Pastor Raita Neely

Rev. 7:9-17; Mtt.5:1-12

November 2, 2003 – All Saints Sunday

Saints in the Making.

Today is the day we pull out the old family photo album and remember where we came from. This picture album, aids us in remembering all the people that have influenced our faith and our lives.

This is the day to remember the disciples and Mary the mother of Jesus, the Samaritan woman and the apostle Paul, and all the others who people the Scriptures. But our album pictures more than the people of the Old and New Testament. You may also find there Saint Francis, standing barefoot in the snow, with birds on his shoulders and his pet wolf at this side. Saint Joan of Arc, dressed in armor, mounted on a horse, ready to lead men in battle. There is Saint Christopher, carrying a child on his back. Saint Julia and ST. John De La Salle, both of whom had a heart for education poor children. See Dietrich Bonhoffer preaching in prison, Martin Luther King Jr. preaching against racism and for justice for all people, and Mother Theresa caring for the sick in Calcutta. And thousands of others are in our album. You probably know a few of them whom none of the rest of us has ever met.

The lives of the Saints intrigue us, but as we read about them we see something very quickly, they were not people who were perfect. Rather, they were ordinary men and women whose love of God led them to do extraordinary things, which means none of us can shrug our shoulders and say sainthood is beyond our reach. So who are the saints? Saints are people who realize their life is a gift and the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away. Saints remember that the kingdom belongs to the poor before God, to those who hunger for God's goodness and guidance and who weep when God's word is disregarded. They are often people of great simplicity, but spiritual wisdom.

There is a kickback in being a saint, some will revile and defame saints, some will call the saints weak-minded and say that God and the church are nothing more than a crutch, but that goes with the territory, saints are tough skinned and can't be taken completely off guard. They know their strength, courage and commitment come from God's strength, not their own. And so the saints live knowing God loves them, but without angling for stained glass window status.

It would also be a mistake, to assume that you must be dead to be a saint. Think Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu or Osceola McCarty of Hattiesburg , Mississippi .

Almost no one in Hattiesburg knew she was a saint until about a year ago. No halo around her head, I guess. She was just a laundress, an old black woman who had never married, dropping out of school when she was in the sixth grade to begin a lifetime of washing clothes. That was the year her maiden aunt came out of the hospital, unable to walk, and moved in with her family. Twelve year old Osceola left school to care for her and to help her mother and grandmother with the backyard laundry business. By the time her aunt recovered a year later, Osceola thought she was too far behind to return to school. “I was too big,” she says, “so I kept on working.”

For the next seventy-five years that is what she did, scrubbing the dark colored clothes on a washboard and boiling the white ones in a big black pot in her backyard before hanging them all out on the line to dry. Her day started when the sun came up and stopped when it went down, and it was not until she was eighty-seven years old that anyone knew who she was.

That was the year she gave $150,000 - her life savings- to the University of Southern Mississippi for scholarships for African American students. Local business people have pledged to match her gift, and the young woman who was awarded the first McCarty Scholarship has all but adopted her.

Osceola says the one question she gets asked more than any other is why she did not spend the money on herself. “I am spending it on myself,” she answers, smiling the slyest of smiles.

Or consider Joyce Roush whose favorite passage from the Bible is the one we use at baptism as we light the candle given to the person baptized from the Christ candle, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Some think Joyce is selfless, others call her crazy. Joyce is the organ donation coordinator from Indiana who donated one of her kidneys to a 13 year old Maryland boy whom she did not even know. It was the second time in the history of organ donation a person had donated an organ to a complete stranger. The mother of five says that in giving of yourself, you receive more than you could ever hope for. She feels that God called her to make this donation. Joyce has received much media coverage, but she says of herself, “I'm just a normal person who still goes out and buys groceries. The greatest blessing for me is that for a moment in time, I got to see God's purpose for me and see that manifest. That for me has been a miracle.”

On All Saints' Day, we make the bold claim that all these people are our relatives because we have been baptized into the same family, Christ's brothers and sisters- and the same light we see shining in them shines in us too.

Not to be missed and much closer at hand are the saints of the rank and file of daily life. See them give blood so that others might live. See them teaching in classrooms of our schools. See them in hospital emergency rooms, serving with skill and embracing with compassion someone who has just learned that a spouse of 60 years has died on an operating room table. See them in retirement homes, speaking to the fragile ones who sit, mute and staring, in the wheelchair line in the hallway. See them in junior and senior high school kids who tutor younger children, pack gifts for children less fortunate, or work on Habitat. See them in auto repair shops or lawyers offices where customers or clients receive an honest job at an honest price. See them anywhere there is love for God and neighbor honesty in all dealings, compassion, and fairness.

Once you are baptized, you belong to God and all that remains to be seen is what you will do about it. Just remember you do not have to be famous, or perfect, or dead. You just have to be you-the one of a kind, never to be repeated human being, who God created you to be-you are to love as you are loved, to throw your arms around the world, to shine with the light of Christ. See the saints around you today, both in your memory and in those all around you, and by God's grace, see a saint in the face of a forgiven sinner who meets you in the mirror.

And you do not have to do it alone. You have all this company of saints, this cloud of witnesses calling your name and shouting themselves hoarse with encouragement. Because you are part of them and they are part of you, and all of us are knit together into God's family, placed in the world to show the love of Christ. Amen.