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I want to open with a quote from George Bernard Shaw, who said:

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no 'brief candle' to me.  It is a... splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

Friday night I got a call from Barbara Jackson.  Kern had just died.  I went over to the house, where we prayed the Litany at the Time of Death together over his body.  Kern was at home, where he wanted to die.  Surrounded by his treasured rock collection, a remnant from his years of teaching and research as a geologist.  Shadowed by the harpsichords that he helped Barbara build, following their shared passion for early classical and baroque music; the books and music library; the parked camper in which they traveled months at a time to see family and America; the color front-page newspaper picture of Kern's naval ship cruising under the mountainous smoke of the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 – it hangs on the wall next to his Purple Heart and other medals from the Pacific and European campaigns of World War II.  We talked of his good life.  He was excited that his corn crop in Iowa had record yields this year, and he was planning to help boost the St. Paul's Organ Fund with this latest windfall.  Kern had just gone on hospice, but we thought he would probably hang on until Thanksgiving when so many of the far-flung family was coming back to town.  But Kern was worn out.  Thoroughly used up.  His splendid torch had burned out and is now handed on to future generations.

Kern's name now joins the others that we will remember every year on this All Saints' weekend.  His ashes will rest among many friends on the other side of that wall right there.  We will remember and give thanks for him and for all the saints who have given their lives to God, to family, to vocation, church and community.

In the spring of 1984, Tom Brokaw was sent to France to prepare a 40th anniversary documentary on D-Day.  "I was simply looking forward to what I thought would be an interesting assignment in the part of France celebrated for its hospitality, its seafood, and its Calvados, the local brandy made from apples," he writes.  "...Instead, I underwent a life-changing experience."  He listened to the stories of men like Kern Jackson, and found himself moved to write a book about them, "The Greatest Generation."  He told how they grew up in the Great Depression, left everything to answer the call to save the world from the most extreme military threat in history.  They fought and won.  Then they came back to re-build and build a great nation.

That generation established nearly every institution that renewed business, education, philanthropy and art in the United States.  Brokaw writes, "They became part of the greatest investment in higher education any society ever made – the GI bill...  They gave the world new art and literature.  They came to understand the need for civil rights legislation.  They gave America Medicare."  After talking to so many of that Greatest Generation, Brokaw summarized it this way: "Most of all, they love each other, love life and love their country, and they are not ashamed to say just that."

"It is almost as if they discovered something very important, something very costly: namely that having something you believe in passionately and love deeply enough to call you to real sacrifice, enough to die for, brings a depth to life, a sense of life's value and preciousness, a profound and deep gratitude for the gift of life and time, a sense of wholeness and peace and fulfillment." (John M. Buchanan, long-time Pastor of Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church)

The late William Stringfellow once described saints as "those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away."  Some of us catch on to that in a breathless moment and throw ourselves into life with a whole-hearted abandon.  World War II seemed to do that for the Greatest Generation.  For most of the rest of us though, that giving-away-into-life is a gradual process, a little bit like the children's song "Hokey Pokey."  You put your right hand in, and then you take your right hand out.  You put an arm or a leg-at-a-time in, cautiously, testing, then committing, "you shake it all about."  You turn yourself about and think about putting a little more of yourself in.  And, given time, a little courage, and a little self-discipline, you may find that its not too much of a leap to do what God wants us to do: "You put your whole self in." 

A saint is someone who relishes the event of life as a gift and realizes that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away.  Jesus said, "If you want to gain your life, you must lose it."  What does it take to "put your whole self in," to relish life enough to give it away, to be a saint?

Toward the end of Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory the Whisky Priest sits in his prison cell, looking outside his window at the gallows that will hang him in the morning.  He has lived an ambiguous life.  When others ran away, he stayed to provide the sacrament to the people after the army arrived.  He had fathered an illegitimate child and drowned much of his fear in liquor.  As he waited to die, “He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all.  It seemed to him at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint.  It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.  He felt like someone who had missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place.  He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted -- to be a saint.” 

A little self-restraint and a little courage.  That phrase has haunted me.  There's something about it that rings true.  What separates me from my best self is often those little indulgences and small acts of cowardice.   Maybe all that is needed is just a little self-restraint and a little courage, minute by minute, day by day, to relish life enough to give it away, to be a saint.

The movie Saving Private Ryan is a vivid portrayal of the sacrifice and courage of that Greatest Generation.  It opens in the present, at the Normandy American Cemetery in France, where a elderly man and his family are looking for a tombstone.  Then we flashback; living through the breathtaking narrative of a squad of soldiers who are ordered into the thick of D-Day combat to find and bring back a paratrooper, Private Ryan, the last remaining son of a mother of four who will receive the death notices of her other three sons on the same day.  Six of the eight-man squad are killed in the course of their task, including, finally, their leader, Captain John H. Miller, who speaks to Private Ryan his last words, "James... earn this.  Earn it."

We return to the present, to the cemetery, where the elderly James Ryan looks at his wife and asks in a seeking, almost desperate voice, "Have I led a good life?  Have I been a good man."  "Oh, yes," she assures him, with deepest sincerity, as his whole family looks toward him with reverent love.  He then salutes the grave of Captain Miller, as the camera pans down the lines of gravestones. 

On All Saints Sunday we salute the graves of Kern and of all of those who have gone before us.  We thank them for the love and sacrifice they have given to make God's world a better place.  But more than that, as Abraham Lincoln reminded us at Gettysburg, "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they... have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion..." 

Increased devotion.  Maybe all that is needed is just a little self-restraint and a little courage, minute by minute, day by day, to relish life enough to give it away, to be a saint.