Why are saints important? Why do we venerate about a bunch of dead folks? For starters, we're not celebrating their death, but their life; we're celebrating women and men who lived extraordinary and exemplary lives that serve as models for us and the way we ought to live. And, we are celebrating testimonies throughout the ages of God's goodness and love-love so intense that he allowed himself to live among us as one of us in Jesus the Christ to offer us a deeper understanding of who God is.

What makes the saints so compelling is that all of the saints, every one of them, were people just like you and me. They were ordinary humans who did or said extra-ordinary things. They are examples to us, because they give us something to strive for. Most of the saints themselves felt inadequate. Most of them were extremely humble. They didn't even become saints until they died and other people thought their lives were noteworthy enough to be made a saint. You can look all around and see saints -- people living today, doing exceptional things. Our celebration today includes them too. "All Saints" means saints past, present, and future. Members of the great cloud of witnesses -- kind of like a heavenly iCloud or DropBox. The saints who have gone before are out there somewhere in a place we cannot see, but we can access them at any time. We can ask them to pray for us, just like we can pray for each other, but we feel like they're closer to God, since, as it says in the Book of Wisdom, "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God." The saints of the past were great, because they lived lives, not for themselves, but for others in the world with selfless devotion and conviction. That is the example we are to take from the saints. If we ask ourselves, "What would Jesus do?" the answer is in the message from the Gospel. We would feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give water to the thirsty, and live a life of selfless love, like the saints we venerate.

The other reason we celebrate those who have gone before is because of our hope of the resurrection at some future time. When someone dies, we celebrate his/her life because we expect them to rise again, and we expect that we will do the same ourselves. We can say this, because Jesus the Christ did it, and because he did it, we will do it. That's the promise made to us in his death and resurrection. Our own baptism represents that same death and resurrection: as we go down into the water, we die to sin and come out, raised to new life in Christ.

Look all around. See the saints all around you. The clerestory windows in our church show many of the saints looking down on us in beautiful stained glass. They are the ones who have gone before. Take a look around the room where you are right now. See all of the saints who are alive today. Think of the heroes of your life and the heroes who are making news on the internet as you read this. Think about all those ordinary people who are doing extra-ordinary things. And look at yourself, too, because:

They lived not only in ages past,
There are hundreds of thousands still.
The world is bright with the joyous saints
Who love to do Jesus' will.
You can meet them in school,
or in lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains,
or in shops, or at tea;
For the saints of God are just folk like me,
And I mean to be one too.