I want to honor all of the saints we lost this year, and in other years, too.

 

Psalm 34:1-10 and 22

1 I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. 2 My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. 3 O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears. 5 Look to him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed. 6 This poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord, and was saved from every trouble. 7 The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them. 8 O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him. 9 O fear the Lord, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want. 10 The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.  22 The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.

Revelation 7:9-17

9 After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. 10 They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” 11 And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” 13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” 14 I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. 15 For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. 16 They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; 17 for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Spoken words for “Our Saints” by Rev KellyAnn Donahue

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Today it is time to discuss that word Redeemer that I have been saying every Sunday. That opening sentence is from the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible Psalm 19 verse 14. The author of the Psalm is asking God for help in resisting temptation, and to be forgiven. God is the one who brings the author back from temptation and sin, in the same way one might pay ransom to a kidnapper or to a hacker threatening to keep your computer data. The redeemer is stepping in to help pay or cancel a serious debt that is hard to pay back. The redeemer does this out of grace and lovingkindness. The redeemer is God.

 

In the New Testament, the word redeemer from the Old Testament was applied to Jesus. He said he was sent from God, and he taught about resisting temptation, repentance and forgiveness. By the time the book of Revelation was written, the death of Jesus was seen as a sacrifice, the same way a lamb was to be sacrificed in the Temple. It was a seen as way to pay for breaking the law, a way to pay for sin.

 

In our reading from Revelation, that author John of Patmos had a vision that might be of heaven. He saw God and the Lamb on a throne. The Lamb might represent Jesus as the one sitting next to God. Both redeemers are there; God and Jesus. The people gathered in their washed robes are from all nations. I think that means that everyone has a chance to be there, in that heaven. I think we are all given a choice to lead lives that follow the golden rule and that all of us can be forgiven by God.

 

It is in that sense of inclusiveness and hope that we use this reading on All Saints Day. Which saints am I talking about? Our saints. The protestant church thinks of saints as those who are baptized or confirmed or who in some way acknowledge God and Jesus. The Catholic Church names someone a saint after prayers to them are said to have resulted in a cure. And there are other saints, like the apostles, and martyrs. I have a few books of saints. I am sure they are listed in many places. We can honor those saints today as well as our church folks. I want to honor all of the saints we lost this year, and in other years, too. Some are in our Steeple Lighting list. The list I read during the pastoral prayer was taken from the prayer list in our bulletins.

 

What about those on our list or in our hearts and memories that are not church goers, not believers in God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit? I honor them, because they were part of our lives, because we care enough about them offer prayers for them. They made us who we are, helped us grow, taught us to care. We may not have liked them every day we knew them. We can love those we don’t always like.

 

Why are we doing this service? To look back at those who have gone. To look at them with respect and to hope they are in God’s care. I would like us to learn to feel a little grief or sadness in this place, and to know that this is a safe and good and right place to feel those feelings. We feel them in small doses, with people we love and trust and share with. We see that it is healthy to feel them. We can get through it together, get through it knowing that others feel as we do, or, if they don’t know exactly how much or how little we loved a saint, we know that they are willing to sit with us while we feel it. We are not grieving alone. Imagine how much I love you, to be willing to share these feelings with you. God loves us all much more than that.

 

Sometimes we do not want to grieve. Sometimes we are afraid that we will never get out of our tears once they start. Look around you. Smile or make a funny face. We are not smiling alone. If you can smile for a second or two, maybe you can stretch that into a few more seconds.

 

We are here to comfort each other as we remember our saints. We comfort each other with words, with hugs, with prayers and with our tears. We don’t have the power to heal grief, but we stand beside you   as you grieve, now and in days to come. All our saints are loved and cherished by God as much as they were loved and cherished by their family and friends, by all of us here. I think God helps us heal, even if we don’t feel it now. Helps us get through the next minute, the next hour, the next day. And one day, we look back on a tough day, the day of a funeral or of All Saints Service, and we feel some healing, some lessening of our pain and grief. That is hope. The looking for a day that is better than this one. A day with more smiles. A day that we feel as much joy as we do in the fondest memories of our saints. May we look forward to the day when we will be with all of our loved ones, and with God.

© Rev KellyAnn Donahue