Last Sunday's Sermon: Looking for Grace

We celebrated All Saint’s Sunday by naming those who died last year –  members, relatives of members, and others who were important to us – and showing slides of them to call up their memory.  We gave thanks for their lives and prayed for those who mourned their death and remembered their life.

The scripture was from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi: 

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 

I have always found Wesley’s use of  scripture, tradition, reason and experience as sources for theology useful.  On All Saint’s it is experience which comes to the fore.  What we know of God and grace and the practice of the faith we know through those who have embodied it for us.  The yare the source of our experience.

If we can, we should give thanks for what we have received. 

Of course sometimes we cannot.  We look back and we wish that we could change the past.  We cannot.  But as one of my teachers told us: turn the wish, or the demand, that the past be different into a preference.  “I wish it had gone this way…”  I asked people to remember someone who would have done things differently if they had been there and then to  tell themselves that they would have preferred that this person had been present.  Changing our language and expressing a preference can move us out of the past.

More often, at least for me, I can give thanks. The blessing is that we mourn people who lived lives we wish we could imitate.  In another letter Paul gives us a list of qualities worth demonstrating: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Of course there are others.  The list is incomplete.

I  regard those as disciplines: works I need to practice.  To help with my practice, I visualize, I remember, people who had those qualities and how they used them.  I cannot be them but I can copy them and hope.

So on this day I give thanks to them for giving me a partial experience of “God” or at least God’s grace in the flesh.  And I give thanks to God for those “saints.”