Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Revelation chapter 21 verses
22 I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 23And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.
Today is All Saints Day, a day for remembering all those beloved saints who have now departed on to be with God in glory. In the Protestant tradition, All Saints commemorates not only the great Saints officially beatified by the Church, but also all the more minor saints who have gone on before us. It is for me a day for pausing to reflect on the lives of those faithful persons who made such a difference in my own journey of faith. For me, the minor saints in my life are all quite major.
I remember my former pastor Charlie Johnson used to say that the Church teaches us how to die. I think of those saints whose names will be read this coming All Saints Sunday at Second Baptist Church and the way so many of them faced the reality of death with courage and with grace and with the peace that surpasses all understanding. They not only taught us how to die, but even how to live in dying.
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who wrote the seminal book “On Death and Dying” once compared people to stained-glass windows. “They sparkle and shine when the sun is out,” she said, “but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
Those saints I remember today, shone with a beautiful light within, even as the sun’s rays began to wane on their mortal lives. Now, the great promise has come to pass; these saints have entered into that place where there is no need of sun, for the glory of God is now their perpetual light.
May God bless and keep them; may God’s face shine upon them — and us too, until we all live together in glory.
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