Sermon — November 1, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
“Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
(1 John 3:2)
There’s a beautiful children’s book by Doris Stickney called Water Bugs & Dragonflies that tells the story of a little colony of water bugs who lived below the surface of quiet pond. They lived a busy life, scurrying around in the mud, doing whatever water bugs do. And one day, they noticed that one of them had disappeared. They looked up just in time to see her climbing up the stalk of a lily that hung down into the water. They waited for her to return, but she never did. The other bugs missed their friend, and they wondered where she’d gone, but they had no way of knowing. One of them came up with an idea: the next bug to climb up the stalk would come back to tell the others what was going on.
The very next day, that same bug began to climb the lily stalk. When she reached the top, she was tired, and she flopped down on the lily pad on her back to rest. When she looked up, she was amazed. She’d never seen the sky before. She’d never smelled the air before. She’d never felt the warm sun on her wings before—in fact, she’d never known she had wings, but now they were unfurling underneath her. She lifted her wings, and tried a flap or two, and before she knew it, she was flying through the air. She had transformed from a water bug into a dragonfly!
She remembered the promise she had made, to go back and tell the others. And so she tried to fly back down below the water, but try as she might, she kept bouncing off the surface. She couldn’t swim any more. She began to despair: she would never see her friends again! But then she realized something: one day, each one of them would climb the lily stalk and emerge into the sun, and they would fly together through the air. And so she took to the skies, her little dragonfly heart full of joy.
…Okay, I’m not an entomologist, but even I know that water bugs don’t really have friends. But that’s okay. This isn’t really a story about water bugs and dragonflies, after all; it’s a story about us. It’s a story about death. And it’s a story about how we relate to what we sometimes call “the communion of saints”—by which we mean that vast community of all God’s holy people, ordinary and extraordinary alike, who lived with us on this earth, and died, and entered into eternal life. It’s this communion of saints that we remember and celebrate on this All Saints’ Day.
“Beloved, we are God’s children now,” Saint John writes, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” (1 John 3:2) We expect to be transformed into something new, but we don’t quite know what that something new will be, any more than the water bug knew what it meant to be dragonfly; any more than an acorn knows what it is to be an oak.
In the Gospel of John, speaking about his own coming death, Jesus tells his disciples that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) Think about a grain of wheat. Or better yet: think about a sunflower seed. Try to imagine living in a world where you had only seen the seed. Could you even begin to picture a sunflower in bloom? None of us could. And yet this is the kind of transformation Jesus tells us lies ahead.
The Christian understanding of death is built on this idea that—as one of our funeral prayers says—“to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.” (BCP p. 382) And we don’t know exactly what that change will be like. “What we do know is this,” John says: that “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) We believe in a God who is loving and good, and so we “have this hope,” as John says, (1 John 3:3) that the life of the world to come is a life more beautiful than we can imagine, in which we see God face to face and become more like the God of love.
And in the Beatitudes, these “Blessed are those”-es that we hear today, Jesus invites us to bring that life into being here and now. He asks us to run that tape in reverse, to imagine the dragonfly hidden within the life of each bug, to imagine the flower tucked into each seed. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he says, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matt. 5:3-5) Blessed are they now, Jesus says—because of what is to come.
That is the tension that’s at the heart of All Saints’ Day, between the promise of an amazing future and the challenges of the present. We anticipate a world in which “God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.” (Rev. 7:17) But we live in a world in which—while plenty of joy is here already—there’s also a lot of mourning, and persecution, and pain.
In fact, sometimes those come together. It is the very sweetness of the love we have for the parents and children and spouses and friends who have died before us in this world that gives such bitterness to death. We are separated from those saints who have gone before us by that unbreakable barrier at the surface of the pond. And yet we know that even that barrier can’t sever the bonds between us. Our hearts are still full of love for those who are gone. And, at least in our tradition, we believe that those who have gone before us still love and care for us, as we love them. All those “saints at rest” are still, in some way, present with those of us still striving, here on earth; still caring for us, still praying for us, and certainly still inspiring us to be the people that they believed that we could be.
So this fable of the water bug and the dragonfly works pretty well, as an expression of what we believe. It reminds us of these themes of transformation, and separation, and ongoing connection with those who have died. But there’s one big difference, at the end. The dragonfly can’t go back. It can’t tell its friends what’s next. They’re left with their confusion, and their grief; they have no reason to hope. But we believe that someone did come back from the other side of the pond. That there is someone who connects these two worlds, who bridges earth and heaven, who climbed up the lily stalk and came back down to tell us what’s up there. For us, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus mean that we “have this hope,” that life is changed, not ended; that we will rise again and see God face to face.
But it also means that we already know something now about the life of the world to come. Which means that we can already begin to live out some of that kind of eternal life. We can already now choose mercy and peace and love, knowing that while these are not always the values of this world, they offer us a window into that world of sun and wind and endless flight that lies just beyond our sight. We can live our lives on earth with one foot already in heaven, following the example of the saints who’ve gone before us, remembering and inspired by their love.
On All Saints’ Day, we pray for those who have died. But they don’t really need our prayers; God’s love for them is already more than enough. The prayers we say today are for ourselves: that we remember that our lives are knit together with theirs, even still; that we may be inspired to live like them; that we might never forget that “we are God’s children now,” and that while “what we will be has not yet been revealed,” we know that we “will be like him,” and we can begin to be more like him already now.
