All Saints' Day

For My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples.   (Isaiah 56:7)
 
Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour.   (Acts 3:1)
 
Every now and then in a movie or book, there is a scene where the lead character—usually with a great decision to make or weighed down with anguish—goes into the church to pray. Kneeling before the altar or seated in a pew, the hours move past as the character waits for God to answer.
 
Those scenes remind us of something that is disappearing from our world—the church used to be viewed as the place people went to pray, especially about important things. It wasn’t that people thought that they couldn’t pray at home, any more than the Jews thought that they had to be in the temple to pray. It was just that the church was consecrated space, a place set aside for prayer, and so it made sense to go there.
 
The fact that going to the church to pray has (mostly) disappeared from our culture probably has a lot to do with how busy we are and the fact that churches are not conveniently located near our homes or businesses. It is probably also a product of the fact that we are losing the concept of consecrated or sacred space. The idea of a sanctuary—a place set aside for the presence of God—is disappearing. It is likely also because we value personal, daily devotions more than previous ages did. (That’s a good thing!) For a variety of reasons, though, we say our prayers at home, instead of going to the church to pray.
 
On All Saints’ Day, there will be two opportunities to “relearn” the old practice of going to the church to pray, two moments when the Eucharist service is stripped down to its barest essentials: God’s word read and our response of prayer and confession; the life of the Jesus Christ given and our response of thanksgiving; God’s blessing given as we go back into the world. Without the worship team and the welcome table, we are invited to do the very simple, yet very hard, work of bringing our heart before the Lord, of coming into his sanctuary in awe, of gathering before him to pray.
 
Of course, we are supposed to do this work every Sunday, but the “production” of Sunday morning, as important as it is, can sometimes distract us. Sometimes the no-frills, sparsely attended, 30-minute service is a reminder we need. The word liturgy means “work of the people,” and the work that we do is our prayer—prayer in response to his word, and prayer strengthened by the food from his table.
 
Join us at either 7:30am or 6:15pm on Wednesday, Nov. 1, as we pray together on All Saints’ Day. Use the time to thank God for those who have set an example in the faith for you.  Both services will last around 30 minutes.
 
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