Saints Who Weep
All Saints Sunday
November 2, 2025
The Rev. Josh Evans
St. John’s Lutheran Church
Albany, NY
Tucked away on a college campus
just outside of South Bend, Indiana,
is a small, unassuming room,
in the otherwise cavernous and awe-inspiring Basilica of the Sacred Heart
at the University of Notre Dame –
the Reliquary Chapel –
home to over 1600 relics
from nearly 800 different saints.
The practice of curating and preserving relics –
from the Latin for “remains” –
goes back for centuries in the history of the church,
and there are even different “classes” of relics.
Relics that are parts of a saint’s body are considered “first-degree.”
Fragments of their clothing,
or items they used during their lifetime, are “second-degree.”
And still other items that have physically touched a first-degree relic
become themselves “third-degree.”
While most of the relics housed in the Basilica
are very tiny fragments of cloth or bone
kept in small, quarter-size glass medallions,
others are more remarkable – and noticeable.
One of the first things you would see upon entering the Reliquary Chapel
is a wax model of the body of St. Severa,
a second-century Christian martyr from Rome about whom little else is known.
Two small boxes on either side of the model hold Severa’s bones.
Meanwhile, on the wall just to the right hangs a large wooden cross
that contains what is believed to be a splinter of wood from the cross.
Whatever your religious background or personal piety –
or even with a dose of healthy skepticism –
there is no denying that you are truly in sacred space among such relics…
and yet, I have to wonder:
With the way the church preserves and venerates
the relics of its holy women and men,
it’s no wonder our perception of saints has become what it is:
Saints are holy.
Saints are respectable.
Saints might not be perfect,
but they certainly live model lives
of faith, discipline, and service
that it feels we can only aspire to.
In a word,
saints are blessed.
***
The gospel readings for All Saints Sunday
for all three years in the lectionary
also suggest something else about saints:
They weep.
Last All Saints, we wept
with Martha, Mary, and Jesus
at the tomb of Lazarus
in perhaps one of the most relatable gospel stories
about loss and grief.
The year before that,
we heard Jesus’ words
from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew,
encouraging those who mourn
“for they will be comforted.”
Today, in the Sermon on the Plain,
we hear a similar encouragement
in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes:
“Blessed are you who weep now.”
The differences are subtle but important:
Where Matthew speaks generically – “Blessed are those” –
Luke speaks directly and more intimately –
“Blessed are you.”
And where Matthew speaks more piously of “mourning,”
Luke gets more real and raw as he speaks of “weeping.”
Mourning is formal, proper, even austere.
Weeping is honest, loud, even messy.
Mourning hides behind a black veil.
Weeping holds shredded and tear-soaked tissues from crying so much.
Saints weep … loudly.
Saints don’t have it all together.
Saints are poor and hungry.
Saints might even be hated,
excluded, and reviled just for being who they are –
unjustly detained for the color of their skin,
or the language they speak.
But we resist these saintly characteristics.
We don’t want to be poor or hungry.
We certainly don’t want to be hated by anyone.
Loud and messy weeping makes us uncomfortable.
Maybe we don’t full-on desire
the wealth and haughty laughter and praise
that warrants Jesus’ pronouncement of “woe” in the verses that follow.
But more often than not,
we much rather prefer the “respectable” side of sainthood,
safely ensconced in glass display cases and reliquaries.
And yet, Jesus reminds us:
Blessed are the saints who weep and don’t have it all together.
Blessed are the saints who are poor and hungry.
Blessed are the saints who are hated and excluded and reviled
for being who they are.
It is these saints to whom Jesus speaks
blessing.
When life takes an unpredictable turn
or is flipped upside-down,
when grief or anxiety rips a hole in our chest,
and it feels like our world is falling apart,
Jesus gives us permission to weep
and blesses us
in our loud and messy weeping.
***
Today is a day to commemorate and celebrate All Saints:
The saints sitting in these pews this morning.
The saints of blessed memory whose names we will soon read aloud.
And the saints of the church whose images are preserved in icons and frescoes,
and whose bones and tunics might even be enshrined in reliquaries.
Today we commemorate and celebrate All Saints.
Not as a day to elevate certain saints above others.
But to remember what connects us in the communion of saints,
past and present.
This communion of saints,
as the Book of Common Prayer puts it,
“is the whole family of God,
the living and the dead,
those whom we love and those whom we hurt,
bound together in Christ
by sacrament, prayer, and praise.” (p. 862)
Saints –
whoever they are, wherever they’re from, whenever they lived –
are real people, with real flesh-and-bone bodies.
We are old, and we are young.
We are lifelong Christians, and we ask a lot of questions.
We laugh with uncontrollable joy, and we weep loudly.
***
“You do not have to be good” –
the well-known poem by Mary Oliver begins,
as some of us read with our ice cream on the patio this summer –
“You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting [ … ]
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
Take your place
in God’s family of blessed saints:
holy,
imperfect,
beloved.
Blessed are you,
saints who weep.
