October 29, 2020
Dear friends,
This Sunday we celebrate All Saints’ Day. We celebrate so that you might not grow weary or fainthearted. It is a welcome encouragement in the midst of a world beset by sin and decay and death. We are reminded that there is victory over sin and death with eternal life for God’s people. Even now, there are countless saints who rest from their labors, peacefully awaiting the resurrection. God kept his promise to them: having begun a good work in them he has now brought it to completion.
They are witnesses to us of God’s faithfulness and loving-kindness. They are witnesses by their lives that we remember and in their deaths that we have grieved. In their lives, they witnessed by their trust in God’s promises and the fruits of love that they bore by the Holy Spirit. In their deaths, they witnessed by the confidence of faith, a good conscience that rests in the sacrifice of Jesus, a certainty that looks the grave dead in the eye and fears no ill.
Thank God for that glorious host, generations upon generations of faithful saints through whom God has shown love to us by delivering to us the same Gospel that was delivered to them. Thank God for that glorious host and be courageous! Fear God and give him glory! Worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water. The hour of his judgment has come, and in the cross of Jesus you have life and salvation.
Come this Sunday and rejoice in God with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven!
God bless and keep you,
Pr. Buchs