All Saints Sunday November 6, 2016
My friends, we enter into a series of Festival Sundays … Reformation, ALL SAINTS, and Christ the King! Here at the completion of the church liturgical year, we look back in honoring the past and we look forward to all that God is doing as the future stretches broad before us.
╬ Feast of All Saints
The Christian Testament describes all the people of God as “saints” – deriving from the Latin sancire, “consecrated,” and sanctus, “holy.” Not just particular, especially virtuous people … but all of us! Claimed by God in our baptism, God sanctifies us for a life of faith. Here on the Feast of All Saints, we celebrate the lives and the witness of all who have gone before us, our heritage of saints stretching back over untold generations. And we celebrate the saints of our time – the people of God, the Body of Christ, in the world today – even as we look forward in hope to generations of saints to come. We remember the saints of God “who from their labors rest.” And we lift up and celebrate each other, as saints of God, who carry forward in the great calling we share: to bless God’s world, now and in the future.
We are blessed on Nov. 6 to have as our visiting pastor and preacher, Rev. Brad Fuerst, Pastor of Lutheran Campus Ministry at the University of Texas in Austin!
