You are in the will.

Now, I haven’t even told you whose will you are in, or what inheritance you will receive, but doesn’t your heart just kind of skip a beat at the thought that someone has named you in a will, that you are going to receive something for no other reason than the goodness and graciousness of the one who has died?

Now, what if I told you that the will you are in names you as an adopted family member with an equal share in the estate? And what if I told you that it is a really rich inheritance? And what if I told you that the will is incontestable, irrevocable, and unchangeable? There are no hand-written last-minute codicils out there in a safety deposit box that can invalidate your part.

Well, it’s the gospel truth. Literally, the GOSPEL truth, don’t you know?!

Sometimes inheritances produce jealousy among siblings or stepchildren or second wives or daughters-in-law. Sometimes what you get is more trouble than it’s worth. But not so our inheritance in Christ. What we inherit is more grace than we deserve. We live off the merits of his successful life in the same way a child might live off the bounty of a parent’s success. If daddy made millions selling widgets and you did nothing for it but claim your last name, then you start to get the picture.

Jesus did all the heavy lifting: he lifted the curse of sin off your shoulders and mine, replacing it with the blessing of being at home with God. For all eternity we get to share in the riches of God, and for the time being we have a brother and friend who sits at the right hand of God making sure we know that we belong.

If you have any doubt about your faith today, I want to tell you not to put your faith in your doubt. Doubt about your relationship to God focuses more on your unworthiness of being so loved and included instead of faith’s focus on God’s prerogative to love and include you. If you have come into this world—and if you are alive, you have, so never mind all that talk about legitimacy and illegitimacy—then you belong to God. Faith in Christ is the means by which you give in to the deepest truth that defies all lies that only sound like the truth: The deepest truth is that God does not pick and choose among people as to whom to love and call and save. God has the right to include you. Seems un-American, doesn’t it? Seems like we ought to want a meritocracy where we get only what we deserve and earn. Well, you can exclude yourself from enjoying the benefits of God’s benevolence if you insist—but what sense does that make? Do you actually think you are going to do more by emancipating yourself from God than by living out of the largess of God?

So our first rich inheritance is in Christ. But on this All Saints Sunday, we give thanks for the rich inheritance that we share with the saints of the family of God who have gone before us. Paul mentions the saints in this text as a way of reminding us that the church is much larger than those that just happen to be walking around at any given moment in history. The church exists across time, and we live not only off the rich inheritance that is ours in Christ but also off the legacy of those who preceded us in faith.

This is something Catholics and Episcopalians seem to get more than those of us in the Protestant and Free Church traditions. To recall the lives of the saints is to realize that though they are dead to the world, they are yet alive in Christ. Though death has silenced their voices, the Word of God speaks through them to us even from the grave.

Consider the apostles themselves who gave us the New Testament. Where would we be without their words of witness to guide us? Paul himself speaks to us this morning. He has words that by the power of the living Word bring life to us. Consider some of the saints of God who mattered to you throughout your life. How often do you go back and imagine sitting in your grandmother’s lap and hearing her speak tenderly to you? Doesn’t it make you better able to believe in God’s unconditional love? Or you hear your father or mentor tell you about the right way to live and the wrong way to live, and you saw the right way in him so often that you feel his pleasure and pride when you do right even though he is long gone.

Roberta Bondi teaches church history at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. She had a faith conversion of sorts back in the ’60s while studying some dusty old texts in the library in Oxford, England. She stumbled upon the words of a sixth-century bishop with the strange name Philoxenus of Mabbug. Can you say Philoxenus? He preached long sermons on the Christian life to Syrian and Egyptian monks. You wouldn’t think you’d find much life there. But then Roberta came upon these words: Monks ought not judge each other, because God judges us much more leniently than human beings are able to do. “His words bowled me over,” she said. She had grown up in the church thinking that God loved human beings; God hated sin; everybody is a sinner; God would send people to hell if Jesus hadn’t died in our place; [and you’d better] believe it or you’ll be sorry. Philoxenus’s words allowed her to see God in a way that melted her heart and firmed it up at the same time.

Some years later, after reading these long-forgotten saints devotionally for her own sake, she received a job offer from Candler to teach about these saints to others. She was happy going about her teaching business instructing students in the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. She didn’t want to leave her small and settled life. But the voices of these saints came alive to her again. She imagined them saying to her: You have a choice. You can continue to teach Semitic languages, which you enjoy, or you can act on what you know—that we have saved your life over the years, and we can save the lives of others as well if you chose to teach them about us. [Christian Century (Nov. 2, 2004): 16]

This is the rich inheritance of the saints. We have Hebrew heroes and heroines. We have twenty centuries of Christians to draw upon for wisdom and guidance. So tell me this: Why do we prefer Dr. Phil to Dr. Philoxenus? Why a self-appointed Oprah-anointed TV expert to a tried-and-true saint? What of all the Philoxenuses across the ages who loved the Lord and left a legacy? Don’t they count enough for us to take account of them? Should we not listen to Ambrose and Augustine and Aquinas and Abelard and Anselm? What of Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr? And cannot John Calvin and John Knox speak to more than just the Presbyterians? Do you Baptists know John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, Roger Williams and William Carey, John Bunyan and John Leland, Lottie Moon and Mary Hill Davis?  These live among us still.

Clarence Jordan was a Baptist saint. He founded Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia. He wanted to model in the Old South how whites and blacks might live together and work together as a witness to the inheritance we share in Christ Jesus. Many wonderful things have come of his vision. Habitat for Humanity came into existence because Clarence influenced Millard and Linda Fuller. Foy Valentine is a friend of this church who lives in Dallas. He formerly headed the Christian Life Commission of Texas Baptists and later of Southern Baptists. When he was a young man, he spent some time with Clarence Jordan at Koinonia Farms. Upon leaving, Clarence handed him an envelope, the contents of which would become his prized possession. It was a blank check made out to Foy and signed by Dr. Jordan. In case you ever need anything, he said. What Foy needed as a 21-year- old fledgling minister was someone to believe in him like that, someone to invest trust in him. He never cashed that check, but he’s been drawing on the account for nearly sixty years.

What legacy are you leaving for those who come after you? Will it be a rich inheritance? Is the life you are now living building such value that your children and those who look to you would say, I want to live up to the gift of this life, and I want to be worthy of that inheritance?

A young adult woman in our church told me recently about how she learned stewardship. She and her sister were given a generous allowance of $20 each week, but with the money was a church offering envelope made out with $2 of the allowance already committed. Her mother told her the story of how her father had come to be a tither himself. Seems he took to teaching a junior high boys’ Sunday school class in his Episcopal church. He had to teach the lads about stewardship, and as he got into things, he realized he could not teach them what he was not doing himself. So he made a point to begin to give, and before long he began to tithe. That isn’t the end of the story, however. Since what he did for a living was work on people’s income taxes, he began to go back over his own tax returns to figure all the way back to his conversion to see where he had cheated on his tithe. He made it a point to pay back all of his back tithes. He still gets a thrill from thinking about it. The spiritual high he got from doing the right thing in his giving carried over into other areas of his spiritual life. This is the little secret of any righteous discipline—the spillover effect! Well, this man would tell you today that that act of commitment led to others that transformed his life. His daughter tells the story with tears in her own eyes, as though it is her own story. That is a legacy, a rich inheritance from a person who would never describe himself as a saint—but the fact that he does not even want you to know who he is puts him in jeopardy of being just that.

After 9/11 a new trend in estate planning was noticed. People started making so-called ethical wills. They write love letters to their heirs, telling them what they want to pass on to them of spiritual value. Some people fear they do not have anything of tangible worth to deed to the next generation, but they want to grant them the blessing of their accrued wisdom. Some use paper and pen, others audiocassettes, and still others videos or DVDs. Any way they do it, they know they want to create living legacies to pass on. Of course the best way to pass on a legacy is to live it.

How are you doing in that regard? You have a rich inheritance in Christ. You share in a rich inheritance with the saints. Are you following in their steps? Are you leaving a trail of faithfulness that your heirs may follow? To switch the metaphor, Christ has laid a firm foundation for you. The saints are the living stone who have been building the house of God. It’s your turn. It’s your turn.