Sermon from last Sunday, November 1, 2009. Text: Matthew 5:1-12
Death puts everything into perspective. Death reveals that all of our accumulated treasures on earth are worthless, all of our medicine cannot heal, everything done outside of God’s Word and will was a waste.
All Saints Day is about the dead. It is about the dead in Christ, and especially the martyrs, those who were put to death because they confessed the Christian Faith. Some martyrs, like St. Matthew or St. Stephen, have their own day for remembrance. All Saints Day is for the rest, all those martyrs who don’t have their own day. And we also think about all faithful Christians who have gone before us.
But as we think about the dead, we cannot help but think about our own death. What kind of death will we have? Will we die a blessed death, a Christian death, the death of a saint?
A saint dies in the same way a saint lives; a saint dies in the same way a saint goes to sleep. The words we sang in the Introit should be our evening prayer and our dying prayer, just as our Lord JESUS spoke them on the cross: “Into Your hand I commit My spirit; You have redeemed Me, O LORD, faithful God.”
On All Saints Day, we remember why it is that anyone is a saint: it is because they have been joined to that death of Jesus, and to His resurrection. And so, while we refer to certain Christians of the past as saints because the grace of God and the work of the Holy Spirit shone through them in a profound way, we must never forget that the Bible calls all Christians “saints.” In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul writes, “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1.2).
How can the Bible call ordinary Christians saints? Not because of our sanctification, our perfect behavior. The LORD calls us saints, holy ones, because we have been joined to Christ in holy Baptism. We participate in and share Christ’s holiness. We are saints not because of our sinlessness, but because of our sin-forgivenness. That is why the Bible can call sinners saints; we are at the same time saints and sinners.
On All Saints Day, we remember that the Holy Spirit has called us into not just Immanuel Lutheran Church, or the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, but the Church of All Saints, from the beginning of the world until the end of the world. The Church is one, and she is holy, because she is the body of Jesus Christ. She gets her holiness, her saintliness, from Him, from His holiness. The Lord JESUS is the true Saint, the true Holy One, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
So you are a saint, because you believe in Jesus, trust in Him for your life, your salvation, your deliverance from death. Now if we are this kind of saint – i.e., a believer in Jesus – then that also means that it is our earnest desire, our greatest wish, to no longer be a sinner. A saint is weak in this life, but nevertheless wishes to become different. He hungers and thirsts for righteousness.
That hunger and thirst is always meek, always poor in spirit – humble. Pride is the enemy of the saint. Notice how in our first reading, the saints in heaven cannot stop talking and singing about how God has saved them. The salvation of the saints was not in their good works, but in the good work of the Lamb, the Lord Jesus: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
That was their faith – but the saints of old were also rich in good works, even if they were not saved by them. Good works are the fruit of faith, and so our prayer today is to follow the saints in all virtuous and godly living. How do we know what real virtuous and godly living is? Where do we find it described? We find it in the Ten Commandments; and the Commandments have their counterpart in the Beatitudes.
The statements of Jesus in today’s Gospel all begin with the word “Blessed”: “Blessed are the poor in spirit…. Blessed are those who mourn…. Blessed are the meek,” etc. They are called the Beatitudes from the Latin word for blessing, Beatus. The Beatitudes are like the Ten Commandments – they show us our sin, and also show us the godly life.
Like the Commandments, the Beatitudes reveal the weakness, the corruption, the depravity of our heart. Outwardly we may appear to be very good, but we must learn to see our heart as God sees it. His Word says (Jer. 17.9), “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
Jesus calls blessed the one who is pure in heart, showing that it is not just the one who outwardly does the commandments, but the one who keeps their inner meaning: helping the neighbor in every physical need; harboring no dislike or grudges; never looking with lust anywhere outside of marriage; always putting your spouse’s needs before your own; having a heart free from the desire for money; having a mouth that always speaks what is true, helpful, and edifying; keeping a heart that is absolutely content with what God gives. All this is what it means to be pure in heart – and it should reveal to us that we do not have the purity of heart God desires.
Our good works, our sanctification is very weak in us – but still, the saint hungers and thirsts for righteousness. So just as with the Ten Commandments, we can and should understand these Beatitudes not only as showing to us our sin, but also serving as a guide to our Christian life, a guide to being the saint we are. The great theologian Martin Chemnitz said about the words of Jesus, “Blessed are the poor … those who mourn,… the merciful,… the pure in heart”: “Christ here is not speaking of the cause of this blessedness but He is showing who they are who possess this blessedness.”
God wants you to have that blessedness, the blessing that He gives, and this is why He allows you to suffer in this life. “God puts His saints to work” (AP V) and brings us through suffering so that we don’t become proud or boastful, and learn to trust only in Him. That’s why the last Beatitude, the last word of blessing, is about persecution and the loss of honor and reputation: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.”
All Saints Day is about death, and for that reason it is also about life – the life of the resurrection, the life of the world to come. The death of those we love who have gone before us, and our own coming death, should teach us to fix our eyes not on the kingdoms and possessions of this world, but on that world to come. The Collect, or Prayer, for All Saints Day ends by asking God to brings us with the saints “to the unspeakable joys [He has] prepared for those who love [Him].”
You are children loved by God, you are saints, you are holy because you were joined to that Holy One, the Lord Jesus, when you were baptized, when your robe was washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb. Follow the saints who have gone before you in virtuous and godly living, and rejoice that you will soon come to the unspeakable joys God has prepared for those who love Him!