The Festival of All Saints (Observed)

Revelation 7:14

November 2, 2025

“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” [Gen 2.25]. So ends the creation narrative. Our first parents did not know evil. They knew only the good.

They fell. And in falling, they hid. From God, and from each other.

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings” [Gen 3.7].

It was insufficient. They blamed each other. They hid from God. But you cannot hide from Him. He sees. He hears. He knows.

He interrogates: “Who told you that you were naked?” [Gen 3.11].

They do not confess. There is no mea culpa.

They are judged. Marriage becomes bitter. Childbearing painful. Work, toilsome. They will return to the ground. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

And until then, anxiety. Shame. Hiding. Coverups.

They are judged. They are cursed. But not forever. A promise is made. A Messiah shall come.

The shame they could not remove, the nakedness they could not hide - the LORD Himself covers. “For Adam and his wife the LORD God made tunics of skin, and clothed them” [Gen 3.21].

With each succeeding generation, the curse continued. Every child born of woman was born under the Law.

East of Eden, man is naked and ashamed. He cannot keep his possessions. He cannot keep himself alive.

The wealthiest man alive – what good is it to him in the end? Consider Job, the richest man in the ancient world. He had ten children, vast lands, thousands of sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys.

And it all is taken away. Sabean raiders attack on one front; three armies of the Chaldeans attack his other possessions. Everything he has is taken, killed, or burned.

Job connects all the evil to the primordial nakedness:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

And naked shall I return there.

The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away;

Blessed be the name of the LORD” [Job 1.21]

Everything he had, Job confesses, was pure gift. Alone, he is naked. Only God can clothe us. Everything we have, we have only out of His fatherly goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in us.

The worst position to be in is ignorance of your own condition. You think you are wise, and do not see your folly. You think you are good, and do not see your evil. You think you are altruistic, and do not see your egotism. You present yourself as pure, but it is a cloak concealing perversion.

Yet your perversion is in fact not concealed. He sees. He hears. He knows. “There is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account” [Heb 4.13].

One of the letters to the seven churches in St. John’s Apocalypse is addressed to the lukewarm church. They clung to their money, they wallowed in their shame, but made a Sunday-morning pretense.

“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth. Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’—and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked—I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire, that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed.

The garment to cover shame and nakedness—the garment that clothes and absolves sin—cannot be purchased from any retailer. It cannot be fashioned on your own. It is obtained from the Lord.

This is the Lord who, after instituting the Eucharist, goes out to pray. Where? In a garden, recalling where our first parents fell.

There they come, soldiers with swords and clubs. They seize Jesus, arresting the one innocent man for His trial and execution. All the disciples flee. But one young man stayed close to Jesus in that garden.

“Now a certain young man followed Him, having a linen cloth thrown around his naked body. And the [guards] laid hold of him, and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked” [Mk 14.51f].

Eden is recapitulated. Man’s fall is replayed. Just as it has replayed over and over again in your own story. Just as it repeats in each generation.

The young man runs in the garden, naked and ashamed. Death chases him. Judgment pursues.

Death and judgment have seized Jesus too. He is found guilty before the High Priest of the Jews, and before the Roman governor. Crucify Him!

“And when they crucified Him, they divided His garments, casting lots for them to determine what every man should take” [Mk 15.24]. The one righteous Man, the one Man who has nothing for which He can be shamed – this One Man, clothed in righteousness, they strip. They divide His garments, and they are distributed among the executioners.

His garments are distributed. As He did for our first parents, God Himself provides the garments of righteousness. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” [Gal 3.27].

We no longer follow the custom. We’ve lost so much in recent centuries. But baptism used to involve a descent into the font naked. It’s a birth, after all. Arrangements were made to preserve the modesty of adults being baptized. After immersion into the font—another salutary custom—the newborn child of God is clothed with a white robe. Then would be said the words we still print in our baptismal rite, to keep the memory alive for a time when the old traditions may return: “Receive the white, holy, and spotless robe which you shall bring before the judgment seat of Christ so as to receive eternal life.”

This is the robe that makes you a saint. Which is to say, Baptism gives you Christ’s righteousness, Christ’s holiness. Baptism makes you a saint, one of Christ’s holy ones.

Today we observe the Feast of All Saints. It is in memory of the martyrs, the great and noble throng slaughtered for their confession of Christ, from St. Stephen the proto-martyr to the thousands being murdered today, with Muslim attacks on Christians in Nigeria and South Sudan, and Hindu attacks on Christians in India. “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” [Rev 7.14].

The martyrs are remembered on All Saints Day. In the medieval period another festival developed, the Feast of All Souls, appointed for November 2. Coming out of the tenth century, it was a festival to remember all those Christians who have gone before us.

This is a good and salutary thing. The problem is with the nomenclature. It suggests that some Christians are saints, and others are not.

It is a good custom to honor certain notable Christians, like the Apostles, with the title of “saint”: Saint John, Saint Mary, Saint James, etc. But the New Testament teaches over and over again that all the Baptized are saints, “holy ones.”

Paul begins Romans, “To all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” And in 1 Corinthians, “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints…”. Sometime just go through the opening verses of the epistles and you’ll see how frequent this is.

This morning, the LORD called Caroline Louise into the company of saints. And all you who have been baptized into Christ, you too are Christ’s holy ones, His saints.

Perhaps you have not been living very saintly. Perhaps you have soiled your garments, and brought the name of JESUS into shame.

Return to Him. He will abundantly pardon. His blood will yet wash your robes and make them white.

The LORD JESUS is the Holy One. Hide no more. Confess your shame. Jesus absolves. Jesus forgives. He gives you His garment.

You are righteous. You are holy. You are His saints.

Now be courageous. The world is filled with demons, and demonized people who crave your destruction. Be steadfast and immovable. To you the LORD JESUS says, “He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the Book of Life; but I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” [Rev 3:5f].