Dear Beloved Saints!
Happy All Saints Day! We'll be celebrating that feast day this coming Sunday, with all the pomp, circumstance, and fun we Episcopalians can muster. How cool is it that we ALL get to be saints, not on our own merits (because compared to a perfect God, who loves us to perfection, who has those?), but on the merits of God Incarnate who came to reconcile us to the Lover of our Souls! Such good news! I like the way pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber talks about it, so that's what I'm sharing today (please see below). See ya Sunday!
Blessings, saints...party on!
Mo. Nikki+
(an excerpt from) It's All Saints, not Some Saints
by Nadia Bolz-Weber
"God will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth. (Isaiah 25:8)
I mean, come on, isn’t that beautiful?
I have no idea why so many churches try to make Christianity into a reward and punishment program instead. I do not know why so many people seem to think that we only get to return to the one who created us if we happen to say the right things and believe the right things and do the right things – only if we happen to be a member of the right church and have the right lifestyle and political affiliation.
As if we are that powerful.
Friends, if as the prophet Isaiah said, God is swallowing up death –I just can’t imagine God spits anyone out in the process (as if the blood of the lamb can only wash garments that are lightly soiled)
It just isn’t like that, friends. We aren’t more powerful than God’s grace and mercy.
Our failings are never as powerful as a God who sees to it that all the shortcomings (mine, yours, our loved ones’) that are so glaring now, fade when in glory our eyes adjust to the light of Christ and we finally see how the story works out.
God promises you this. The story works out. Amen."*
*from The Corners Substack by Nadia Bolz-Weber, 11-1-22
https://thecorners.substack.com/p/its-all-saints-not-some-saints
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