On All Saints Sunday, we remember and honor all those who have preceded us on the journey of faith. Our Scripture readings call us to focus on the central command that unites us as God’s people, the command to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
This command and the basic confession that Jesus is Lord are what unite us with the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us. Together as a church, we build on their legacy of faith.
Today’s Scripture readings are Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Psalm 119:1-8, & Mark 12:28-34. Here’s the livestream from Christ the King and the sermon podcast audio.
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Grace to you and peace from the One who was, who is, and who is to come, Jesus Christ our Risen Lord. Amen
How many of you are familiar with VeggieTales? Maybe you needed to have been a child or had children in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
My kids Jonah and Micah dressed up as Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber for Halloween, and almost everyone who recognized them appeared to be in their mid-30’s or early 50’s.
VeggieTales was a Christian home video series, America’s first half-hour computer-generated animation. Our church library has a few, just like I think every church library in America. They were hugely popular for about a decade, and then the company went bankrupt.
I just read a memoir by Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, (Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story About Dreams, God, and Talking Vegetables) and the reason for his company’s downfall, as he sees it, is that they lost focus on their purpose, what they existed to do.
It’s ironic, because one of the attempts they made to stay focused was to include a little tag on each episode of VeggieTales with a clip of a little kid walking and the words, “Why we do what we do.”
And yet, once they began achieving success, they got sidetracked by product licensing (things like Halloween costumes) and trying to become an empire and do everything, almost like a Christian version of Disney. The goal became growth for its own sake, and they lost sight of their purpose of making videos to teach kids about Biblical truths and Christian values.
Today’s Scripture readings both focus on why we do what we do as Christians. The first reading is from Deuteronomy 6.
Let me set the scene for you. For 430 years, God’s people the Israelites had been slaves in Egypt, and God miraculously rescued them. The Egyptians didn’t want to lose their slaves, but God sent 10 plagues on Egypt, and the Pharaoh was eventually convinced to let God’s people go.
Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, but when they reached the land God had promised, they got scared, and they refused to go in and take what God was giving them. Instead, they wandered in the wilderness until that generation had passed away.
Anyone remember how long they were in the wilderness for? 40 years.
Deuteronomy 1:3. “In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses spoke to the Israelites.” They’re almost out of the wilderness, about to enter the promised land, and Moses gives them a motivational speech, which is most of the book of Deuteronomy.
Before they enter the land, God through Moses reminds them of their identity and purpose. As it turns out, they very quickly forget about God and who they’re supposed to be as God’s people, but that’s later in the story.
Today’s reading is the very heart of their instructions before they cross the Jordan river and enter the promised land, especially verses 4 and 5. Even for Jewish people today, these verses are the centerpiece of morning and evening prayers: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
This is the most important thing, the foundation for all the rest of God’s law, God’s covenant with God’s people. This is the big idea.
God tells the people to remember these words. Verses 6-9: “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.” Hold on to this promise. Remember the Lord is your God; remember you belong to God. Remember you are God’s people.
In our Christian faith, this is the promise of baptism, the promise we celebrated at confirmation last week. You belong to God. Let God be God in your life.
But don’t just keep this in your heart; “Recite [these words] to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
Many of our Jewish neighbors do this literally. Tefillin are small leather boxes containing verses from the Torah, from God’s law, to be worn during morning prayers, as a way of binding these words on your hand and fixing them as an emblem on your forehead.
Typically, Jewish homes also have a little box with a scroll of parchment containing this passage of Scripture, called a mezuzah. Again, following the directions: Write these words on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
The point is to remember these essentials. Do whatever you need to remember God’s commands, to remember these basics of faith.
Thousands of years later, a scribe—an educated religious leader—comes to Jesus and asks him what the most important commandment is. Of the 613 commands God gives in Scripture, out of all these instructions for how God’s people are supposed to live, which one takes priority?
Jesus answers by quoting from Deuteronomy 6: “The first is, ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’”
As a good Jewish rabbi, Jesus knows the correct answer. But then he continues, “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” That’s also part of God’s law given through Moses, but Jesus is elevating it to top priority as well. Here’s the basics of faithful living: Love God with all that you are, and love your neighbors as yourself. Everything else follows from there.
These basic commands—love God, and love people—these are what we are to teach our children. We may not literally carry around the written words of God’s law or post them on our doorposts, but we are called to share this faith, to pass it on to our children, and our children’s children, to all who come after us in faith. This is why we do what we do.
Not everything we do in church is centered around children, but if we’re not passing on faith, if we’re not taking what we learn from God’s word and teaching it to our children and grandchildren, to the people in your life who don’t know these promises, we’re in danger of losing our mission, losing our purpose.
The news we have of God’s love, the truth that God is our God and our God is a God of love and mercy and grace, this news is too good to keep to ourselves.
On All Saints Day, we pause to remember those who have come before us in faith, who have passed on this good news to us, whose faith has lit our path. Today, we give thanks for those on whose shoulders we stand. Thank God for the people in your life who have taught you God’s word.
Maybe it’s your parents, or grandparents. Perhaps Sunday School teachers or pastors. Maybe it’s a friend who invited you to church to hear the good news. You are here today because at some point, someone told you about God’s love for you.
And we give thanks as a church community as well. We’ve been talking about our church mortgage recently. Well, we have a church mortgage because people who came before us—some of you were here then, but lots of us don’t go that far back—people who came before us had the faith to build a building in this place for a church to meet in.
When our church was founded, the funding came from other people of faith who had a vision and a commitment to pass God’s word on to the people who would come to this community in the future. Thank God for those saints!
I don’t mean to say those who came before us were perfect, or even better than we are.
We as Lutherans don’t label people as “Saints” to say they’re super-Christians or something like that. Because faith depends on God’s grace, every follower of Jesus is a saint.
You are saints. And you and I get to leave a legacy for those who will come after us.
All Saints Day is a time for grieving, and there is sadness as we mourn our separation from those who have died. Yet at the same time we grieve, we give thanks for their legacies of faith.
And we grieve knowing, trusting, believing in the promise of resurrection, the promise that death is not the end of the story. In Jesus, we have a living hope of resurrection.
This is why we do what we do.
Continuing on the path of faith walked by those who have gone before us, surrounded by the cloud of witnesses in the church triumphant, we seek to love God with all that we are, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
And we pass on those words to all who will follow us, in Jesus’ name. Amen