All Saints

DAILY BYTE

On the first Sunday in November, the church all around the world celebrates one of my favorite holidays – or Holy Days. All Saints Sunday. This is the day in the Christian year when we recognize that we are part of a community encompassing both the earthly and heavenly realms. It is a community that is alive in the way that it prays and teaches us how to live. We recognize that living in this world is not easy, and as we look at the lives of people who have gone before us, we acknowledge that suffering has happened and that it continues to happen. We also, however, see that the way people who have gone before us have lived, suffered, and died has something to teach us today about how to live together as a life-giving community.

What does it really mean for our lives that we are part of a community that includes both people who are alive on earth and people who have physically died? Does this not sound a bit crazy?

Perhaps, but today, I offer to you to the words of one well-known man who suffered greatly in his life. This voice that speaks out from the communion of saints is St. Francis of Assisi. Although he wrote this prayer in the 13th Century, it still yields truth today, as we acknowledge our world as it is and strive to imagine a world that can be different – one in which all of us help to bear one another’s pain:

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sew love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood, as to understand,
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Proclaim today the Apostles’ Creed, as a prayer. This is an authoritative statement about what we believe, as followers of Christ that was compiled a long time ago in the 8th century, and yet, it still rings true today:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth:
I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit
And born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
And is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
The holy catholic Church,
The communion of saints,
The forgiveness of sins,
The resurrection of the body,
And the life everlasting. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Ephesians 2:19-22

So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.