Remembering The Saints Who Shaped Us

What if remembrance is more than nostalgia—what if it is a practice that shapes courage, love, and the way we face death? We dive into All Saints Day with open hands, naming the limits of what we know about the afterlife while grounding ourselves in the steady assurances of faith. Along the way, we hold a candid story of loss and comfort, a personal glimpse of how hope of reunion can soften grief without denying it.

We turn to 2 Thessalonians to trace an early church wrestling with persecution and fear: would the dead be left behind? The pastoral answer offers a wider frame—belonging is not undone by death, and God’s fidelity outlasts our timelines. From there, we explore the markers of everyday sainthood not as lofty titles but as lived trajectories: faith that grows abundantly, love that widens toward others, and humility that knows we are still works in progress. These traits don’t make anyone perfect; they make communities resilient.

We also reframe Dia de los Muertos as a rich, reverent practice of remembrance—light for the path, food and drink for honor, bright paper to name life’s fragility. It’s not horror or superstition; it’s a sanctuary of stories where the living and the dead meet through love. Drawing on Dr. Rev. Barbara Holmes, we name ancestors as those who poured themselves out for the community and still meet us in memories, dreams, and shared narratives. By speaking their names and continuing their work, we turn memory into mission and comfort into courage.

If this conversation moves you, follow the show, share it with someone who needs hope today, and leave a review telling us about a saint or ancestor who shaped you. Your story may become the light someone else needs.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: All Saints Day
• 1:10 What We Think We Know About Afterlife
• 2:28 Grief, Comfort, And Hope Of Reunion
• 3:23 Thessalonians, Persecution, And Assurance
• 5:14 Is Jesus Returning And Who Belongs
• 6:14 Dia De Los Muertos Reframed As Remembrance
• 8:06 What Makes A Saint: Growing Faith And Love
• 10:29 Ancestors, Legacy, And Living Well
• 12:53 Holding The Saints In Our Hearts

Transcript

Pastor Darren: 0:00

Well, friends, uh jumping right in, all Saints Day, right? A day that we are remembering all the saints who have gone before us uh in this life. Uh it's an interesting thing. We saw it in the kids talk this morning. We kind of wrestle with uh our full understandings of what the afterlife might be like, right? And we're sort of limited in what we know. I I say sort of limited. We are absolutely limited. Uh and you know, there's only one person who uh went there and came back, I guess, or went there and gave us some message of what is there. Uh otherwise, we're kind of have to just go by faith. And in the midst of that, we've got a lot of different images of what that is, the afterlife looks like. You know, you start from uh a lot of um what I would call the more existential understandings, right? The idea that maybe there's nothing there, and and this is, this is the life, this is what it is, and there's nothing beyond this, and we ought to live our lives in that way. And at least maybe even in our consciousness, that's all we really know, right? You've got that on the one side, and then you have faiths like Christianity, who have u images of what we understand to be real and true about what happens after we die, right? Uh a stronger understanding of something that awaits us when we pass, some new existence with God, with maybe some new connections to the world that that would be with God. And even introducing uh these concepts of ghosts and angels and saints out there. And it's really weighted beliefs, right? These are not without uh a certain level of importance to us, especially as we start talking about those who have passed before us, those who have touched our hearts, have been part of our lives. We're invested in what we believe about what happens after we die, right? It matters to us. You know, I remember when my dad passed away, I had the very first feelings of, hmm, I might not be too upset about when my time comes. Because at that point, I might get to go see my dad again and be reconnected with him in whatever existence lay beyond this. I can't know what happens after we die, but that belief, that belief itself is is very comforting. Right? I can I can rest and have and find comfort in that belief about what happens in the afterlife. One day I'll pass and I'll see my dad again. I'll see other people who have been meaningful to me again. Maybe you have similar feelings. Maybe there's someone like that for you. It's in that spirit that we enter into this passage from Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, right? So another letter coming from the Christian part of the Bible, the New Testament, many of them from Paul or written by people who knew Paul or walked with Paul. This is one of them. It's the second letter. This one's probably a disciple of Paul that wrote it. And he's addressing some concerns, this writer, about persecution. Early in Christianity, uh, when it was just a movement and there weren't that many people who were part of it, there were concerns about one's safety in that small movement. You had to worry about governmental factors, kings and others who might be concerned about you worshiping something other than the kings and others. Maybe they have some justification for worrying about subversion or what have you, but the reality is lots of Christians were worried about getting hurt in those situations. And for their belief system, the concern was, well, what if I die or are martyred in the word we sometimes use, people dying for their faith before Jesus comes back? Right? This is early, early Christianity. There was this understanding that Jesus was going to come back. Uh, today we don't hold as tightly to that belief. It's been so many years we think maybe either Jesus isn't coming back in that way, or maybe Jesus came back as the church. This uh massive institution of believers who follow Christ that is worldwide. Uh but in the time they were concerned that, well, wait a minute, I want my eternal spot to be with Jesus in heaven. If I die before he comes back, am I going to get to be in that place? Right? And Paul's reassuring them, and he's saying, you know, if you if you die especially for your faith before Jesus comes back, you will be part of the crew that comes back with him. And there's that assurance that Paul is making to these people in Thessalonia. But it does open up a door to us thinking about what happens in the afterlife. It opens up a door to talking just a touch about uh some of the cultural understandings of Dia de los Muertos, right? This cultural thing that's come from uh Latino culture. Uh we still kind of wrestle with it a little bit, right? You could hear it even with the kids this morning where we we like it and we like certain parts of it, but there's certain parts that aren't true. We heard Kiki, right? Some of it's not true. We have to remember this, but then there's other parts are really, really pretty cool. Even the the phrase day of the dead sometimes makes us go, ooh, oh, hey, settle down. You know, we're Christians. Dead's a pretty hard word. We got this afterlife thing. We pass, right? We transition, right? So it the the that word, even itself, uh it sometimes it's conjuring up images of zombies and and witches and other weird, weird things. Uh, and we start thinking about well, does this afterlife have some concerns for us? Should we be worried about what lay in that afterlife? Dia De los Muertos, the tradition around it, actually isn't even really involved with that, even though we've kind of projected it onto them. Day of the Dead is really about remembrance. It's about remembering those who have passed. Candi did some really good research. She was telling me about it. Uh uh up here, you have certain elements that are part of the journey, because you were inviting those who have passed to come back and engage to a certain extent, not to come back to life necessarily, but to have this moment of engagement to remember and to enhance that memory. So we have food up here, which I've put behind the Bible. Candi's probably disappointed about that. We have drink for them because they've journeyed to come and re-engage with you. Uh, the uh lights that are up here light their pathway. Uh, there's certain things like the these light uh um cutouts kind of symbolizing the fragility of the whole experience. There's a lot of layers to the belief system, but they're all guided around this idea of we are going to re-engage with those who have passed before us. We're gonna re-engage with uh um those people who touched our hearts and continue to live in our hearts. In many ways, Dia de los Muertos is really All Saints' Day in the way we understand it. In our more uh um well-known, I guess I'll call it cultural systems and things. There's some similarities, but remembering the saints, All Saints Day, that's kind of the connection between the two. It invites this idea to me about well, what is a saint then? What kind of attributes do these people have that have grabbed onto our hearts, that continue to live in our hearts? You know, the Catholic Church has a more formalized understanding of a saint and certain things, markers that they need to reach. Christianity broadly is a little more uh um, I'll say, accessible as far as sainthood. That saints is a more general term, meaning somebody who's modeling the faith, modeling it in a way that uh uh uh uh invigorates our faith and inspires us to faith. But partly how we land with Paul in this letter to the Thessalonians is that he does do just a short description of what it means to be a saint. He writes, first Paul is affirming he is affirming to them in the sense that he says to them, Your faith is growing abundantly. There's a checkpoint if you're looking for saints. Is your faith growing abundantly? Not by accident, but with some intention. He also says about he talks about how our love for each other is growing. Another good marker for a saint. Is this somebody whose love for others is growing? Is this somebody who fosters love between others? And finally, he says, you are recognizing that you are still works in progress. You know that God isn't quite finished with you yet. That's why this passage is kind of good for doing a light description of a saint, but I do want to say I feel like we might be missing the spiritual part of that understanding. I got a quote here from Dr. Reverend Barbara Holmes, and she is a theologian and uh professor and uh general deep spiritual being who passed away about a year ago, but she talks a little bit more about what saints are, at least in her understanding. She says, although some folks use a very narrow definition of the word ancestor, I use the word as an indicator of legacy and interconnections. The ancestors are elders who pour their lives into the community as a libation of love and commitment. They live and die well, and when they transition, they do so in full connection with an engaged community. Thereafter, they dwell in the spaces carved out by our spiritual and cultural expectations, and they may be in another life dimension, but they connect with us in dreams, in memories, and in stories. I thought she captured that that last super important piece about the saints that we remember here on All Saints Day. These are people who lived life well. They lived and they died well. These are people we connect with in our dreams, in our memories, and in stories even today. They're people who shaped our lives. They shaped us, they remind us of what it means to be able to live well, and even to die well. Many of them remind us of what it means to be church, a good church, taking care of each other, taking care of the world around them. So today on All Saints Day, let's let them be remembered and held deeply in our hearts. Amen.