All Saints Day (A)
November 5, 2023
Revelation 7:9-17
Matthew 5:1-12
INTRODUCTION
Happy All Saints Day! By way of introduction today, I want to explain briefly the Lutheran understanding of “saint.” We usually think of a saint as someone who is extra faithful, or a really good person, but Luther says something different. He says that we all become saints when we are baptized – even as we remain sinners. We spend the rest of our lives after baptism striving to live into our saintly nature, to live a life of faith. We never achieve that fully, of course, until we enter into God’s eternal glory in our death, which we celebrate for 15 specific saints today. On All Saints Day, we remember and lift up this tension of being already-and-not-yet saintly, which we will see in our texts today.
First in Revelation we see what it looks like to be in a state of constantly praising God with all the saints. The Psalm echoes that sentiment, saying that God’s praise will always be on our lips. The epistle reading recalls that we are all children of God – you may recognize that first line because it is what I say after each baptism I’ve ever done – and it reflects on the hope of this children-of-God status. Finally, in Matthew, we will hear the beginning of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount: the Beatitudes, outlining the various sorts of people who are “blessed” – though not all of their circumstances sound especially blessed!
Today’s stewardship theme is “God’s extravagant promise,” so as you listen today, listen for that promise. What hope or future is promised to God’s people, and how does that help us get through the present, whatever that present may be currently delivering? Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from the one who is and who was and who is to come. Amen.
Yesterday, we had a large group gather here to talk about what we called the “long journey home.” That is, we talked about some of the many aspects of preparing to die: practical things, like medical directives, as well as some of the more spiritual and emotional aspects. The part of the workshop that I was in charge of leading was regarding funeral planning. Now, this may seem less important than things like, making sure your family is taken care of financially – after all, a funeral is one day, and seeing to the financial well-being of your most beloved people and organizations can last for generations to come. But the more I read and learned about funerals as I prepared for this, the more I came to love this occasion in the life of, well, everyone who dies, but in particular the life of the faithful.
There is a wonderful book called The Good Funeral, which is written by pastor and professor Thomas Long, and funeral director and poet Thomas Lynch. I started off my part of the workshop asking people what they believe makes a funeral “good.” Perhaps it is good music, people you love being there, meaningful preaching – and yes, all of these are elements of a good funeral. In the book, the authors argue that there are four elements that are necessary for a funeral to be good:
1) A body, if possible – after all, a significant purpose of the funeral is to accompany our loved one to their final resting place, and how can we do that if they aren’t there?
2) Mourners – people to whom this person who died mattered. From the beginning of humanity, people have cared for their dead and accompanied them to the grave. Until fairly recently, mourners even dug the grave themselves! Though we outsource a lot of the job of caring for the dead now to funeral homes, it remains a deeply human thing to show up and accompany our loved ones all the way to the end.
3) A story – not only the story of the person’s life, but a larger story to which we can connect their story and ours, something to provide some meaning to the persistence of capital-D Death, this mythic force that is the enemy of all that God wills for life.
4) Transport – getting the body from here to there, as well as getting the mourners hearts from here to there. As Tom Lynch, the funeral director, says, “A good funeral is when, by getting the dead where they need to go, the living get where they need to be.”
Now I find all of this very helpful, both as a pastor and as a fellow human, who also struggles with the reality of death. But the part I’m drawn to in particular on this All Saints’ Day is the third point: the importance of a story, a story to which we can connect our own story and that of the deceased.
For Christians, of course, this story is that of Jesus Christ and his triumph over death, and on All Saints, we get a heavy dose of that story, in all of our readings, really, but I want to focus especially on this stunning reading from Revelation. A lot of the book of Revelation is pretty weird, sometimes violent, and full of complex symbolism and hidden meanings. But even with the weird imagery, it is hard to read this passage and not feel its power. John paints a picture for us of a diverse gathering of people, clothed in robes of white, who spend their days in continual worship and praise. We then come to find out that these are not people who praise God because their lives have been so good. No, these are people who have come out of “the great ordeal.” It’s not entirely clear what that ordeal is – most likely it refers to people who have kept their faith in the face of persecution – but it is easy enough, and I think still faithful, to imagine there whatever “great ordeal” we might be facing. There are any number of global ordeals (wars, climate change) as well as all of the personal ones (illness, job loss, divorce). Sometimes the ordeal is the one at the forefront of our minds today: grief over the death of a loved one. We are no strangers to great ordeals, or tribulations.
Yet whatever the ordeal these people in Revelation have faced, here they all are, these white-robed people, standing at the throne of the Lamb (that’s John’s favorite name for Jesus), and praising unceasingly. How is it that these who have suffered can be so full of praise?
That is where our Christian story comes in, the story that makes for a good funeral, and, I’d argue a hopeful life. It is a story that faces head on the “great ordeals” of this life, giving them meaning, purpose, and a future. Scripture and Church history are both full of stories of trial and tribulation. And repeatedly, we see that ours is a God of promise, and a God who makes good on that promise. Now that doesn’t always mean we get everything we asked for or wanted. Or, it may mean we get exactly what we wanted, but in a form we didn’t expect. But either way, God fulfills his promise to his people.
This is shown in numerous Bible stories. For example, our Bible Huddles recently read the story of Jacob, wrestling with God – in this story, Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, is renamed “Israel” which means “strives with God,” and he walks away from his wrestling match with the divine, with a blessing, yes, but also with a limp, a reminder (with every step) of both the ordeal he has endured, and the power and promise of God. This coming week our Huddle story is that of the Exodus out of Egypt, in which the Israelites, enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptian king, are led out of slavery, through the Red Sea, and toward the Promised Land, toward freedom – another great ordeal. And then there’s Jesus, of course, who “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, and descended into hell” – all of that before, “on the third day, he rose again.”
You see the theme here? God’s people have always endured “great ordeals,” of various types and flavors, and have always endured. Because ours is a God of promise, and that promise is this: that whatever ordeals or tribulations we face, be it physical or figurative wrestling, or captivity, or even death itself – the other side of that ordeal will be life, freedom, and salvation. We will come through it.
And that is why those white-robed people, those saints, are praising God, shouting, “Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” Because they have lived to see this promise come about, perhaps many times. And they know, just like those saints we remember and celebrate today, that even what the Apostle Paul called “the final enemy” – that is, capital-D Death itself – has been defeated by the Lamb, by Jesus. These, robed in white, have come through the great ordeal, and know that God will always win. And “for this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple.” They believe the promise of God, that the Lamb “will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
That story – told at “good” funerals, on All Saints Day, and I hope every time I climb into this pulpit – is a story that says, “Death cannot and does not have the final word. Death thinks he can win, that he can destroy hope and tear apart loving relationships, but we know better. We know that God wins, every time.” This story is the reason we come here week after week, to hear it proclaimed, to join with the saints who know this story so well themselves, and even to join with them at the table – a table that serves as a bridge between this life and the next, a table where no one hungers or thirsts, and tears are wiped away. Christ’s is a table where we are fed by God’s promise and assured that we are blessed: that we will be comforted, we will be filled, we will receive mercy, we will see God and be called the children of God, for that is what we are.
Thanks be to God for all the saints who have come through great ordeals to remind us that God’s promises are true.
Let us pray… God of promise, your story of salvation is the best story ever told. When we face our own ordeals, keep our gaze upon your promise: that you will bless us and comfort us and save us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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