On Sunday we celebrate one of the great feasts of the Christian year, the Feast of All Saints. The feast for all of the saints. Of all those who are blessed.
We will baptize and confirm. We will bring in the new to the family of God as we also remember those who have gone on before us. It is as they say in the Lion King, the circle of life. In our own, weird church way. We remember all those who have gone before and all those who are here now.
Once again, at All Saints we can get to see how we in our humanity attempt to put up great barriers to keep folks out. How we try to make a lot rules to protect ourselves. It’s what we do, it’s why we need Jesus’ and all saints to again lead us in paths of righteousness. To help us walk in the ways of kindness and compassion. This is where faith leads beloved. For weeks we have talked about our stuff, interior stuff and exterior stuff. Both the positive and the negative impacts of those accumulations. Here we are now at All Saints when the finality of life stares us in face. We will leave. We will all die. And yet we are blessed by God – our words and action may fade from the world view, from the public eye but never from the eye of God.
We join the throngs of countless angels, the choirs of the redeemed. A gracious host of forever saints surrounding us, some known and named and more unknown and unnamed. All children of God. Many of you know that I love the hymn
, I sing a song of the saints of God - not just because it’s one of the few hymns I can sing all the way through but because the theology of the hymn is true for me. It is what I believe. It holds me and helps increase my faith.
We are all of them saints of God and I mean God helping to be one too.
I look forward to singing the hymn this Sunday and being surrounded by the saints of God, all of them.
Alison Schultz+
Priest in Charge
