All Echoes Day
N.T. Wright is the greatest living Anglican Biblical scholar, and a popular author to boot. A few years ago, he wrote Simply Christian, a kind of 21st century reboot of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Both start with the concept of justice as the first stepping stone to perceiving the divine being in whom justice is rooted. But Lewis began with, The Law of Human Nature, something he clearly assumed that civilized people during the Second World War could accept as a given. Wright calls the first part of his book, Echoes of a Voice.
I had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing about it is that I can’t remember what it was about…Our passion for justice often seems like that…It’s as though we can hear, not perhaps a voice itself, but the echo of a voice; a voice speaking with calm, healing authority, speaking about justice, about things being put to rights, about peace and hope and prosperity for all.
Where are the calm voices of those who don’t have to shout to win their point? Where is the authority that people actually trust to bring healing? Where is the peace in a world threatened by rebellion, repression, and degraded creation? Where is the prosperity in a world where governments tell us the numbers look great, except for ours?
Wright goes on to say that there are three possible responses to this echo. We can dismiss it as a childish dream and get on with the winner-take-all pursuit of power by any means necessary. We could assume that we will only hear the voice in another world, to which we will only escape when we die. Or, Wright concludes, we can trust that there is someone speaking to us now, who cares about this world because this someone made this world, and has a purpose for this world that is just and right and good.
I think that this holy day known as All Saints Day could also be known as All Echoes Day. For nowhere do the echoes of that divine Voice reverberate more than in the lives of those we honor as saints in the Church. Nowhere do we find more hope for justice than in the lives of those who faced down violence, hatred, poverty and all other forms of injustice; whose lives say to us, we have been here before.
Are you afraid of political leaders whom you consider unjust? St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan in Italy has been there. In the 4th century he forced the Roman Emperor to do public penance for his slaughtering of several thousand Roman citizens. Are you frightened by those who would attack us? Pope Leo the Great has been there. In the 5th century, he negotiated with Attila the Hun to prevent the pillaging of Rome. Are you afraid that our society is collapsing? Benedict has been there. In the 6th century, he created communities of peace and hospitality and prayer amid the ruins of the Western Roman Empire.
Are these echoes too far back in time for you? Listen to the echoes of Bishops William White and Samuel Seabury, who helped form The Episcopal Church out of the ashes of the Anglican Church in the former colonies now called states. Listen to the echo of Florence Li Tim-Oi. When Japanese persecution threatened the Anglican Church in China during World War II, she accepted ordination as the first woman priest, and through her ministry the Church survived. Listen to the echoes of the Martyrs of Memphis, Episcopal and Roman Catholic nuns and clergy who stayed to care for those suffering from yellow fever in 1878. Listen to the echo of Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian who went to Alabama to serve the great cause of civil rights in 1965, and who took a shotgun blast intended for an African American woman.
Listen to the echoes of those who trusted the Voice behind that echo. And be not afraid to be an echo yourself. Listen to the voice behind that echo this very day — How blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs…How blest are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail; they shall be satisfied…How blest are the peacemakers; God shall call them his children. How blest are those who have suffered persecution for the cause of right; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs. [The New English Bible]
This is the season for echoes, of red and orange leaves and brown grass, of tall stalks harvested and made bare, of early sunset and Vesper light. And as the earth reminds us each November of death, the Church has long called us to listen for the echoes. Fully observed, this triduum would begin on the night of October 31st. That was the ancient Celtic night of Samhain (pronounced in Gaelic “Sowen”). On that night it was thought that the ghosts of the dead became more than echoes. We don’t know for sure that there is a cause-and-effect relation between the fixing of All Saints Day on November 1st and Samhain. But it certainly seems at least a Godincidence that at the time of the year when people’s thoughts turn to mortality, the Church turns our thoughts to the echoes of the saints who have gone before us.
So, on the night of the 31st, while we laugh about death, and thus acknowledge death, the Church gathers outside at twilight. We hear stories from the Old Testament of doomed kings, witches and ghosts, dry bones in a valley, angels fighting demons. And we call that night The Eve of All Hallows, that is, “Saints,” All Hallows’ Eve, Halloween. Then the next day we celebrate that death is not the final word for God’s “elect,” or chosen, set apart. Then having celebrated the loudest echoes, the most famous of the saints, we conclude our All Hallows’ Tide on November 2nd by remembering those whose echoes only we who loved them know, which includes God.
We are God’s elect, who need not avoid death out of fear. We are echoes of that Voice who can still be heard through the lies and false bravado of those who resort to lies and false bravado in their futile quest to hold back the darkness they cannot admit to fearing. Taking my own echo from the Echoes of the past, I speak to you the Echoes of today, and wish you a most blessed All Echoes Day.
November 1, 2026
All Saints Day, Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick