This Sunday we’ll do two things that might seem like they belong on different days. We’ll celebrate All Saints Sunday, reading the names of those who have joined the church triumphant and lighting candles in their memory. And we’ll celebrate Commitment Sunday, bringing our pledges to the altar for the year ahead. One looks back. One looks forward. But I’ve come to believe they’re really the same act of faith.
The scripture for All Saints Sunday comes from Revelation 7, where John is given a glimpse of worship in heaven. John sees “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” They cry out with one voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
Then one of the elders asks John a question: “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” And the answer is stunning: “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
That’s who the saints are. Not people who had it all together, but people who came through real trials, real grief, and real struggle, and who were made whole by the grace of Jesus Christ. At Pittman Park, that great multitude has names and faces. For 70 years, ordinary saints have shown up in this place, teaching Sunday school, cooking meals, sitting with the grieving, praying for children they’d never meet, and giving faithfully, sometimes sacrificially, out of what they had. Many of them carried heavy burdens while they loved and served. And now they stand before the throne, singing.
Look around the sanctuary this Sunday. The stained glass that beautifully lights our sanctuary is a gift someone else paid for. The pews you sit in, the classrooms where our children learn, the preschool that has cared for families since 1983, the fellowship hall where Open Table now feeds more than 170 people every Wednesday: none of it appeared by accident. Every bit of it is the result of people who believed God was doing something at Pittman Park worth investing in, even if they wouldn’t live to see all of it.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3:10 says, “According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it.” That’s exactly what the saints of our church have done for us. They laid a foundation of grace, and we are the ones building on it.
And I love that John’s vision is of a multitude “from every nation, tribe, people, and language.” We get little glimpses of that right here. We see it in our Chinese ministry gathered around tables on Wednesday nights, in our partners in Uganda and the Dominican Republic, in the college students who fill our fellowship hall each week. The saints who built this church may never have imagined some of what God is doing here now. But they made room for it.
Here’s the beautiful and humbling part: we now have the same opportunity they had.
When you fill out your commitment card this Sunday, you’re not just funding a budget. You’re laying a foundation for people you may never meet. Somewhere down the road, a child not yet born will be baptized at that font. A student will wander in, lonely and searching, and find Jesus. A family will walk through their own “great ordeal” and be carried by this congregation. Someday, someone will read our names on All Saints Sunday and give thanks that we were faithful.
That’s what it means to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. It’s never just about this year. It’s about adding more voices to that great multitude, passing on the grace we’ve received the same way it was passed to us.
So as you remember the saints who shaped your life, I invite you to pray about how God is calling you to shape the lives of those who come after. Bring your gratitude, and bring your commitment. Let’s honor the saints by doing what they did: building something that will outlast us, until the day we join them in singing, “Salvation belongs to our God!”
God bless,
Jonathan Smith
For Jesus. For People. For Community.