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Sermon Notes for October 31 - November 1, 2009
All Saints' Day
Saints on Earth (and Above)
Throw the thoughts and assumptions you have about being a saint out the window. Those we look up to as being especially holy from the Bible had murder, betrayal, extortion, prostitution, adultery, and drunkenness in their personal profiles—Moses, Peter, Matthew, Rahab, David, and Noah—and we can find many more examples throughout Scripture and the centuries of the Church. I say that not to condone their behavior, only to acknowledge it.
Dorothy Day, in many ways the Mother Teresa of America, used to remind people that we belong to the communion of sinners as well as saints. When people praised her for her work on behalf of the poor and downtrodden in our society, she’d say, ‘Don’t call me a saint … I don’t want to be dismissed that easily!” She had a past, and was known to shake up the present in church and society as well. On a much lesser note, when a childhood friend of Francis de Sales first heard him called a saint, he laughed and said, ‘I’m delighted to hear he’s a saint. He was fond of saying indelicate things, and used to cheat at cards’ (Bierce).
Too often, people get called saints who have outwardly good and pious behavior while forgetting that they too belong to the community of sinners who have profiles. We can forget that being a saint is not something we achieve but are given. To be a saint means literally that we’ve been sanctified—set apart by the washing of water, Word, and Spirit for baptismal living—not as ‘holier than thou’ but as humble people who carry out God’s holy purpose. To be a saint means that our Lord is working his holy change in our lives, transforming us from the inside out. Jesus came into this good but disordered world to saint us—to give us his life as a holy and selfless sacrifice, to set us apart through the gift of his Spirit so that we live the distinctively different way that God intends for us. Saintliness is not the same as respectability, even though the two often get confused. Saints, after all are usually seen as those crazy in love with God and even his enemies … people who live by a divine standard.
On this All Saints’ (or All Hallows’) Day, I want to focus not so much on the saints above but on those still below: those who live however imperfectly and believe however half-heartedly; people identified as believers and livers in Christ—you, me, and others we might rather not even include in the number. When John beheld the whole heavenly host, it included people from every nation, every ethnic group and language, and all were clothed alike in clean white robes praising Jesus, the Lamb of God, who is our salvation. ‘Who are these people?’ John asked, ‘and where did they come from?’ ‘These are the ones coming out of the great suffering and trial below, whose robes were plunged in the blood of the Lamb. These are the ones who were hungry and thirsty, but aren’t any longer. These are the ones who knew no shelter from the scorching heat but now are led to springs of fresh water. These are the ones who have cried tears but now have them wiped away by God himself.’
These are the ones John wrote about in the epistle who live as well-loved children of God here and now; people considered unimportant in the world’s grand scheme of things, people ignored and cast-off by the movers and shakers of society even as Jesus was. To be a saint means that our lives will be marked by the offense and scandal of Jesus’ cross … that our lives will be driven by the extravagantly selfless and forgiving love of Jesus that wants to make all things and all people new and holy. As the Lutheran pastor Berthold von Schenk wrote over sixty years ago, cross-bearers don’t make an easy thing of their religion, but through true suffering find a way to the heart of the world through Jesus Christ (The Presence).
Have you ever noticed that despite the evident comfort of Jesus’ Beatitudes, there’s something disturbing? That’s because what Jesus calls blessed flies in the face of how history and popular wisdom tell us to be a success and get ahead, stuff like: ‘Blessed are the proud and self-sure, for they’ve got the world by the tail. Blessed are those who ignore sadness and seek only happiness. Blessed are the ones who use power to take what they want. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst only for fine food and drink. Blessed are those who show no mercy, for they live as a law unto themselves. Blessed are those who give in to whatever their hearts desire, for they have all the pleasure they want. Blessed are those who perpetuate strife and unrest, for they can rule the world. Blessed are you if everybody likes you, for you’re obviously doing something right.’ Jesus’ ways are totally opposite, aren’t they?
The trouble is that living in what he calls blessed involves sacrifice, shame, and loss … it makes us look like weak and defenseless losers—like scum of the earth. Interestingly, this past summer I met someone who’d been associated with a congregation in Denver, not Lutheran, called Scum of the Earth Church. I’ve heard of several congregations called All Saints, but that’s the only Scum of the Earth I’ve ever encountered. And you know what’s even crazier? They draw their name from Scripture—I Cor. 4:13, where Paul writes: ‘We have been and still are like the scum of the earth, the refuse of all things.’ That’s what saints can expect to be considered when living out of what Jesus says is truly blessed. Helmut Thielicke wrote so truly about the company that Jesus gathers to himself and calls us to be: “In some mysterious way Jesus attracts the miserable. He draws the sinners and sufferers from their hiding places like a magnet” (Life Can Begin Again).
Jesus doesn’t call us to respectability, he calls us to a holiness and blessedness that seem crazy in this world. He calls us to live not stiff and starchy lives, putting on a good appearance, but real and risky lives of faith that are founded on his mercy and grace, forgiveness and love. Jesus started out his Beatitudes literally, ‘Blessed are those who cringe in spirit—who see their own weakness—for the kingdom of heaven is given to them.’ Do we shrink back in humility like the centurion who said to Jesus, ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under even the roof of my house, but only speak a word and your servant will be healed!’
Let us cringe, yet let us dare to come to Christ’s Holy Supper as a communion of sinners and saints who hunger and thirst for Jesus’ blessed food of righteousness. Let us rejoice that we are saints and children of God who are satisfied if not fully now, then in the life to come. Let us praise him as saints below who give thanks for the saints who’ve gone before even as we look for the saints yet to be in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit—Amen.