6 November 2011

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Anybody want to see a real, live saint? Well, just look at the person next to you or in front of you, behind you, across the aisle from you. Or just look into a mirror. Saints are everywhere and anywhere the baptized people of God are. And least you think this is just some nifty, new thing I dreamed up – well, just go the letters that St. Paul writes to various groups of the baptized in his time. He begins almost all of his letters with phrases such as “To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi,” “To the saints and faithful brothers and sister in Christ in Colossae,” and so on. The saints are all those whom God in Holy Baptism has proclaimed just and holy – for whom there no need to embark on spiritual projects, no need to show off good works, no need to try to take heaven by storm. God has proclaimed you, sisters and brothers of Christ, sanctified, sancti, santos, saints -- and that’s all there is to it. Of course, while we yet live in a world where we are also in bondage to the forces of this world, we are simultaneously sinners – but on that day when we become fully dead to this world and are received into the full presence of God . . . . well then, all that’s left is saint. And it is those completed saints whom we remember and honor on this day.

But why do we remember and honor the saints? As many of you know, The Book of Concord sets forth the basics of the Lutheran confession, the Lutheran understanding of the Holy Catholic Faith. A part of that book is a document called The Apology (or Defense) of the Augsburg Confession – the Augsburg Confession, the Confessio Augustana, being the document that defends Luther’s position against the papacy and sets out to prove that the Lutheran position does not deviate from the Catholic Church, but seeks to return the Catholic Church to its roots. In this defense of the Augsburg Confession we hear that the Lutheran reformers do indeed approve of giving honor to the saints and explains the threefold nature of that honor.

The first reason we honor the saints is that in doing so we give thanks to God that God uses quite ordinary people to accomplish God’s purposes. In the so-called beatitudes which we have just heard proclaimed, Jesus declares that those who are blessed, who are most favored, are not the high-achievers, the visionary leaders, the highly successful, or those whose lives seem somehow exemplary. In fact those who are primary among the blessed, the highly-favored of God, are those who are poor in spirit, those who lead mournful lives, those who are down-cast – those who are invisible to much of the world. So in remembering and honoring our beloved dead, we are, in truth, honoring the God who uses not the extraordinary, but who uses those who are regular, everyday, down-to-earth men, women, teen-agers, children, infants.

The Apology goes on – and here I am quoting directly: “The second kind of veneration is the strengthening of our faith,” that is to say for the strengthening of our trust in the promises of Christ. Quoting again: “When we see Peter forgiven after his denial, we, too, are encouraged to believe that grace truly superabounds much more over sin.” This gives us great hope. God justifies and forgives us in spite of ourselves. Peter, who denies he knows Jesus three times, Peter who is full of hot air, Peter, who can be such a dolt – Peter is forgiven all his sins in the Lord’s Supper – even as he is about to commit apostasy, the renunciation of Jesus. And then there’s St. Paul – persecutor of the early Church, murderer of early Christians. God uses sinners not only in spite of their sins, but uses the greatest of sinners as examples not of God’s anger, but of God’s super-abundant love, mercy, and forgiveness. Or to put it another way – all of us great sinners here – God has proclaimed abundantly loved and forgiven in the one baptism for the forgiveness of sins – past, present, and yet to come. So on this feast of All Saints we remember that God forgives, loves, and even uses the greatest rogues and rascals among us. And this frees us when we tell the stories of the saints of our lives, this frees us to remember their follies and foibles – just as we delight in remembering that God chose Abraham and declared him righteous in spite of Abraham twice pimping his wife to save his own hide, just as we delight in St. Peter’s bungling boobishness, just as we marvel that God chose Paul, a murderer to build the early church, just as we remember that Martin Luther was a foul-mouthed, temperamental, opinionated, gluttonous lush whom God used to begin the great reform of the Church.

“The third honor,” says the Apology, “is imitation, first of their faith, and then of their virtue.” We are to remember their trust in the promise of God in Christ Jesus – we are to remember and imitate those times when the saints could do no other than come before God as complete beggars, with nothing of their own to offer but their utter dependence upon the promise that indeed they were beloved children of God who would indeed one day stand before God and the Lamb, this, not because of any merit of their own, but simply because they were given the promise. We are to imitate their faith, their trust in the promise that the baptized are safely home before they ever even started their journeys. And the virtue, the purity, that we are to imitate? In today’s reading from 1 John we hear that purity – that is to say “virtue” – is not a moral category or a moral project – it is this hope: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will se him as he is.” And to be sure, this differs greatly from optimism. Optimism is the conviction that things in this world will get better. The virtue of hope, by contrast, acknowledges that though in this world, things will not get better, the time will come when we shall be like the ascended Christ in every way. We give honor to the saints by imitating their trust, their hope, that even in the hour of death, we will all be bathed in mercy infinite, that we all shall come at last to shine like the sun in the realm of God.

And so on this Feast of All Saints, this death-defying day, we give thanks to God for our beloved and blessed dead – and we take time to step out of time and even now do fall before the throne of God and the Lamb and with our beloved and blessed dead and with every saint and angel do sing: “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!” And through our own tears of remembrance or awe or wonder or whatever we proclaim that the day will come when we along with every created being will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not smite us, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be our shepherd and he will guide us all to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from all our eyes.

Thanks be to God for all the Saints. Thanks be to God for you and for all those who have gone before us.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.