All Saints Day is a time to worship God as we remember and honor those saints who have gone on before us. In this service, our congregation hears the names of all from this congregation's history who have died. This year, that list ran to 186 names. The risk, Pastor Phil Kniss said, is that this tradition might lead us to hero worship. These saints we are remembering do not have super-powers and also embodied sin and error as do we all. Revelation 7:9-17 paints a scene of heaven that gave readers a picture of where contemporaries resided when they, in the midst of great persecution, died. But as time went on, these martyrs were the subject of increasingly grand stories that set them apart from us. That is the risk of hero worship. It masks that we are ALL children of God. So we honor the saints who have gone before us because they are just like us.
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