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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
You and I may often say or write things like the following: “God’s blessings”, “Have a blessed day”, “God bless you”, and maybe even “I am blessed”. When we say or write such things, what do we mean? What does being “blessed” mean? Does being “blessed” mean being happy? Does being “blessed” mean being fortunate? Does being “blessed” mean being prosperous? What others and we think about being blessed may be quite different from what God teaches about being blessed. Today as we observe All Saints’ Day, our appointed Gospel Reading challenges and corrects what may be our false views of blessedness. Our appointed Gospel Reading teaches a true view of blessedness that is quite the opposite of human values and almost contradictory. I titled this sermon “Blessed Saints”, and we pray that through it God might both make us “Blessed Saints” and lead us to a greater appreciation of our being “Blessed Saints”.
For All Saints’ Day, the Gospel Reading comes from St. Matthew’s divinely‑inspired account: it is the very beginning of the first of five major sections of Jesus’s teaching that St. Matthew records. Since Jesus went up on a mountain and taught, we usually call the first major section “The Sermon on the Mount”. “The Sermon on the Mount” itself begins with nine statements about those who are “blessed”, and, since the Latin word used for “blessed” is beati, we usually call the nine statements “The Beatitudes”. The nine statements form one group of Beatitudes, though the first, eighth, and ninth in the present-tense are different from the second through seventh in the future‑tense, and the ninth (addressed directly to the hearers) is also different from the preceding eight (which speak of the “blessed” in the third‑person). As we will realize, those differences matter for us as “Blessed Saints”.
In the first eight Beatitudes, Jesus describes the “blessed” people as the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. And, Jesus describes their blessedness not as their being happy, fortunate, or prosperous, but Jesus describes their blessedness as their possessing the Kingdom of Heaven, being comforted, inheriting the promised land, being satisfied, receiving mercy, seeing God, and being called sons of God.
Some people take the descriptions of the blessed people from The Beatitudes and wrongly try to make them into an agenda by which they can earn The Beatitudes’ descriptions of blessedness. To some extent, those descriptions of blessed people may truly fit people in the world, unbelievers and believers alike, at least some of the time. But, the unbelievers do not please God because their deeds do not flow from faith, and even those whose deeds do flow from faith fail in some cases to live up to those descriptions. We all are sinful by nature and so fail in these and countless other ways, some unspeakable. We cannot earn and in no way deserve the blessedness Jesus describes. Rather, we earn and deserve nothing but death now and for eternity.
Curses or blessings: from the Old Testament through the New Testament, those are the only two options. We either receive curses or blessings; there is no opting out of both. As God proclaims both curses and blessings, He calls us to repent so that, instead of cursing us, He can bless us. A few verses before our Gospel Reading in St. Matthew’s account, Jesus Himself began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” So, we repent. We turn in sorrow from our sin—from our misunderstandings of what being blessed is, from our failures to live up to the descriptions of the blessed, and also from our sinful natures. We turn in sorrow from all our sin, we trust God to forgive that sin, and we want to do better. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin. He forgives our sin freely by grace through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.
For some people, observing All Saints’ Day may seem a little too Roman Catholic. After all, do not the Roman Catholics canonize certain people as “saints”? Do not the Roman Catholics invoke the saints to help them? Do not the Roman Catholics hold that the saints earn a treasury of merits to be dispensed to others who do not do enough to get to heaven? Well, yes, yes, and yes, but such false Roman Catholic teaching and practice about the saints does not mean we have to throw‑out All Saints Day altogether. (Along the lines of what our Synod’s founder, C.F.W. Walther once wrote, if we threw‑out everything found in the Roman Catholic church, we would even have to throw‑out Jesus Christ and His Gospel.)
In contrast to the Roman Catholics, we believe, teach, and confess that all people who believe in Jesus are made holy and so are “saints”, that the Triune God alone should be invoked to help us, and that Jesus alone did all that needs to be done for anyone to get to heaven. Jesus alone perfectly lives up to The Beatitudes’ descriptions of the blessed. He was so poor in spirit that He humbled Himself unto death; He mourns over lost sinners; He is meek and lowly in heart, so meek He entered Jerusalem on a donkey; He hungers and thirsts for righteousness, so much so that, for example, He was baptized for us; He shows mercy; He is pure by nature; He is the greatest of peacemakers; and He was persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Jesus has done it all, and He has done it all for you and for me. He was born, lived, died, and rose again to save us from our sins. As we repent and believe in Him, God forgives our sin—our misunderstandings of being blessed, our failures to live up to the descriptions of the blessed, or whatever our sins might be—God forgives all our sin, and He even forgives our sinful natures themselves. In Jesus Christ, we truly are blessed: accepted and approved as a result of God’s favor—not because we earn forgiveness but because He gives it to us as a gift, a blessing.
For most of us, our blessed life in Jesus Christ begins at the Baptismal Font. There, in Holy Baptism, the Father gives us the love St. John describes in our Epistle Reading, the Father gives birth to us from above and so makes us His children by water and the Word. Holy Baptism works the forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives us eternal salvation, the Kingdom of Heaven. As we live in our baptisms, we seek out God’s forgiveness from His called and ordained servants, privately confessing to them the sins that trouble us most and so receiving individual Absolution from them as from God Himself, not doubting but firmly believing that by it our sins are forgiven before God in the Kingdom of Heaven. So absolved, we come to receive Holy Communion, the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, for us Christians to eat and to drink, and so to receive the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation, the Kingdom of Heaven. As the liturgy of the Church reminds us, at this altar and its rail, heaven and earth come together in the worship of the Lamb described in today’s First Reading.
The Lutheran reformers did do away with the false Roman Catholic teaching and practice about the saints, but they kept All Saints’ Day and other individual saint’s days. Though we do not invoke the saints who have gone before us into the Kingdom of Heaven, we do honor them, and such honor is even for our benefit. Honoring the saints as examples of God’s mercy and His will to save and His giving teachers and other gifts to the Church encourages us to give thanks to God. Honoring the saints also strengthens our faith, for example, recalling how Peter was forgiven after his denial reminds us that grace abounds more than sin, so we can be forgiven, too. Finally we honor the saints by imitating their faith and other virtues, especially their virtues pertaining to the various callings in life that God gave them and also gives.
To be sure, there is nothing wrong with saying or writing things such as “God bless you” or “I am blessed”, especially when we know what being “blessed” means. All believers in Jesus Christ are blessed by sharing in salvation through faith in Him. We live each day in that forgiveness of sins and see the present in light of the future. The Kingdom of Heaven is already ours now, even though in this life others revile us, persecute us, and utter all kinds of evil against us falsely on Jesus’s account. Such reviling, persecution, and false witness is included in being blessed! Nevertheless, we rejoice and are glad, for our reward is in heaven, where we will be comforted, inherit the Promised Land, be satisfied, receive mercy, see God, and be called sons of God. May God truly make us all “Blessed Saints” and keep us as such faithful to that end.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +