ISAIAH 25:6-9
“The Eternal Celebration”
By: Kenneth Emerson Sauer, Pastor of Parkview United Methodist Church, Newport News, VA
www.parkview-umc.org
Most of us were given our first glimpse of Jesus through one of His saints.
Maybe it was our mother or father.
Maybe it was a neighbor, school teacher or friend.
Maybe it was a pastor or a member of the church fellowship we were raised in or a Sunday School teacher.
Whoever it was, there was something about them…
…something that separated them from the rest of the crowd…
…something special about them that intrigued us and caused us to want to have that something special as well.
They were the people who would go the extra mile for us…
…they were the people that we knew we could count on no matter what…
…they were the people who made us feel special, who made us feel loved…
…who gave us just a glimpse of the Divine.
A fantastic pastor who I grew up knowing told the story of his introduction to Christ, to his calling in life, to the Church.
He was raised in a family that did not attend church.
His father was a loving, but hardened man, and they didn’t have a lot of money.
Well, this pastor, his name was Bob…
…when he was a young boy he used to deliver papers.
And I know that many of the younger people here probably aren’t very familiar with paperboys…there really haven’t been paperboys for a good fifteen years or so.
I used to be a paperboy, and so did most of my friends.
I would get up early every morning…at about 4:30…a distributor would drop the papers off in front of my house…
…I would put the sixty or so newspapers in my newspaper bag, get on my bike and deliver the paper before going to school.
We paperboys would get to know our customers pretty well because each week we had to go to each of there houses, ring the doorbell and collect the cost of a week’s worth of newspapers.
Oftentimes we’d make a little tip.
Well, one of the customers on Bob’s route was a Methodist Minister, and one day when Bob came to ring the man’s doorbell to collect his paper money the minister said to him: “You know Bob, I was wondering. You know I’m the pastor of the Methodist Church down the street. And we don’t have anyone to hand out bulletins on Sunday mornings. I wonder if you’d be willing to come hand out our bulletins?”
Bob was astonished.
He’d never been in a church before, let alone handed out bulletins, but he was honored that this nice man had asked him to do this…
…so he decided he would give it a shot.
Well, this invitation to hand out bulletins at the Methodist Church turned out to be the changing point in Bob’s life.
He met and was befriended by the dear saints of this church who loved him, took him under their wing, became his family, and taught him the love of Jesus.
Bob ended up going on to seminary, and from there had a lifelong ministry of loving others into God’s kingdom.
I didn’t meet Bob until he had already retired from the ministry…
…but then, Bob never really did retire.
In retirement he was the minister of visitation at our church, would occasionally preach, and led the weekly Bible study.
My mother, who attended the Bible study, would invite Bob over for dinner every Tuesday night before Bible study and Bob took a keen interest in me.
He would tell me that I ought to go into the ministry…
…I was flattered, but I thought he was crazy.
Before I left for college Bob showed up on my doorstep and handed me a small leather-bound Bible for me to take with me to school.
That was the first Bible that I really, really read…that was the Bible I was using when I had my born again experience.
While in college, Bob paid for me to fly out to St. Louis in order to attend a conference for young people thinking about entering the ministry.
Bob used to tell me: “I look forward to the day when I can attend your ordination.”
Well, Bob passed away several years ago.
So, when I am fully ordained an Elder, Lord willing, in 2005 at the Hampton Coliseum Bob won’t be there physically…but he will be there in spirit.
Bob and many others like him have put their full trust in the Lord, given their complete lives to Him in service and have found more out of life than they ever could have imagined.
And because of this, they have also lived their lives to pass on this fullness of life to others.
These people are saints…saints of God.
Who are the saints that have touched your lives with the incredible love of Christ?
Maybe they are still alive.
Maybe they are members of this very congregation.
Maybe they have passed on, and you lit a candle in memory of them this morning.
The passage I read earlier from Isaiah is a description of the great celebratory banquet which will take place at the end of time, a feast hosted by the Lord of Creation, to which all those who have heard the call of God in their lives and have accepted that call by giving their lives to Christ will be.
It will be held at a holy place, the mountain of the Lord: the place where God dwells.
And in that day, all the saints will say together in eternal celebration: “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”
There is a heavenly celebration, but there is also an earthly celebration for those who have been born of God through the blood of Christ.
For we are here…together…brothers and sisters in Christ…the kingdom of God here on earth.
Believe it or not, if we have given our whole lives to Jesus Christ, we are saints of the Most High God…and we are kin to all who are running the race with us, who will run the race after us, and who have run the race before us.
In Hebrews chapter 12, we are told: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run the race marked out for us.
Let us fix our eyes upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.”
Every time we worship, we celebrate our kinship with Jesus Christ, Who endured the Cross for our sake…
…and we celebrate our kinship with the saints in our midst and the saints who have gone on before us.
The sacrament of Holy Communion connects us with the communion of all the millions of saints.
Communion is a powerful experience in feeling connected by the body and blood of Christ; it is a great antidote for loneliness, lostness, and loss of identity.
It reminds us of the race we are running, why we are running it, and it gives us a foretaste of the Great Eternal Celebration that is to come!
May this be on our minds and in our hearts as we come to the Lord’s Table this morning.
Let us pray: Almighty God, we thank You for not giving up on us…even when we have given up on ourselves. We also thank You that You have so loved us that You came to this earth in human form, suffered all the trails that we suffer, and died the death we deserve, so that we might join with You in the eternal celebration! We thank You for saints present and saints who have gone before us…showing us the way toward Your amazing love. We also pray that You would use each one of us to bring others into sainthood, through the blessed name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
