This weekend, November 2-3, we’re celebrating All Saints’ Day at St. Peter Lutheran Church.
Our Scripture today is Ephesians 1:11-23, and I found the commentary by Sarah Birmingham Drummond in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4 helpful.
How many of you as kids learned the rhyme “Here is the church, here is the steeple”?
If you know it, say it with me:
Here is the church,
here is the steeple.
Open the doors,
and see all the people. Close the doors
and hear them pray.
Open the doors
and they all walk away!
Now, if I wanted, I could complain about this rhyme a little bit, because not all churches have steeples. I grew up in a church congregation that worshiped in a junior high school auditorium, and even when we built a building, we didn’t include a steeple.
I do appreciate that it ends with “They all walk away,” which of course does not mean the church goes away and disappears, but rather that the people go out into the world to do God’s work. We have to open the doors of the building; we don’t do much good as the church if we never leave these walls!
Our building is just a tool to use to do ministry – and it’s a wonderful tool thanks to the commitment of lots of people over the last 147 years of this congregation, right up to the work John and Gary and the rest of the building and grounds committee are doing to fix the old elevator to the sanctuary.
But what I really like about this rhyme is that it shows it’s the people who make up the church. When Paul in Ephesians describes the Church as the body of Jesus Christ, he means the people, the people claimed in the waters of baptism and filled by the Holy Spirit.
Often I think we have a tendency to make the Church too small. Sometimes we think it’s the building. Other times we remember the church is the people, but we get this strange idea that it’s all up to us, that we can see or measure the Body of Christ by human standards.
We fall into the trap of thinking the church is only those people we see around us. And of course, the Church does include those of us here today, gathered for worship. It includes those who are worshiping at our other services. It includes those who are part of our community who for whatever reason aren’t here this weekend. That’s not too hard to see.
But the Church is far more than just our congregation. Our congregation is part of a denomination that includes ministries like the camp where our confirmation students are this weekend, and the missionaries and military and hospital chaplains we support, and our schools and colleges.
That’s more than we usually think of. And yet the Church is so much more than just our denomination. Christ’s Body includes all Christians gathered around the world, in every Christian congregation, people who look and talk and act very differently than we do, people who we will never meet this side of heaven.
And here’s the part where the definition of the Church gets strange and mystical. Christ’s body is not bound by time or space. The Church includes all of God’s people who have ever lived, our ancestors in faith, all the saints.
Saints is the title the Bible uses for everyone in the church. It’s the label given to all of us when we are baptized into Christ and marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit.
When we do the full communion liturgy, we proclaim that we’re praising God’s name with all the saints, with all the choirs of angels, with the church on earth, and the hosts of heaven, joining the unending hymn of praise to God, who is far beyond measuring, who is far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. All those people are gathered with us, joined together at Christ’s table.
This is what we’re celebrating on All Saints’ Day. On this day in the church year, we take time to pause and look beyond ourselves to remember the rest of the Body of Christ, the ones we can’t see, the ones resting in Jesus’ presence in heaven who have completed their earthly tasks.
In this reading, Paul prays for God to open the eyes of our hearts so we may know the hope to which God has called us, that we may grasp the riches of the glorious inheritance and the immeasurable greatness God gives to us.
But it’s not just those who have died who are saints. Looking at the people around us, it can be hard to conceive of each other as saints. We have this idea that saints are supposed to be perfect, and we highlight the “special” saints, people whose lives most clearly point to God.
But saints aren’t limited to just especially good or holy people. Saints are all us sinners claimed and forgiven by Jesus.
That means you are a saint.
Sometimes it’s hardest to see ourselves as saints, because we know all the ways we don’t measure up to the standard God sets for us—we know ourselves and our sin too well.
And if it’s challenging to see ourselves and each other as saints, perhaps it’s even harder to look around at the tangible, institutional expressions of the Church in the world around us and see it as the Body of Christ. It’s easier to see the abuse scandals, the greed, and the navel-gazing. It’s easier to see the fighting over silly things, the divisions, and the just plain apathy. So often the church we look around at does not look like the vessel that bears the riches of God’s glorious inheritance. Sometimes I wonder what God was thinking.
And yet this is the body Christ chooses to work through.
Jesus knows your sin, and my sin, and the sins of the church. And Jesus forgives your sins, and my sins, and the sins of all the saints. That’s grace.
And Jesus trusts you and me with a mission. The Holy Spirit is empowering us to be the channels through which God’s love is made known to the world.
One of my favorite definitions of the church is that we are God’s ambassadors to the world.
We are the stewards trusted with God’s word, trusted with the Gospel, trusted with the good news of redemption and of life beyond this existence.
So how do we represent Christ to the world? Knowing the hope to which God has called us, how do we act in the world?
With the eyes of our hearts enlightened, knowing Christ our head is seated in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come, knowing that great eternal hope, how then do we live?
We live as God’s people. We remember who and whose we are. We are the Body of Christ, and we are children of God. We are forgiven and set free. We are sent out as the Church to serve the world and share the good news. It’s a high calling!
And at the same time, especially when that high calling gets overwhelming, we remember that we’re not in this alone. Each of us is a tiny part of something much greater than ourselves, part of a body transcending time and space through Jesus Christ.
We’re in this together, which means none of us is responsible for carrying the burdens of life on our own. And again, it’s not just us in this room!
All the work we do depends on the power of God in Christ. We’re not here to save the world – Jesus has already done that. Everything we the people do as the Church depends on what Jesus has done for us on the cross.
The cross is our symbol as the Body of Christ because it shows how far God is willing to go for us. It also reminds us we are part of a community.
The cross points up to God, who empowers us to live.
It points down, which can remind us of those who have come before us, the community of faith on whose shoulders we stand, those who have shown us Jesus.
And the cross points sideways to our sisters and brothers on this journey with us. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.
People of God, may you remember those who have come before you in faith.
May you prepare the way as a witness for those who will follow in your path.
And may you remember always that you belong to Christ, who has called and redeemed you to live and serve in Christ’s body.
Amen