Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's November 7, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.

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The former chaplain at Duke University writes this: “The other day, inspecting with an electrician the attic of Duke Chapel high above the sanctuary, I noted the wonderful workmanship of the fitted beams. Then, there, toward the base of one of those huge oak beams, carved into the wood where nobody but God could see it, I read, ‘John Scavonni, for the Glory of God.’ Some unknown craftsman put a lifetime of skill into that beam that no one would ever see. Yet God sees. If its worth doing for the glory of God, it’s worth doing right” (W. Willimon, The Last Word, 75).

So, the writer of Ephesians has urged us to “live for the praise of God’s glory.” Gloria Dei. To the glory of God. What can that mean? We who so carefully calculate how much money we can make and what portion we can then give a portion away; we who so casually pass judgment based on the superiority of our own moral calculus; we who so secretly enjoy keeping score on the words and deeds of someone else; we who are so easily prone to blame “the other” for the presence of evil in the world – just how are we doing when it comes to our own life lived, Gloria Dei?

Being Protestant Christians, Monday, November 1, probably slipped by us with hardly a sideways glance. All Saints Day, it was. The day after All Hallows Eve or Halloween. All Saints is a day, as a prayer of the ancient church puts it, “to remember the saints who have gone before us in this life, the high and holy ones, who have wrought wonders and have been shining lights in the world, as well as the meek and lowly ones, who have sought God in the darkness and held fast their faith in trials, and led lives of kindness and mercy toward others as they had the opportunity.”

Everyone probably knows just enough about Church history to know that Roman Catholics have a saint for almost everything – patron saints, saints associated with virtues and saints ministering to special bodily needs and saints associated with sacred spaces and holy places. We also know that one impulse of the Protestant Reformations was to reject widespread abuses associated with the cult of the saints, to recover the biblical teaching that a person of faith need not rely exclusively on the saints to make intercession before God, but that all could have direct access to God through Christ.

But I think an even more radical contribution of the Reformation movement is that it democratized the idea of sainthood, and made being a saint the near equivalent of being baptized and commissioned to be a follower of Christ. If you give a close reading to scripture, you’ll see that in the economy of the New Testament, saints are everywhere, even in the pews of the Church. The word “hagios” or holy ones, the word we translate saint, appears nearly 50 times in the Pauline epistles alone.

Here in Ephesians we read, “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints. . . “(1:17-18). Here the epistle invites the reader to experience the benefits of an inheritance of grace that is given to all of God’s holy people, God’s saints.

Who are the saints?

A young boy, upon visiting a magnificent cathedral on a glorious day when the sun was streaming through the beautiful stained glass windows, was told by the priest that the windows depicted the saints of the church. As they looked at the windows, the priest asked the boy if he knew the saints. The little boy, looking up at the beams of light blazing down through the brilliant windows, said, “yes, the saints are the ones the sun shines through.”

The prism through which we gaze upon the water of our baptism says that we are the saints of God. It says that our light is to be refracted outward in a rainbow of colors. No matter what dark wilderness or desert place we find ourselves, the water announces that we have been created, redeemed, and called to a high and holy purpose, that we are to live Gloria Dei.

It’s not always easy – to let the light shine through. Deep within us, we can quickly get discouraged or feel forsaken by God or by friends. We can become bitter.

We have learned from experience that our toys break down, our earthly leaders have only earthly wisdom, and the fortune we were sure could buy us everything we want, has not gotten us anything we really need. Our constant return to war to settle human differences makes a mockery of the triumph of the intellect, and once again we see that might has not made the world right, not by a long shot if Afghanistan and Iraq and Gaza are any measure of what force of arms can accomplish. Just where is the glory of God in all of that?

It’s not always easy being saints. At the very least, we have to let forgiveness and reconciliation carry the day, even when that is by far not the easiest thing to do. We have to deal with the nagging sensation that too often we have permitted the Church institution to become more important than the gospel, that we prize our own power and prestige above letting go and letting God.

It’s not easy. To cope with change, disappointment, and, worst of all, the grief of loss and its haunting memories, and the grief of not being able to have time back again.

In the end, the harsh realities of this life can leave us cynical and critical and looking for something more, something better, something more enduring. Something that maybe only the eyes of the heart can see, something that only the heart of our heart can know.

It is then we can recall that, as the holy ones of God, we have been sealed by the Spirit, the pledge of our inheritance as the redeemed and holy people of God, that our chief end, as the catechism puts it, is to “glorify God and enjoy God forever.” Gloria Dei.

All Saints is a time to remember those women and men who came before us and whose names are largely forgotten to the world. The reason we celebrate these people is that, because of what God has done for them, we can believe that we are not abandoned to the moment. We are not alone. We are not left adrift in this world with no past and no future. We are connected to one another, to the living and to the dead, through Christ, the one who exemplifies, Gloria Dei.

Saints, then, are those people whose hearts speak the language of heaven. We repeat their stories as lights to show us the way. Sometimes the saints are apostles and martyrs; sometimes, they are prophets as ancient as Micah or as recent as Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa; but mostly, they are people just like me and you, who care about the worth and dignity of every person, who know that God calls us to ministry at the margins, who believe that a difference can be made, one life at a time..

So, today, think about your favorite saint, consider someone whom the history books will never mention, but someone dear to you who taught you and showed you and loved you and sang you into your own faith. The truth is, we don’t have to make up this faith as we go. The saints will teach us, if we will listen. And in gratitude, as we listen, recall all that your saints have done Gloria Dei . . . knowing that we, too, can do the same.