Hallowed

Propers: All Saints’ Sunday (Hallowmas), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

“The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” So wrote Léon Bloy in his 1897 novel La Femme Pauvre.

Every once in a while we get a troll on the parish Facebook page. I honestly can’t tell whether or not she’s a bot, but she definitely doesn’t like it whenever we talk of mercy. Just the other day she posted that Jesus may forgive, but He doesn’t tell us that we have to, and to say otherwise is to mislead people. So bot or not, our troll isn’t terribly well-versed. But the first thing that I thought when I read her latest post was, “Good Lord. This world of ours desperately needs more saints.”

I realize that that’s a loaded term, “saint.” It might bring to mind a Goody Two-Shoes, or perhaps someone who’s holier-than-thou. These days the capital-S Saints undergo a vetting process, with investigators analyzing posthumous miracles. But that’s a fairly recent development. It used to be that saints were simply recognized as such by general acclaim. Vox populi, vox Dei. Nicholas and Patrick, for example, two of my favorites, never bothered with canonization. They were too busy working wonders.

Moreover, with our medieval baggage, and in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, we have a tendency to dismiss the saints as “getting in the way.” Why do we need to place other people between ourselves and Jesus? Even Mary, to whom Luther was deeply devoted, barely gets a mention in our denomination. More’s the pity. Where would we be without the Theotokos, the Mother of our God upon this earth? Yet when I start to say such things, people tell me I’m “too Catholic.”

So let’s clear up some misconceptions. A saint is not a sinless person. A saint is not a gatekeeper getting in God’s way. A saint isn’t someone who must earn their place in Heaven. “Saint” comes from sanctus, meaning “holy.” And holy means “set apart.” A saint is someone set apart by God. But set apart for what? Well, for the Christian, the answer’s pretty clear. We are set apart, by Baptism, to become the Body of Christ. Each of us is a member—an eye, a heart, a hand—knit together, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, with Christ as our head, in order to continue Jesus’ mission in this world.

That’s what the Church is. We are all of us Jesus together. Within the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, God became a human in the person of the Christ. We call this the Incarnation, the “enfleshment,” and it remains the scandal at the heart of Christian faith. Jesus is a Man, yes; that Man is also God, fully, truly, unconfusedly. That’s why Christmas is such a big deal: the arrival of Immanuel, of God-With-Us. That’s why Easter is such a big deal: not just in that He rose from the dead, but that God has conquered death.

Then He returns, far beyond the heavens, to reassert His divinity in the fullness of His humanity. In other words, He opens to us Heaven, opens to us the beatific vision of the presence of our God, utterly devoid of separation. Creator and Creation are now one in Jesus Christ. But what comes next is the greatest gift of all. Jesus sends His Holy Spirit, the life and breath of God, to dwell within us, dwell among us, making our bodies His temples, binding us all in His grace. Such is Christian mysticism. As we are one in Jesus, so we are one with God.

That’s the whole point of the Church. Why do we come here? Why spend a Sunday morning? For affirmation, entertainment, moral instruction? No, we come here to receive the living God! We speak His promise of forgiveness, we listen to His Word, we welcome here His Spirit, we partake of His Body and Blood—all of it in order to be one in Jesus Christ. You’ve heard me say it before: in Baptism we are given Jesus’ Spirit and His Name; in Communion we are given both His Body and His Blood.

And when we have the Name of Christ, the breath of Christ, the Body and the Blood of Christ, what does that make us? Who does that make us? It makes all of us together Jesus Christ for all the world! Our job is to take in all of Jesus, and then give Him all away! We are to go out, sent forth from this place, from this assembly, to feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted, rebuke the sinner, speak truth to power, forgive the repentant, and raise all the dead from their graves!

This is a holy calling. We are set apart. Not because we’re special, any better than the rest. Not because we’ve earned it, as though this would be our due. We are called, we are saved, we are liberated, purely by His grace, set free in the love of Jesus Christ our Lord: free from death, free from hell, free from selfishness and fear. And all that we can do is share our joy. That’s the thing about mercy, the thing about love: it has to flow freely—freely in, freely out, freely through us unto others.

What makes us into saints? Only Jesus’ love. Jesus does it all. He calls, He claims, He forgives, He resurrects. And He does all this incarnate, through bodily physical things. The Sacraments send forth the Incarnation, through oil and water, bread and wine, through the healing hands of our neighbor and the Word here soundly preached. It’s not that saints get in God’s way; it’s that they are God’s way! God comes to us through others, through our shared humanity.

We all know that we’re to love God by loving our neighbor. But do we know the opposite is true? God loves us through our neighbor. We are His hands and His feet, we are His action and His voice—because God is love, and love cannot remain abstract. Love can only be known, can only be lived, through specific real actions for specific real people.

We want to know how God answers prayer? He answers it through us, through me and you. Welcome to the world, you sainted sinner, you Christian who is called a little Christ. You are to bear Him to your neighbors in their need. You are to love them with the same love by which Christ has first loved you. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”

We need saints. We need people who can put aside our egos, our angers, our fears, and reach out to one another with honesty, compassion, forgiveness, justice, and peace. We need John the Baptist, who looked to Christ and said, “I must decrease, but He must increase.” We need Paul of Tarsus, who wrote, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.” We need neighbors who can say, “I’m not perfect. I’ve done wrong. But I know that I am loved. And this love is given to me, that I might give it now to you.”

That’s what holiness is. That’s what sanctity is. That’s what sainthood is. It’s giving people Christ! Not in the sense that you sign the dotted line at the bottom of the tract, but in offering a helping hand, a strong shoulder, a sympathetic ear, a cup of water, a crust of bread, and a voice that’s willing to say that the voiceless too are human. God damn death. God damn war. God damn the sin that pits a man against his neighbor. All of that will burn in the fires of God’s grace. And only what is good and true and beautiful will rise up from the ash. Come, Lord Jesus! Then shall every sinner be a saint.

You, my dear Christian, have nothing left to fear. The world is yet a wonderful and terrible abode. But we know that in the end it is redeemed. Until that day, when Creation is reborn, we are Jesus’ Body in this world. Our lives are now a foretaste of the promised feast to come. We live with one foot in the fallenness, and one in future bliss. And while we are here, with whatever time we have, we have to love our neighbors as ourselves. We have to, because that’s who Jesus is, and Jesus lives in us. And Christ will never leave a soul behind.

You are His saints. Give Him to His world.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout


St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026