Dear friends, this feast of All Saints ranks among the greatest celebrations of the church year. Today we celebrate the lives of all the faithful departed, we rejoice in the communion of saints, and honor them. Today we recognize the glorious cloud of Christian faith that has touched and linked together people across two millenia, in every generation, and touched every nation, tribe and tongue on earth. That same cloud of witnesses comes down to this place, this very moment to embrace all of us here at St.Matthew’s and at other churches throughout our community, our land,our world.

While collectively we celebrate the countless souls that comprise that cloud, each of us recalls the individual saints, the singular souls that have led us along the way in faith. One may be a parent, a grandparent, a spouse, an uncle or aunt, a Sunday school teacher or a youth group leader, a friend our own age or a friend of the family—perhaps even a priest or bishop. Each of us is blessed to have had such people in our lives,people who have challenged us, encouraged us, who by word and example have inspired us to deepen our faith, to open our hearts, to trust in God’s providence, to believe in God’s presence and to join with God as partners on this human journey.

When a friend of mine first took his granddaughter to church she became captivated with the stained glass windows and began to learn everything she could about the lives of the saints. Her own mother, opposed to religion, asked he caustically on day who the saints were. "They’re the people in the church. The light shines through them," the girl replied.

The people who have inspired us may not be those on the church calendar or in the stained glass windows. But the light shines through them, too, as the light shines through so many of you here today. They are the everyday saints, the kind of saints of whom we sing, "And I want to be one, too." Let it be so.

Most fittingly, All Saints’ Day is one of the feasts reserved in the church calendar for the baptism of new Christians. Today we have the ineffable, the inexpressible joy of welcoming seven new Christians into this church family. Seven souls will join the great company of the saints in light, seven souls will be sealed in baptism by the HolySpirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. This church family will welcome them. We will pledge to support their lives in Christ, and we will reaffirm our own baptismal vows. In so doing we remind ourselves of the promises that lie at the very heart of who we are as Christians and we recommit to live by them, with God’s help.

We are proud to be modern-day disciples of Jesus Christ, who seek to make the risen Christ known by our actions in the world. To do that we seek to know Jesus through the study of his life and words in scripture. Today’s gospel is one of the best. Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, unlike the version in Luke, is addressed only to the disciples. Also unlike the version in Luke, Matthew’s Beatitudes focuson the spiritual values that govern discipleship.

The translation issues from Greek are enormously complex, so please forgive my offering a summary from the sources I have read. In Matthew, Jesus‚ disciples are called to humility (‘the poor in spirit’), to compassion ("those who mourn"), to kindness, non-violence ("the meek"),to a longing for righteousness, to mercy, to an unwavering obedience to God ("the pure in heart"), to peacemaking--in fact to waging peace within our own communities and in the wider world.

I don’t have to tell you how counter-cultural these qualities are now--just as they were then. Making them our own values, the goals for our own behavior is hard. We cannot do it alone, but only with God’s help. It is a life-long process, too. And, if we succeed--with God’s help--it will set us against the powers and principalities of the world, as it did the first generation of disciples and the prophets who came before them. Jesus knew that, too, and said so.

Jesus told the truth. The call to discipleship is a call to an extraordinary life of self denial--not so much in the material sense, though that may follow naturally as a consequence. No, the self-denial of discipleship is the surrender to God of many things: the surrender of our ego, of our will and our ways, of our pride, our competitiveness, our selfishness, our hardness of heart, our anger, our yearning for control or for power over others. The list goes on. But when you look it over, there’s nothing there that we should really want to keep.

In return, bit by bit we are transformed. More and more we come toreceive God’s peace, God’s purpose, the grace of the Holy Spirit, the joyful participation in Body of Christ, and the renewal of the communion table. And, as we draw strength from those who have gone before in this life, we prepare to dwell with them and all saints in light and with our Godthrough eternity.