What incredible loyalty to a cause! What enduring faith in trying times! What an amazing price to pay! What a wonderful heritage of dedication to responsibility they left us! We are here today with faith because they were faithful. By the record of their lives they reassure us that endurance is possible. Because of their faithfulness and their devotion to the spread of the Gospel, and their belief in the power of a Triune God who draws straight with crooked lines, and their utter resolve that Calvary's Hill is higher than Capitol Hill, we are here as "stewards of this divine mystery."

By their perseverance and their sustaining trust, we can have confidence that "sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," when we will understand it better. They show us "from afar" how to run with perseverance the race that is set before us by locking to Jesus, the Pioneer and the Perfecter of their faith. In us, and through us, they can be perfected (Heb. 11:40).

We can fulfill their faith, or we can cast aside, bargain away, ideologize away, fragment away, corrupt and bankrupt the priceless heritage, the rich and abiding tradition and the Paul would remind those saints who were receiving his letters that they were not the whole church, that there is a wider church, a larger fellowship -- a universal church, by adding the salutation: "All the saints greet you" or as the old King James Version of the Bible translates it: "All the saints salute you!"

There was probably a small motley group of the followers of Jesus who gathered together to hear read the letter from their spiritual leader, the apostle Paul. Probably a few dozen people gathered in somebody's large living room: among them were slaves, servants and common working people. A tiny group of people who felt insignificant in these huge, cosmopolitan, commercial cities of the Roman Empire. They felt disconnected, isolated -- a minority for certain, unimportant -- until they hear the words in Paul's letter: "All the saints greet you!" Ah, there's the connection! For them and there's the connection for us: "All the saints salute you!"

And that's the word for the followers of Jesus gathered in Washington in the District of Columbia at the close of this annual conference this very morning: "All the saints salute you!" For there comes to us out of every century and from all over the globe and from the mysterious regions beyond the grave, the voices of our comrades in Christ who have finished their course in faith and who now rest from their labors, the greeting: "All the Saints greet you!" Paul, Philemon and Phillip; Augustine, Athanasious and Agnes; Luther, Calvin and Melanchthon; Charles and John and Sussanah; Asbury, Allbright and Otterbein; Abraham, Martin, John and Mary McLeod Bethune; Charles Albert Tindley, Matthew Wesley Clair, G. Bromely Oxnham, William Alfred Carroll Hughes, George Outen, and those listed on the roll the conference secretary shall call today: "All the saints salute you!"