Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the first reading from Revelation 7.
You are surrounded. I want you to know that. You are
completely surrounded and there is no escape. And that is a good thing.
This is the major holiday in Texas, what the State calls the
opening of deer season, or what I jokingly refer to as the Commemoration of St.
Venison. There is a Far Side cartoon that is appropriate for the day: two bucks
are standing in the woods. A sign reading “Deer Season Opens Today,” is nailed
to a tree. Buck #1 is standing there with a birthmark shaped like a bullseye on
his chest. Buck #2 says, “That’s a bummer of a birthmark, dude.”
While hunters are celebrating the beginning of deer season, today
the Christian church marks All Saints Day. For a few minutes, I want you to
have a picture of that bullseye target as we think about the word “church.” “Church”
has a lot of different meanings, or different uses; I want to use that bullseye
image to explain it. As a point of explanation, we usually think of the center,
the bulls-eye, as being the most important place. For right now, don’t think of
it as most important, but simply as the smallest. There are four rings in this
bullseye.
The center and the smallest circle of “church” is as a
building, as in, “we remodeled the church a few years ago,” or “who left the
lights on in the church?” If you expand just slightly, we think of a congregation,
a gathering of God’s people in that church building – Zion Lutheran Church, or
Rocky Creek Baptist Church. Moving another ring out from the bullseye into yet
a larger circle, we talk about a church body – the Lutheran Church Missouri
Synod, or the Southern Baptist Church, or the Roman Catholic Church. Again,
each ring, each circle, increases in size and scope, with the next ring being
very large – the whole Christian church one earth. This is every person who
confesses the name of Jesus as Lord and Savior. While we might disagree with
our brothers and sisters in Christ in those various congregations and church
bodies over matters of doctrine and practice, we are still united under the
headship of Christ as part of His Bride, the Church. One, two, three, four – building,
congregation, church body, Christian church on earth.
But there is one more layer, one more circle that encapsulates
even the body of Christ on earth. You’re thinking, wait a minute: you said four
rings, we counted to four, so how can there be five. That’s because this fifth
ring you cannont see – it’s the church triumphant, the people of God who have
died in the faith and now rest from their labors. You are surrounded by a
heavenly host of saints, angels, and archangels whom you cannot see with these
eyes on your face, but they are there and you see them with eyes of faith.
We are the church militant, because we continue to struggle
this side of heaven. They are the church triumphant, for they are already
receiving an even greater foretaste of what awaits us in the resurrection of
all flesh. They are enjoying the peaceful presence of the resurrected Christ
even as they await their own fleshly resurrection in perfection. You sang about
this in the 4th stanza of the hymn a moment ago:
4 Oh, blest communion, fellowship
divine! We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine. Alleluia! Alleluia!
We call the hymn, “For All The Saints.” Great title; great
hymn. Easily, one of my top ten favorite hymns and probably in the top five. If
I could have my way, we would sing this with the organ music turned all the way
up so that the walls shake and your ears ring for hours – not because I want to
hurt you, but because it’s the song of the church – the whole church – the whole
church in heaven and on earth and in church bodies and in congregations and in
buildings and even those outside of buildings. The whole church joins in the
song. The Latin name captures it a bit more – Sine Nomine – without number.
That’s what St. John saw in the Revelation – the heavenly saints
of God, a great, innumerable congregation from every tribe, people, language,
nationality, skin color, and geographic corner of God’s creation from all time,
singing the song of praise, “Salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb!” And
with the angels and the elders and the four living creatures, the entire
heavenly host fall to their faces before the throne to worship God.“ We join in the song as we celebrate the Feast.
“Blessing, honor, glory and might be to God and the Lamb forever, Amen!”
There’s a lovely tradition in the old Scandinavian Lutheran churches
that has come across into many if not most Christian churches today. In the old
Scandinavian churches, the altar rail was a circle – well, a half-circle,
really. Like our half-square rail, it began at one wall, circumnavigated around
the chancel and ended at the other wall. The idea is this: the church on earth
is on this side, communing together face to face, side by side at the rail. The
rest of the circle – in our case, the other half of our square – is what
continues into heaven with the saints who have gone before us. So, in the
communion liturgy, when we speak of “joining with angels and archangels and all
the company of heaven,” you can think of those innumerable saints of God, the sine
nomine, who worship God and the Lamb from the other side, the heavenly side,
the triumphant side. “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, Lord God of hosts!”
You know that I am a hopeless romantic – I use the word in
the classical sense. All Saints Day gets me right in the feels because it highlights
that connection of the church militant, this side of heaven, with the church
triumphant, the other side of heaven. We see this side of the cross with its
nail marks and bloody stains; they see the other side of the cross that glows
in radiant brilliance. And, when I think of the baptized people of God, family,
friends, members of this congregation and the others where I have served, the
people of God who have fallen asleep in Jesus, it gets me.
We remember the dead, all saints, all made holy in the blood
of Jesus, not to grieve their death but to thank God for them. But, if we are
honest, there is still mourning, even if it just a whisper of it, this side of
heaven because those whom we remember, we loved. Memories are a left-handed
gift of God. We thank God for the memories, but the memories sting just a bit.
But, as Jesus said in the Gospel reading this morning, “Blessed are [you] who
mourn, for [you] shall be comforted.” Your comfort is in this: Christ died,
Christ is risen. All Saints Day brings out most fully the reality of Easter,
that you – and our loved ones – all who are dead in their sins and spiritually
dead by those sins, deserve a physical death that we cannot stop. Yet, in
Christ, we live a resurrected spiritual life, now, already, in the sure and
certain promise that in Christ, we will be raised to a new, spiritually whole
and holy physical life. Death is not the end. The grave is defeated; death’s
sting is no more. We have hope – capitol H Hope – because of God’s entering
into space and time in the flesh of Jesus who died, and more than that, was
raised. We have hope because of the resurrection of Christ, and in His
resurrection, the first-fruit resurrection, there is the Hope of a greater
resurrection with all who have died in the faith.
At the graveside, I always read this passage from 1 Thessalonians
4: “And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then, we who are alive, who are
left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in
the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” Remember this: a cemetery is a resting place.
That’s what the word literally means. It’s a resting place for the bodies of
the faithful who await the return of Jesus. I will always remember Mr. Kimble.
When his wife died, Mr. Kimble sat at her graveside every night until the sun
went down. He rarely missed a night. As the years went by, someone asked him
why he did that. I forget the exact words he used, but it was something like
this: “Because, just maybe, Jesus will come back while I’m sitting there. I
want to see her face when she sees Jesus for the first time. Then, I’ll turn
around and see Him for myself.”
We’ll sing this hope as we leave this morning:
The golden evening brightens in the
west; soon, soon to faithful warriors cometh rest;
Sweet is the calm of paradise the blest. Alleluia! Alleluia!
But, lo, there breaks a yet more
glorious day: The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of Glory passes on His way. Alleluia! Alleluia!
Remember, I said you are surrounded? “We remember those who
by their blood, sweat and tears have left their mark on the church, the body of
Christ, to which we belong. And we cannot, I think, commemorate this day
without a certain sense of awe and respect. Remember, that when you enter the
church you are ushered into the presence of a great host. You inherit their
legacy.” [1]
What you inherit is this: the title of saint. I suspect that
we often think of saint simply as one who has died, or perhaps in the Roman
Catholic sense, those who have died with extra-ordinary acts or confession of faith.
It’s not that those ideas are bad, but it’s kind of like thinking that the
church is only this small thing instead of the great thing that it is. A saint
is one who is made holy by the declaration of God through Christ. You are not a
saint because of what you have done. You are a saint because of what God has
done for you. He has declared you innocent in His sight. You are proclaimed
righteous. It’s not your own, you didn’t create it, you didn’t become it. It
is, however, yours as His gift to you. You, with all your failings and foibles
this side of heaven, are still a baptized child of God and you are as much as
saint as any of the famous ones in the Bible or in the history books of the church.
Their Jesus is your Jesus. Sainthood knows no levels in Christ.
When we conclude this morning’s service, the last verses of
the hymn will sing of that day. As you sing it, envision what that day will be
like. Sing it loud, sing it bold – I don’t care if you can’t carry a tune in a
bucket, today, belt it out. It’s our confession, it’s our hope, it’s Christ’s
promise put to music. And, if like me, the tears get in the way and your throat
gets tight and you can’t sing, it’s OK. Every year, it gets harder for me to
finish the hymn as I remember those whom I have buried and transferred from the
church militant to the church triumphant. And I remember those whom I love who
have fallen asleep in Jesus. But, even as I wipe the tears from my eyes, I see
what is to come.
But, lo, there breaks a yet more
glorious day: The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of Glory passes on His way, Alleluia, Alleluia. [2]
And, on that day, we will fully receive Jesus’ blessing as
our mourning becomes dancing. Amen.
[1]
(Gerhard Forde, as quoted on 1517 Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=961037322721534&set=pcb.961037442721522
[2]
For All the Saints – #677 Lutheran Service Book, © 2007, CPH: St. Louis, MO
