As Lantz Professor of Preaching and Dean of Academic Affairs at Yale Divinity School, David Bartlett has shared his homiletical skills with the Yale community for over thirteen years. This collection of 31 of his sermons, all preached during his tenure at Yale, is both a tribute to Dean Bartlett's presence at Yale and a gift to those in the Yale community who know him. Following is an example of one of the sermons you will find in To All God's Beloved in New Haven: David Bartlett's Yale Sermons, 1990-2003: November 1, 2001 · Yale Divinity School · Matthew 5:1-13 All Saints Day was the occasion for this sermon, which Dean Bartlett preached on Prospective Students Day at Yale Divinity School. Professor Margot Fassler, mentioned in this sermon, was the Director of the Institute of Sacred Music and is Robert Tangeman Professor of Music History and Liturgy. She is a Roman Catholic. I. One of the things that I love about this school is its interconfessional worship. Last week a Lutheran service to prepare for reformation day, sung morning prayer on Wednesdays, a revival by the Black Seminarians tonight. Twice in the last three years, however, our rich diversity has presented me with a particular challenge. Twice I have agreed to preach for services on November 1, always forgetting and this will be a clue always forgetting that November 1 is also All Saints Day. Now here is the problem as we gather on this All Saints day both my companionable liturgist and I are Baptists and on the Baptist liturgical calendar, All Saints Day is not only downplayed, it is entirely invisible. Let me be clear about my gratitude for those traditions that hold the saints in high esteem. On occasions in recent years when I have faced the kind of crisis that afflicts humankind I have been genuinely moved to open my e-mails and receive from Professor Fassler the word that she is praying for me, and the list of saints to whom she prays. I am here to testify to the efficacy of those prayers. But you need to know this about the Baptists. Like many other Protestants we talk a lot about the priesthood of all believers, but an even more central conviction is this: the sainthood of all believers. We base this conviction on our commitments to being a biblical, if not a biblicist people. And as you well know, in the New Testament, "saints" is a term, not for a particular subset of Christian people, but for the whole community. When Paul writes to the "saints" at Philippi, he's not writing to a particularly holy subset of that community he's writing to the whole gang. And when Paul refers to the people we think of as official saints, he has other terms for them. He does not refer to himself as Saint Paul, but as Paul the apostle, and he does not refer to Saint Peter or to Saint James but to those so-called pillars of the church at Jerusalem. That stress on the larger meaning of "saints" reaches across denominational lines, too. However much a particular church may honor particular saints, when it comes to funeral services I have noticed we all stand and sing "For All the Saints" not in memory of St. Anne or St. Francis in particular, but in memory of all believers, especially the believer whose loss we mourn that day. II. So here I am wanting to say some Baptist things about All Saints Day, trusting that you will find other places and other words later in the day to hear other perspectives on sainthood. I am helped by the text, the Beatitudes, because no one would think that these are words about a subset of believers. Those whom Paul calls the "saints" Jesus here calls "the blessed." And blessedness is not reserved for the few, it is the promise and the hope and the responsibility of the whole community. Blessedness, the sainthood which is the gift to all believers is both a present gift and a future promise. The poor in spirit are blessed right now because their spirits are formed aright and they will be blessed b