EPHESIANS: The following passage is a prayer that Paul offers for the life of the church. The prayer is that all the saints, all the people who are members of the church, would have a relationship with Christ that surpasses just knowledge about him. That this relationship would be based upon more than information, more than right thinking, more than holding to the proper beliefs and tenets of the faith. Paul prays that all the saints would know Christ in the deepest sense of the biblical understanding of knowing, which is in an intimate and personal relationship centered in love. A love that seeks to do more in our lives than we can even imagine, than we can even know or think about intellectually. A love that impacts the life of the church not only in its present moment but for all the generations that follow. For all the saints who are yet to come as the church.

Read Ephesians 3:14-21

I Corinthians: The question for the church is how do we keep that legacy of love alive and vital to the saints, the faith community? Jesus, himself, gave us the practice to keep the message of his love alive. It is in the practice of Holy Communion. Paul tells us that whenever we do this, we do it in remembrance of Jesus’ death. This remembrance is one where we hear Jesus’ words tell us that there is no love greater than a person laying down their life for another. That in his crucifixion, the ultimate rejection of a person, Jesus says, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” A witness that causes Paul to say in Romans 8, “Nothing, absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord.” So even as the saints of God today, we have this legacy, this remembrance that keeps before us this important path to receiving God’s love and having our own personal relationship of love and forgiveness with Jesus the Christ.

Read I Corinthians 11:23-26

SERMON:
It is probably over 20 years ago, now, there was a very popular song by Whitney Houston entitled, “The Greatest Love Of All.” The opening words to that song are, “I believe the children are our future.” It was and is a great song, as it reminds us that we need to treat our children well and to love them. All of which is true, but I disagree with the premise. I do not believe our children are our future, I believe we are the ones who help create our children’s future. In our love and care, we help create their characters. In our parenting we model what it means to live in relationship. In our church, we show them what it means to live in grace and unconditional love. We help create who they will become by the way we live our lives.

But I believe it is even more than this. We leave them the legacy of our actions and decisions. I wake up every day and try to remind myself of how much I have and how blessed my life is because of the lives of people who came before me. I can move to Prescott and have a wonderful infrastructure in place that has allowed my new home to be built. There are roads and hiking trails there for me to use for my own needs and enjoyment. When Nancy and I came to be introduced to the Staff Parish Committee as your new Senior Pastors, I remember walking into this beautiful worship space and saying, praise God for the faithfulness of the many who caused this to be here so we can worship here. It was here to use, not because of a thing I did, but simply because 100’s and even 1000’s of people before me, before us were faithful in their discipleship.

It is why Walter Brueggemann’s thought about the church, about our lives as the saints is so important to me. What God does best is trust us with our moment in history. With our moment in God’s story.” It is through our lives, through our faithfulness that the legacy of God’s love continues and is preserved for the next generation. It is because of the love of those who came before us that the love of God was given to us. Each generation lives the legacy, provides the future context for the generation and generations that follow.

I still remember a Children’s Sermon told almost 30 ears ago by the Lay Leader of my church. He told the children that a Christian is someone who plants shade trees they will never sit under. It is a simple but powerful image of what it means to make our lives as a living legacy for others.

Legacies are what we leave for our children that impact their lives. Our legacies also serve as a reminder to them of whether we were concerned about the kind of life we wanted to pass on. What are we doing today, that will be our children’s and grandchildren’s reminders of our lives? Will we leave them with a massive debt? Will we leave them an unhealthy environment? Will we leave them a legacy of meanness and disrespect for others in our public life? Will we leave them hope for a future greater than they can imagine? Will we leave them a church that is committed to living the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Will we leave them a model for caring for all of God’s creation and all of God’s children? Will our lives be a legacy to God’s grace for all people?

That is what today, as All Saints Day, is all about. In a moment, we are going to participate in the Sacrament of Holy Communion. It is a prime example of legacy. When Jesus uses the words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” the word translated “remembrance” is the Greek word “anemnesis.” Obviously it is a cognate for our word amnesia. Amnesia, as we know, means so much more than losing your name. It literally means loosing your story. Jesus first of all has us participate in the Sacrament of Holy Communion as a reminder of our story, or actually God’s story of grace for all people in every generation. It keeps the story alive. But “anemnesis” also means more than remembrance, it also means to “re-experience.” So Jesus asks us to practice this ritual, so we may re-experience God’s grace for us as well. So we will have the experience of that love as well.

This is truly the example of legacy, and why we are here today on this “All Saints Day.” It is to first remember the lives of those who shared their lives with us, but who have gone ahead to eternal life with God. It is to remember what they did that enhanced our gift of life. To say thank you for their presence that made our lives better and more special because they were a part of those lives. But it is also a time we re-experience their love and presence as well. To experience their legacies to us.

When I close my thoughts during a Memorial Service, I always use this thought. “You know your life has been a success if in the living of it you were an inspiration and in the remembering of it you are a benediction.” And as I explain, many people see a benediction as that which closes our time of worship, when in actuality it is what sends us forth into the world beginning our response to God’s love in our relationships with others. Today, we remember and re-experience the lives who passed onto the life eternal this year, re-experiencing their inspirations and allowing them to be a benediction to the living of our lives. We remember their examples so their legacies will empower us and lead us in what we do so we, too, may be an inspiration to others. May we remember those places where we, and our lives, were blessed by those we honor this day, so that those memories will indeed be a benediction to us that helps us to order our lives in such a way that we, too, live our legacy, as we seek to be inspirations to those around us.

Sermon delived by Rev. George Cushman on November 5, 2006.