I don't know how many of you were sort of present to this or thinking about it, reflecting on it—about 10 years ago I started hearing for the first time after this reorientation of daylight savings time ending on the first week of November this refrain on these even-numbered years when we have elections (presidential elections, midterm elections, what have you), this refrain to "set your clocks back one hour on Sunday and then to vote to not set your country back 50 years on Tuesday."

And I've been thinking about that this whole week, especially a few days ago while I was, of all things, on horseback up just north of Frederick, kind of in the northern part of Frederick County. And I was looking northwest towards the Pennsylvania border in this rather bucolic scene, you know, still uninterrupted and unimpeded by a lot of development. And I thought about how the coding of that message is so very complicated now. You know, 10 years ago, when I first heard it, it had this very clear sort of demarcation line between progressives and conservatives in this country. It was very progressively coded to say that because there was this sense that we didn't want to go back to these ethnic and cultural divisions that had shaped the 1960s in this country, and that we wanted this sort of forward progress to an ever more inclusive, ever more engaged, ever more welcoming environment in this country.

And yet, now, today, in 2026, I can't tell you how many of my progressive friends are keyed up about AI and data centers and about the seemingly unmitigated development of rural landscapes for greater energy usage and extraction, and how many of them kind of look back towards this idealized past now of not having our cell phones, not being so connected to technology, being sort of quote-unquote terminally online... that we wish we could go back to this time before all of this intrusion of development, of technology, of all of these kind of things that feel so encumbering today.

And this sense of moving forward towards a better future, moving back to some kind of return of an idealized past—these things are very often not so clearly black and white. These worldly, materially driven narratives that we are constantly inundated with are just not working. And regardless of whether we are kind of seeking this progress for some future or this return to some kind of idealized, seemingly perfect past or better past, we often find ourselves at tension in this. We find ourselves kind of stuck in this middle ground. And I want to unpack that and think about it this Sunday because it's not only relevant to this fact that we are experiencing this shift in time and the reality of our political landscape being what it is, and with elections on Tuesday, but it has kind of an intimate connection to this celebration that we have of All Saints today.

And there's something in this celebration of All Saints that kind of brings us into this conversation with what time is, how we experience the linearity of our lives. Some Christian traditions limit the concept of saints to those living, to the embodied present church of the present moment—that we, as the people of God in this time, are the gathered saints. Other traditions like ours have a much more expansive view of this concept. To be sure, we affirm the same: that the saints are a community like us, gathered in a present moment, in a present age. But we are not limited by that. The saints are not limited by this sense of time and space. We as the whole gathered community of the church are both those gathered in this moment today, in this lived era of life, but also all those who have come before us throughout time and space, all those who will come after us in the future generations of the church. It is the eternal present of the gathered kingdom of God.

And we see something of this in all of our readings today, too. There's this great interplay of tenses in the English, and much of this is also reflected in the Hebrew and the Greek. Let's just look at a couple of examples. If we look back at our first lesson from Revelation, beginning in verse 15, we hear: "They are before the throne of God and worship him day and night within their temple"—this present tense setting. "The one who is seated on the throne will shelter them"—this future reality. "They will hunger no more and thirst no more. The Lamb will be their shepherd, will guide them to springs of water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eye." It's both a present reality and a future promise, the two existing simultaneously in the moment of that revelation.

And our portion of the Psalter in the Psalm today, we hear in verses 1 through 4 this repetition: "I will," "I will," "I sought"—future, future, past. In verse 8: "Taste and see the Lord is good"—present tense. "Happy are they who trust in Him."

And then that beautiful section of 1 John that we have: "See what love the Father has given us"—past—"that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are"—this present tense setting. "The reason the world does not know us [in this present sense] is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now. What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves just as he is pure." This constant interplay between a present and future sense of what is and what will be.

And then in this passage from Matthew 5, the great setting of the Beatitudes, we hear again this interplay. The Beatitudes are bookended by this present reality: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And then down in verse 10: "Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." That the kingdom of heaven is ours now; it is a present reality for us in this present moment. And yet, in the section in between, we have this repetition of the Beatitudes in which there is a present blessing with a future promise: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

The reality that we are encountering today is this "both/and-ness" of the kingdom that I rather frequently talk about. Even as we continue journeying through this life that is so often dictated by these linear conditions of past, present, and future, we nevertheless live—even in this moment, especially in this moment today of All Saints Sunday—in this eternal kingdom time, this time outside of time and space. Now, like many of you (or maybe many of you), I am an American mutt made up of an amalgam of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. But at this time of year, I am especially close to my large dose of Irish Celtic heritage. And in the pre-Christian isles of the North Atlantic, the Celtic and Gaelic peoples had a celebration of this moment. In their calendar and in their construction of time, they celebrated this season of life, this Samhain, this transition between autumn and winter. And I especially love it because technically with Samhain, with what we identify as November 1st today, you begin winter. And you know I'm always looking to begin winter as soon as possible, so I'm especially happy to honor and celebrate this part of my heritage.

But Samhain was a time in the ancient Celtic and Gaelic practices in which there were pilgrimages to the tombs in which they were opened. And there was this sense of time outside of time, that you are communing in this moment with all who have come before you, with all of your ancestors, who at this sensitive low point in the liminal space between the past, the present, and the future—in this kind of time of thinness—that we have an eternal present with all of created order. And there's actually a fair amount of evidence that scholars point to to suggest that our observation and celebration of All Saints Sunday and the Feast of All the Faithful Departed (or All Souls) that always follows the day after was in many ways shaped and formed by this observance of Samhain, that the two kind of mutually developed together. But it is, I think, instructive for us. It is an invitation for us to have this sensitivity around stepping outside of this strict linearness that so often dictates our lives and so often shapes and forms how we experience the world around us. It's an opportunity to more fully embrace the reality of an eternal kingdom that is always present within us, within our community, and within the world around us.

But yet, as with so many things, as I said, there is this "both/and-ness." And we are still called to live in time, still called to shape our lives around the to-dos, all the tasks that we have at hand, the ways in which we live our lives day in and day out, month by month, year by year, the different jobs, the different tasks that we are called into that must necessitate—being the material world that we are in—this sense of linear time. It's not that we do one thing or the other, but it's that we live both simultaneously. We have elections on Tuesday that are incredibly consequential. The reality is that they are always incredibly consequential. It's never that they are less significant or more significant—I think that's a misnomer of our present memory—but the reality is that participating in our social and societal life is, I think, an incredibly important part of our witness and faith in our ministry in the public square. Throughout Acts, Saint Paul, for example, invokes his Roman citizenship on numerous occasions as a blessing and a mechanism through which he could more fully carry out the work of the gospel. We similarly have this call—a call to participate in the public square, to be voices of good news, to carry forth that gospel in the ways in which we live our lives publicly.

And it's not just about carrying it forward in this public square sense as well. We have more directly as a faith community a call to sort of embrace or connect with this sense of linear time in this moment as well. Beginning with this Sunday today, All Saints Sunday, and running through the duration of this month ahead of us, we are doing—again for this year, for the first time in many years—an Every Member Canvass here at St. Anne's. And an Every Member Canvass is an invitation into linear time and space. And as much as we are a kingdom people who live in some ways outside of it, we also necessarily must reflect at times on who we have been, who we are presently, and who we are becoming or where we are going in the future. Teams of folks from the church will be reaching out to each and every one of you to schedule a time to talk, to learn about your past here. Who have you been at St. Anne's? What drew you in? Why have you continued to stay? What is your present level of engagement and what brings you continually back into this community? And where do you want to see us go in the future? What do you feel we are called to do in this next phase and stage of our lives together?

And so that I'm not obfuscating this, a significant part of that too will be a reflection on our stewardship: how through your financial contributions you can help us realize that next stage of life, what it is that we are doing in the future, and how we are called through our giving of our financial resources especially to be people who fulfill that sense of mission and call in this community. And so, even as we celebrate this moment of All Saints, stepping outside of this strict sense of time and space, we also have this call immediately in our present moment to think about time and space, to think about the linear transition and arc of who we are, who we have been, who we are in this present moment, and who we are being called to be in this next stage of our life.

So I want to end on this, coming back again to this sense of All Saints and All Souls. We have this moment of celebrating all those who have come before us. And just as an aside, because several people often ask me about this, the tradition in our part of the Christian world is to celebrate this Feast of All Saints—the recognition of those who have exemplary lives that we as a whole tradition raise up and acknowledge as being people of a particular faithfulness, and the emulation of that life that we are called forward to embrace—and then the Feast of All Souls, where we remember those personal saints in all their lives: all those faithful departed who have come before us, maybe those who had a faithfulness but also some rough edges, or those who were faithful in very quiet and humble ways where the larger church may never know them, but all those who have shaped and formed us in our own lived experience. The ways in which they call us, both in these moments to presentness, to this sense of the eternal reality of the kingdom, but also in the ways in which they remind us of our linearness and the ways in which we look towards a future that we are called to be generative partakers in, called to be communicators of a gospel in a new age, called to bring about a kingdom that is yet to fully arrive.

And how do we do that? What are the ways in which we are called to live that experience of both the eternal present and the future yet to come? Well, many times on All Saints, it can be the tradition of the church to reaffirm our baptismal covenant, and we're not doing that this Sunday. But I do want to call us to mind of the words in that covenant, the things that we take on in our commitment to our faith in those moments of baptism and reaffirmation of baptism. We promise through God's help to persevere in resisting evil, and when we fall into sin, to repent and return to the Lord. With God's help, we commit to proclaiming by word and example the good news of God in Christ. With God's help, we seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. And with God's help, we strive for justice and peace among all peoples and respect the dignity of every human being.

And in this moment, I think those affirmations, those promises that we make and reaffirm, are promises that shape this encounter we have of the full array of the saints of God—the full collection of saints who we live with in this present moment, who have come before and shaped and formed us, and those who will come in some future age. But we also in this very present moment see the linearness, the call to bring about these places of transformation in the world that we encounter, the call we have to be participants in the work that God is doing, to ever more fully experience the kingdom, ever more bring it about in its full transformation of the world.

And so, let us be reminded again of what we began with at the beginning of this service with our opening collect: May we in this moment, may we in this time be given the grace to follow the blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come ourselves to those ineffable joys that have been prepared for us by those who truly love God. That we may be prepared for that joyfulness, and through that joyfulness work to transform the world.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.