No Dead Saints

Scripture: All Saints, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

The word saint comes from sanctus, meaning holy. But holy doesn’t mean what we think it means. Holy doesn’t mean perfect or sinless or even good. To call someone or something holy means that they have been set apart, by God and for God. And God most often sets apart the unlikeliest of candidates through whom to work His holy will: old folks and children, criminals and cripples, the poor and the persecuted; people on the fringes, usually, outsiders and sinners. These God calls to holiness. These God calls His saints. And they come in such wonderful array.

Now it’s true that we are all saints in the biblical sense. We are all baptized sinners called out from the nations to be God’s new and priestly people. And quite the motley crew we make, each one of us at once both saint and sinner. But All Saints Day—the Hallowmas—exists specifically to celebrate the dead. Or I should say more accurately, not the dead, but those who have died.

Christianity has always been a religion that holds an unusually comfortable relationship with death. Our faith was born on that glorious Easter Morning when the Risen Christ burst forth from the spiced tomb. The earliest Masses of the persecuted Church were celebrated upon sarcophagi down in the catacombs deep beneath the city of Rome. Why, the very symbol of our faith is a Man on a Cross! Why do you suppose all this is? Are we just that morbid?

From the moment He was born, Jesus could not escape the shadow of death. The prophet Simeon warned the baby’s mother about a sword of sorrow coming to pierce her soul. The Magi traveled from far to the East in order to bring the Christchild myrrh, the funeral spice. Even the Christmas tree is a conifer, the same as provided wood for the Cross. Jesus’ job, His mission, the very purpose of the Incarnation was to come and die, to come and take death, the consequence of our sin, upon Himself. Jewish Christians, who yearly offered the Passover lamb at God’s Temple, spoke of Jesus’ death as selfless sacrifice. But as Christianity spread to the Gentiles, we spoke of it in different terms. We spoke of it as war.

Jesus Christ was born to fight a battle. This we knew from the prophets of old, but we misunderstood them. We thought that the Christ would come to fight off our earthly foes: to collapse the power of pagan Rome and raise Israel up to worldly glory. But God’s Warrior-King was not concerned with such parochial struggles. No, Jesus Christ was born to make war on death. He was born to fight the powers which we cannot, which have held us in thrall since the days of Eden’s loss. From His birth in Bethlehem to His childhood in Nazareth, from His ministry in the Galilee to His Passion and Crucifixion in Jerusalem, Jesus was ever marching toward His great confrontation with death, the devil, and hell. And He came to win.

And so He stretched out His arms on that Cross and took it all upon Himself, all the hollow powers of empty death. He took on our fear and our despair and the futility of our fleeting lives, and in glorious exchange from His wounded side He poured out for us the very essence of God’s own life: water and blood and breath, the very Sacraments of the Church. And for three days He descended to the dead, where He razed all hell.

I wonder how long it took the devil to realize that he’d swallowed dynamite. The Bible calls Christ’s death the Harrowing of Hell, the shattering of the prison, the raising of the souls trapped in Hades not only up to earth but beyond that, into Heaven itself, the very presence of Almighty God. He destroyed the gates of death, cast down the tyranny of diabolical powers, and brought all who desired the love of God up to boundless eternal life. They are there even to this day, the great host arrayed in white, those who have died but are not dead, praising the Trinity before the Throne of God and offering up our prayers as bowls of incense. They who have crossed the Jordan pray ceaselessly for us still waiting on the far shore, for the prayer of the righteous availeth much.

For centuries, faith in Jesus Christ carried with it the death penalty. Christians were cast out from the synagogues, stoned in Jerusalem, thrown to the lions at Rome. Yet when the saints were slain—when Paul was beheaded, Bartholomew skinned, Ignatius eaten, Polycarp burned to a cinder—the faithful did not despair, but even in their mourning they rejoiced. They gathered the bones of these holy men and women—not perfect men and women, mind you, but holy—and dressed them with honor, treated them with reverence and respect, as if they were still alive, as if their bones would one day sit up and walk about again—which of course they will.

The book of Revelation promised that those who had died for their love of Jesus Christ had their blood mingled with the Blood of the Lamb at the Heavenly altar. What does that mean? It means that the martyrs, those sacrificed for their faith, have joined in Christ’s own battle, Christ’s own sacrifice, Christ’s own triumph over death and the grave. They were the Body of Christ in life, and they share in the promise of His victory at death. We may look at the old churches, the old traditions, and find them macabre. So many cathedrals seem a bit like charnel houses, full to the brim as they are with bones. But to Christians these are not signs of death; they are the signs of death’s defeat. They are proof of life everlasting.

As time passed, Christianity was legalized throughout the Empire, and the age of martyrs appeared to cease. Now came a new sort of martyrdom, those not called to die for their faith but to live for it: to live out love of God and love of neighbor in every single day of a long and thankful life. These were husbands and wives and priests and soldiers and farmers and servants and monks and kings. They were everyday people performing everyday duties not for their own edification but all for the greater glory of God. They were not perfect. But they were saints. They too have gone before us, and await our arrival at the feast.

Today God is calling forth a new generation of saints. Far to the East, the bad days have returned, the persecutions of old. Men, women, and children are put to brutal public death for no other reason than their trust in Jesus Christ. Communist regimes bulldoze churches while worshippers watch, singing hymns of peace. In the West we face a different set of challenges. We face a postmodern world that denies not simply the reality of God but the realities of death, of age, of our very human bodies. Advertising promises us that our appetites have no limits and that time is no constraint. These of course are lies. The West stands in dire need not of people to die for Christ, but of people who will live for Him.

Not perfect people, mind you. Nobody’s perfect except this one guy, and we killed Him. But people set apart. People made holy, by God and for God. People who are at once both saint and sinner: you and me.

The whole world is so frantically busy being either frightened of death or outright denying it. It is not so with the saints. Christians ought neither to fear death nor to seek it out, but to live life to the fullest (which is to say, live life for others) while proclaiming the impossible promise that death is not the end, and that Christ, in fact, has conquered. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Death will come for each of us, in our own good time. We will all have our little plot of earth in which to await the Last Day. But death will not be our end. It will not even be our loss. Christ promises us that the last enemy to be destroyed is death, and destroyed it truly will be; Jesus has already subjected it under His feet. For to us, living is Christ and dying is gain, and we are hard pressed between the two. Jesus has conquered. Death is defeated. And life shall reign forevermore.

So now tell me, O you saints of God, now that we have been freed even from the fear of death—what good shall we not accomplish for the glory of Christ our King?

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.