All Saints’ Sermon
Dear saints of God in Christ Jesus, baptized by water and the Holy Spirit unto sanctification and salvation: Today we observe All Saints’ Day. We often think of a saint as an exceptionally good person. The word “saint” simply means “holy one,” and Jesus describes one who is holy in today’s Gospel: one who is poor in spirit, meek, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, a peacemaker.
Do these things describe you? No – they condemn you. You aren’t poor in spirit, your aren’t meek, you don’t hunger and thirst for righteousness, you aren’t merciful, you aren’t pure in heart, you aren’t a peacemaker. Perhaps you are some of these things some of the time, but whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of all of it.
And yet – the Bible speaks of ordinary Christians as saints. For example, St. Paul addresses his second letter to the Corinthians, “To the church of God which is at Corinth, with all the saints who are in all Achaia.” But the very people he calls “saints” are at the same time rebuked for being greedy, gossiping, lustful, selfish, and for taking each other to court. That doesn’t seem very saintly!
Nevertheless they are holy, not because of what they have done, but because of what they have received. They are holy because they have received Christ’s holiness, are joined to Christ’s righteousness, are in communion with Him by receiving His own body and blood. He sanctifies us, i.e., makes us holy. He does it, not us. And it is His holiness we receive, not our own we manufacture. God’s Word calls Christ Jesus “He who sanctifies”: “Both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren” [Heb. 2.11].
So, Holy Scripture calls you a saint; God views you as a saint, as one who has received the holiness of Jesus, His righteousness, in the forgiveness of sins. But that holiness is not yet complete, or made perfect. You know this, or ought to. Your thoughts and desires are soiled with sin. Even amidst worship and the Holy Communion, your thoughts roam to what is impure, lusting, filled with greed and envy, anger, doubt, pride; and sometimes you dare to be bored with the holy things of God. No, the holiness that God has declared about you has not always manifested itself in you.
So the Word of God calls you to become the saint that you are, become whom God has declared you to be. This is why we listen to Holy Scripture, and should read it throughout the week, because “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” “Become complete” – meaning you are not yet complete. You are holy, because God has declared you holy, but that holiness has not been made complete in you – and your dirty little secret is that you don’t always really care. You are too wrapped up in fear about the economy, concern about the elections, thoughts about your investments and career, your health, and fulfilling your earthly desires.
But the Holy Spirit has a different plan, that we would grow up from being spiritual children into maturity. It is written that God gives us the ministry of Word and Sacraments to equip us and build us up,
“till we all come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness by which they lie in wait to deceive, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ” [Eph. 4.13-15].
How does that growing up and becoming complete happen? It doesn’t happen by setting goals and making plans. If you want to accomplish an earthly goal – start a business, go to school and get a degree, change careers, buy a car or a house, you will need to set goals and make a list of tasks. But becoming a saint is not something you can achieve in that way. You cannot achieve it at all. In the same way that God made you a saint – by imputing to you the righteousness of Jesus, by giving you His holiness and forgiving your sins because of His crucifixion – in the same way He makes you complete and perfect, as you live more and more not from your own strength, but from the strength of the absolution when you come to confession, from the strength of Christ who dwells in you Sacramentally, whom you partake of each Divine Service.
The one thing all the saints that we remember on All Saints’ Day have in common is this: they are dead – dead in this world, that is. Today we remember the martyrs, the holy witnesses in every age who testified to the Gospel by their death. And we also remember those dear to us who have gone before us in the faith. We call them saints because they died in Christ, and thus are freed completely from sin and death.
And this is what we need to take away from this day: You become a saint by dying. Christianity is not about living, but about dying. My job as your pastor is not so much to teach you how to live, but to prepare you to die. Because you gain your life only by losing it. We have the treasure of the Gospel in the earthen vessels of our bodies, St. Paul says, “always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.” Everything that the world counts as gain, we count as dung, that we may know Christ and the power of His resurrection; the Christian desires to be conformed to Christ’s death so that we might attain to the resurrection from the dead [Phil. 3.10f]. It is in dying that we live [2 Cor. 6.9]. You become a saint by dying.
Christianity is not a tool to prosperity. Just the opposite: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But as I said, those words, and all the Sermon on the Mount, will damn us if we see them as a program to be accomplished, tasks to check off. These sayings of Jesus that all start with “Blessed” describe Jesus Himself, and then you in Him. Jesus fulfills them, as He fulfills all the Law for you. And now, as a saint, as a holy one of God, they are being worked in you. We can sum up all these sayings in today’s Gospel this way: “Blessed are those who die in Jesus, for they shall live.”
What will it mean for you to die? You will stop trusting in your false gods of money and power, health and leisure. You will die to your desires, die to the passions, die to sin, die to everything this world has to offer. And so you will be prepared for your last hour when you go into surgery, when your mind becomes feeble and you can no longer remember, when your body becomes frail and you can no longer walk or lift things. And then you will have only one thing to say, the words we should be practicing now:
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, a sinner.
If I live without you, I am dead; but if I die in You, I live.
For You alone, O Jesus, have conquered death.
In Your death I died; and in Your life I will live.
Therefore let me not live for this world and its vainglories. Give me Your grace that I might die to the world and live in You, and bring me through the grave to life in the paradise of Your kingdom.
In You will I live, in You will I die, and Yours will I be forever.
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