Being Among the Numbered

We are called to be loving, kind, compassionate, generous, faithful people.
This is the way God created us to be,
and when we are anything less than that,
we diminish our own lives,
and we diminish the lives of those around us.

But when we live according to God's will,
we end up experiencing life to it's fullest,
and we bring joy and happiness to those around us.
And those are the kind of people that we remember!

When you are asked to think about specifically about who has influenced your faith –
who has helped you to believe what you believe today, you know who would be on that list, don’t you?

And the persons you and I think of will not likely be on any television special, are they?
But, they have helped us to be believers.
They have enabled us to be persons of faith ourselves.
They are our personal saints.
And, we all have them.

Timothy had his mother, Eunice, and his grandmother, Lois, and his good friend, Paul.

It is good for us to take time to recall and to remember and to “celebrate” those who have influenced us personally in our faith.

Most of the folks that we remember will never be in any church history book.
There will never be any days of commemoration in the church calendar set aside to honor and remember them.

No, they are really, just ordinary folks like you and me, aren’t they? –
but in the course of seeking to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ,
in striving to love the Lord with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind,
they ended up touching our lives in ways that changed us and had a profound effect on who we are today.

I may not remember any one thing in particular that they taught me, but I do remember them.
Somehow, by their example and witness and faithfulness to the love and grace of God, they made an indelible mark on me.

And what about you?
Who are the ones you remember?
Who are the saints in your life who brought you to this place today so that here you are in church this morning to worship and praise God,
to hear God's word, and o celebrate his love?!

We have encountered lots and lots of people in our lives, haven’t we?
– relatives, friends, colleagues, teachers, neighbors –
lots of people.
Why is it that some of them stand out in our memories,
while so many others are just there?
What makes the difference in how we remember someone?

Matthew gives us a clue:
“The greatest one among you must be your servant. . . . whoever humbles himself will be made great.”

Once again, I’m afraid the church has been so works centered throughout history, that we tend to associate holiness with achievement.
But when I read in Genesis that we are created in God’s image,
and that God looked upon all God created and was very pleased,
I don’t see anything there that any of us achieved to gain such favor, do you?
It was simply God s choosing, and that is why Jesus can say so boldly in the Gospel of John: “You did not choose me, I chose you."

Likewise, we are not removed from sainthood because of anything we might have done against God.
As someone once wrote,
There are no saints without a past,
. . . . and there are no sinners without a future.

You see, sinner is NOT the opposite of Saint,
rather they go hand in hand,
and that goes for St. Peter, and St. Paul, and all the saints in Drexel Hill and every where else in the world!

We are not saints because of what we do or don’t do. . .

We are not saints because of what we believe or disbelieve. . .

We are saints because God has chosen to take us as part of God s own self.

Saints are wonderfully human, not super human.
Saints are wonderfully ordinary, not super extraordinary.

That's what this All Saint's Sunday is about –
to set aside a Sunday each year to remember and to thank God for all those saints down through the ages,
whose names may not be recorded in the church history books,
but whose names are certainly written in the Book of Life,
and whose names and faces are recorded in our hearts and our memories.

Some of them are long gone and long forgotten,
others are more recently departed whom we remember today,
and some of them are still alive and still play a part in our lives.

But the one thing that all these saints have in common is their love for the Lord,
and their willingness to allow God to use them in reaching out to and ministering to others,
allowing the grace, love, compassion, and
generosity of God to shine through them and flow out from them to us and to those around us.

Like a stained glass window depicting the saints of times past,
what makes them a saint is that the light shines through.

I continue to be fascinated by the history of this congregation.
83 years ago some 26 people met to begin a new church here in this new community of Drexel Hill.
They had no way of knowing that in two or three years the bottom would fall out of the economy.
And yet, those folks continued to come together, continued to envision a church –
teaching and practicing the faith in the community.
In the midst of the depression, they continued to dream and to plan –
and within ten years, they acted on their dream by agreeing to finance and build a new building.

What faith that took!

Again, they had no way of knowing that just as construction began the country would begin engagement in a world war that profoundly affected what would happen here over not only the next five years, but over the next twenty as well.

Those folks had to be generous people of vision, faith, commitment, obedience, and dedication to Jesus Christ to do something like that so many years ago.

They were people who were looking not only at the present, but to the future as well.

These are some of the saints that we remember today.
And some of them are still sitting right here among us!

Again I ask the question, What about you?

What kind of obituary or eulogy are you writing for yourself?
How will you be remembered?

And please don't say, "Maybe next year – when I'm older – then I'll become involved and be more generous and more compassionate."
No, it's either now or never.
The habits of a lifetime do not change overnight.
They are developed and molded every day of our lives.

How do you want to be remembered?
Do you want to be remembered in the same way that we remember those special saints in our own lives?
Well then, begin living today in a way that puts into practice what Jesus teaches, in a way that follows the example of those special people in our lives.

Let love, compassion, mercy, peace, humility, generosity, graciousness characterize your life. Take a serious look at yourself and see if you are becoming the person you want to be,
the person God made you to be.

Strive for the qualities that you admire and respect in others so that you, too,
might be numbered among the saints that we honor and thank God for today.