Today is All Saints, the day on which we commemorate all those of our congregation, and from our own family and circle of dear ones, who have in this past year gone on from their earthly labors to eternal rest with the Lord. This annual celebration has become one of our most treasured Sundays of the whole year. We will hear many names, and our hearts will be full of memories and love and sadness and inspiration. And this space will fill up with their presence and our hearts will draw strength from their witness.

All Saints. In the church, sometimes we use the word "saints" to refer to those extra-special holy people whose lives were somehow more perfect, more sanctified than us normal folks, and who have been recognized by the church as a Saint, capital "S." But today we use the word "saints" in another sense, the way the apostle Paul uses it throughout his letters, referring to all the baptized, all who share in the mystery and power of the life of Christ just by being who we are and by living as faithfully as we can. Saints, Paul calls us. All those who, age after age, have taken on Christ in our baptism and from that moment forward are claimed by God for life as faithful disciples. Saints together, we are the church, past and present. Saints together, we strive, we stumble, we try again and again, to be the faithful people God recognizes.

We have a long list of names to read this year. Many of our number have gone home to be with God. And those of you who know various ones of them will perhaps chuckle a bit, too, as you think of them, for surely some were more apparently "saintly" than some others. Some gave God a pretty hard time along the way. I relish the diversity of the saints. I give thanks to God for each and every one of them. This list shows us that there's no one way to be a saint. But there are some basics that ought to apply to us all-the baptized, who call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ-basics that have to do with love and generosity and courage and steadfastness. From Paul forward, all the great teachers of the church have been trying to teach us what those basics are all about.

This morning, we hear one part of the picture from Paul. We have here some very early saints of the church who lived in Corinth and Macedonia. Paul was trying to teach those saints how to be more generous. There had come a time when the congregation in Jerusalem had run out of money. They had shown boundless generosity through a time of famine and hardship, and now their coffers were bare. In the verses we heard, Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to give generously for the Jerusalem church, and he does so by holding up the example of another church, the Macedonians, who even though they themselves were very poor, had given very generously.

Now, on this second Sunday of our annual Pledge Drive, our stewardship campaign, some of you are thinking that I'm going to try and shame us into giving more by talking about some poor churches who have given a lot, just as Paul did so long ago.

Well, it worked for Paul, and the fact of the matter is-all of us who have a great deal by worldly standards should always be humbled and challenged by the witness of the poorest saints.

Corinthians 8:9-15Corinthians 8:9-15Having said that, I want to hold up for us today another aspect of these verses, and that is the theological foundation for Paul's appeal. Paul's bottom line. His manifesto about how we are shaped as followers of Christ. It is God's generosity, says Paul, the outpouring of God's love for us in Christ Jesus, that provides the reason and the cause of our generosity, if we are truly disciples of his Christ.

This basic notion is key to everything Paul writes and believes, and I hope you can hear it clearly this morning. God's grace, Paul tells us, was expressed magnificently in Christ's incarnation. In that willingness to come down from heaven and share our fate. In that surrender of the heavenly glories for the ordinariness of human life, with its share of pain and suffering. In that giving up of wealth for poverty. In that passionate desire of our God to say to us in the language of human flesh and blood: I, your God, will show you that I am with you always. I am with you-in your living and your dying and in your rising up to life everlasting.

Christ gave everything, gave his life, that we might have the wealth of knowing God and of knowing the peace of God and of finding that salvation, that wholeness, that is possible for our lives through Christ. This holy generosity, you see, is the image in which we are made. Generosity is at the very foundation and origin of who we are. Generosity creates our identity as generous people in this world and is to be a hallmark of the saints.

I know that many of us are struggling to live faithfully in these so very anxious and stressful times. Many are fearful and vulnerable to nightmares. Some of us just find ourselves irritated and crabby about things that really don't matter much. We are all living in an unexpected and undefined crucible of fear, and we are reaching for deeper resources of faith to ground and anchor our lives.

Dear friends, the saints of God have faced tremendous challenges in every age. And through it all, they have discovered generous wellsprings of faith and hope. It is God's generosity towards us that even now, especially now, shapes us as generous people, generous with our dollars and generous with our hearts. It is the graciousness of God's abiding love that grounds us in courage and hope. It is the witness of God's love in each of us that draws us to the challenge of a life modeled on Jesus. It is the costliness of God's love that convinces us that we are held in that love always, no matter what.

Thanks be to God for all the saints, past, present and future. Saints together, we are the church. AMEN.

© Patricia E. Farris, 2001. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.