The Quilt of Saints

Hagion Koinonian: The Quilt of Saints

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

All Saints’ Sunday, 2 November, 2025

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

 Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord…[1]

I was re-reading an essay I wrote in seminary a long time ago, about All Saints’ and memorial services in the Episcopal Church. It is a classic ordinand’s paper – one part overconfidence, one part earnest excitement, one part wisdom cribbed from much wiser people.

The paper began with a quote from Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy — not a work of Christian theology, but on the sociology of religion (sometimes it helps to see how we look from the outside).

It’s a quote that captures the challenge of All Saints Sunday, of intentionally opening a church to remembrance, grief, and resurrection:

“The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of people as they stand before death….” [2]

Let’s take a look around at some of the banners we carry against death, like the regimental banners that stand in Ely Cathedral.

Some of them are mysteriously vague. Some of them are torn. And some of them are quilted.

They stand in struggle, in tension with time — just as Jesus’ beatitudes speak both to the here-and-now, and the what it is to come:

The deep history of God, the indescribable future ahead of us, not yet revealed, the now-ness of being the children of God.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

This time-travel of ancient, future, and now is central to the spiritual health and well-being of any Christian community.

 If we stand as if we believed in a God trapped by time’s arrow, then the banners we hold on the front lines before death begin to droop windlessly.

Churches can worship so heavily in the past that they become little more than a medieval recreation society, a museum for nostalgia, reluctant to engage with the outside world.

At the least, the liturgy can feel stale. At the worst, the broken ethics of a time long past --             homophobia, clericalism, racism – might remain unaddressed.

Or churches can focus so strongly on an eschatological future, a theology of exclusive and personal salvation at the end of time…

At their hyperbolic extreme, churches so distanced from history and unconcerned with the present, that their theology can’t even be described as concerned with the hereafter, because the hereafter presumes some relationship with the here.

In either event, we can find ourselves immobilised by the fear of not having all the answers in the face of death, in the face of hope and resurrection.

Fear to trust that salvation is shared—  not by timeless individuals — but by a Koinonia, fellowship, of saints spanning all time and geography in the hope to which Christ calls us.

On this day, in this now, All Saints’ Sunday, we are invited to stand under the banner of the Lamb in the face of death.

And we are invited to take hold of the banner of our own lives, to consider our lives as a piece of fabric. Our material might be sturdy or delicate, stained, washed, and timeworn. It may show stitches of old repairs, and it may boast embroidery and designs.

When we face death and loss, it creates a tear in that fabric – a whole network of relationships has been changed and torn.

 The work of grieving is to find the right material with which to repair the tear in our own fabric — sashings of stories and memories, piercings and bindings of hope and expectation.

In the midst of this work, our shared faith becomes, in Sarah Brabant’s words,

“a hoop…that stabilizes our fabric for both mending and embroidery stitches.”[3]

On a personal level, All Saints’ and All Souls’ is the time to examine the stitching in our own hearts:

 We may be surprised how much mending we have done, we may need permission to say that our lives still feel torn by death and loss.

But on All Saints’ Sunday we also take hold of wonderful Fat Quarters — have you seen those in a fabric shop? They are irresistibly beautiful, whimsical rectangles of brilliant fabric used especially for quilting.  Bold blues, warm yellows, fierce animals and verdant leaves and blood-red stripes.

We pick them up, turn them in our hands, these fat quarters, these stories of the lives of the saints. Benedict. Francis. Elizabeth. Brigid. Anthony. Etheldreda. Hilda.

The saints inspire us and challenge us, their stories and struggles bright, creative lives pointing  to a greater pattern: we hold up these fat quarters and remember that our tears and our embroideries        are not on some lone squares.

All Saints becomes a reminder that the fabric of our own lives doesn’t lie on its own in a jumble basket – the fabric of our life is quilted, together: with all of us, with everyone we pray for, with everyone who cares for us, with the living and with the dead.

Particularly in a society which values the individual over community, our Christian witness to membership in a self-transcending wholeness with God stitching the lines of our tears of grief and so binding a new connection to those whom we love but see no longer.        

We are all part of the koinonia, the communion, the fellowship, the quilt  of saints -- The quilt of saints gathered in prayer and song right here, every Sunday morning, across the ages, across languages and cultures.

Here is where we practice prayer, practicing and practicing, unashamed, imperfect in poverty of spirit.

Here is where we carry our tears, and comfort one another, mending the tears in our common quilt.

Here is where we seek God, lifting up our hearts. Here is where we serve one another and the world, and sown together in the meekness of service, inherit the earth for Love.

Here in this lofty space is where we are filled, no batting better, and here is where we go out hungry for Justice.

Here is where we are pierced by love, learning to give and receive mercy, practicing forgiveness, practicing being forgiven.

Here is where we rest from all weariness and injustice, and are given by grace the strength to seek out the communion of saints. Here is where we are  knit together, quilted together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Jesus Christ our Lord. to follow the template of God’s blessed saints in that Great pattern of His inexpressible joys set down for us across the ages.

Amen.

 [1] Collect, All Saints’ Sunday, Common Worship (nearly identical to the 1662 BCP collect)

[2] Berger, Peter L The Sacred Canopy New York: Doubleday, 1990.

[3] Brabant, Sarah Mending the Torn Fabric: For Those who Grieve and Those Who Want to Help Them Amityville, New York: Baywood, 1996.