Dear Friends in Christ,
My Sunday mornings often don’t start at the front door of the church. They start in the columbarium.
Sometimes when I am unlocking early in the morning, or when I am waiting for the 10:30 service to start, I will walk along the stones and look at the names there. One of the things that is both privilege and heartache, having served here almost twenty years ago, when I first graduated from seminary, is that I know so many of those names.
These are not just the people who taught me how to be a priest. They are the people who taught me how to be a Christian. They didn’t just go to church. They were the church. They showed me what commitment meant.
When I walk past their names, I wish I could ask them: Is this what you want for your church now? Are we living up to the hopes you had for the future?
This weekend, we celebrate All Saints Day, remembering all the faithful who have gone before us. And the thing about saints is always this: they don’t just want us to admire them. They want us to join them.
Are we committed to the well-being of Christ’s church, as those who went before us were committed? Do we stand for hope and justice, as they stood?
This Sunday is also the day we bring our pledge cards to church. Those cards are symbols of our real and tangible commitment to Christ’s church—not just to the institution that is Grace, but to the future that God wants for all people on earth.
I encourage you to stand, as the saints of this place have stood, for the promise of God.
The letter to the Ephesians tells us this: “In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance . . . so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.”
May we use our inheritance well.
Yours in Christ,
Anne