Twenty-Third Sunday after
Pentecost
November 4, 2012
Perhaps it’s ironic that All Saints Day always follows Reformation Day.
Reformation Day reminds us we’re always in need of reformation. We are sinners
who wake every day to the need of dying and rising to new life. That’s what our
God does, He reforms us. He continually refashions us, recreates us, renews us.
What He does is He makes us saints. Saints are holy ones. And there’s the
irony. We are made holy by the perfect sacrifice of Christ, His blood shed for
our very imperfect and very unholy lives. By His blood we are declared
righteous and holy.
The irony, and even tension, is found in the fact that He declares us
holy even as we live in this fallen world. We are surrounded by evil, by
tragedy and suffering, by sin in the world and within ourselves. And let’s not forget
the devil who prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We
are holy ones who are in constant need of being forgiven and reformed. It’s not
as though we go back and forth. At one moment we’re in the grace of God and
fully redeemed, in the next we lapse and are outside of the grace of God and in
need once again to be converted. The mystery of this has been described as
being saints and sinners simultaneously. At the same time we are holy ones,
pure and in the grace of God as we stand before Him on account of His Son even
as we are still wrapped up in our sinful flesh, the Old Adam which is
constantly rebelling against God’s grace and sinning against Him.
Do you sin? Yes, daily. You are in a constant state of being a sinner.
You are by nature sinful and unclean. In His grace and mercy, God does not
count this against you. He looks at you and does not see one who is stained and
unclean but one who is holy and pure and righteous. How is this so? It is
because when He looks at you He sees His Son. He sees you robed in the
righteousness of His holy, pure, unstained Son. You are a saint and a sinner.
Simultaneously.
On All Saints Day this is the central thought. If you were to go away
from here with the notion that as long as you are seeking to improve then
you’re being a good saint, you would miss the entire point of what it means to
be a saint. Not that you shouldn’t seek to improve. That should go without
saying. But that you do doesn’t make you a saint. You are a holy one of God
because of Christ and what He has done for you, not what you continue to do.
In fact, the whole notion of trying to suppress your sinful nature goes
against this fact of God declaring you a saint. Your sinful nature doesn’t need
to be suppressed, it needs to be slain! Drown that sucker! That’s what repentance
and daily dying and rising are all about. That’s why each day you arise to the
knowledge and joy that you are Baptized. Begin the day making the sign of the
cross on your forehead and your heart in the Name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. This sign points you to your Baptism. The sign of
the cross points you to what happened in Baptism. You were slain, crucified,
drowned. Your sinful flesh was joined with Christ in His death and you were
then raised to new life, joined with Christ in His resurrection.
This is each day. Each day you die and rise. Each day you wake as a
sinner who needs to be slain. Each day you are raised to new life in remembering
your Baptism, that instance when you were made a holy one, a saint.
The Old Testament reading today talks of impressing the Word of God
upon our children and ourselves. His Words are varied, of Law and Gospel. We
talk of them while we’re on the way, we write them on the doorposts of our
homes, we make them a part of us, of our daily lives. This doesn’t begin at the
moment our children are able to understand and comprehend rational and logical
thought. It begins from Baptism. We Baptize them and then nurture and sustain
them by the Word of God.
And do you know what happens when we do this? Something amazing.
Something we might never expect if we look at things the way we often do.
Something we would never fully appreciate if we were to determine how these
things ought to work. It’s so amazing that we often miss it because when we
look for amazing things from God we too often think in terms of spectacle.
What happens is that they hear. This is the amazing work of God. They
hear. Now parents do well to note a difference between hearing and listening.
Our kids can hear the words we say but too often don’t listen. Too often we
adults fall into the same trap. We hear what we want to hear from others
instead of actually listening to them. There is a lot of wisdom in this and we
would do well to take this to heart.
But this is not what we’re talking about here. Note well that in the
Old Testament reading it does not say, “Listen, O Israel.” The word is very
specifically ‘hear’. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” This
is the amazing work of God. If God were going to tell us how to become saints
He would have said, “Listen up people!” Moses would have said to the people,
“Listen, O Israel!” But he didn’t. He said ‘hear’. The work of listening is our
work. As stated before, we are wise to listen. To pay attention. To take to
heart what is being said. But when it comes to being a saint, don’t try to make
it happen. Don’t rely on your work of listening or improving or whatever other
bright idea you have.
Hear.
That’s how saints are made. By hearing. Paul said it in Romans, “faith
comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ.” He didn’t say ‘listening’.
He didn’t say by doing something. He said by ‘hearing’. This is amazing. It is
the amazing work of God. He is saving you, making you holy, producing faith in
you by what He does. Namely, speaking it into you. This is exactly what
happened in your Baptism. As the water was poured on you the words of Christ
were spoken. And something amazing happened. You heard. You were saved by
hearing. You were declared a saint of God, a holy one, because those words
penetrated your eardrums and went straight to your heart.
Holy ones are hearing ones.
When the scribe in today’s Gospel reading asked Jesus what the greatest
commandment was Jesus didn’t jump straight to the part about loving God with
all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and the part about loving your
neighbor as yourself. If He had, well, it would have been meet, right, and
salutary being as He’s God. But amazingly, He didn’t. He was asked to quote a
commandment. The greatest commandment. What He gave was a statement of how you
are made a saint: hear. Jesus quoted the words of the Old Testament reading,
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
Jump straight to the commandment if you wish; talk all you want about
loving God; loving Him with all your heart, and with all your soul, and will
all your strength, and with all your mind; talk about how you must listen to
Him; about how you must follow Him; how you must serve Him. But if you do
before you have heard you have done it in vain. Holy ones are hearing ones. You
are made a saint by hearing and you live by faith. That means you live as a
saint by hearing. Hearing the Word. Listening to it, yes, of course. There’s no
point in hearing the Word of God if you’re not going to pay attention. If you
find your mind drifting you might need a kick-start and get focused back on the
task of listening, taking to heart, engaging with the Word. But this is not at
the heart of being a holy one.
Hearing is. Hearing ones are the ones who are holy. The saints are the
ones who hear. In other words, the saints are the ones who stand in the presence
of God not of their own worthiness or on account of something they have
accomplished. No, they stand before God as holy solely because they stand under
the mercy. They have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. They stand as holy
ones because God spoke this holiness, this righteousness, this forgiveness,
this salvation, into them. Holy ones are hearing ones.
This can be seen by the way God works. What do we believe happens when
we partake of the body and blood of our Lord in His Holy Supper? We believe He
forgives us. Does He do so on the basis of what we do? On the contrary, it is
on the basis of His Word being spoken, just as it was in our Baptism. It’s
exactly the same thing. It’s the Gospel that saves us, makes us saints. In Baptism
it’s water that’s connected with this Word of the Gospel, in the Lord’s Supper
it’s bread and wine that’s connected with the Word of the Gospel. That is what
you hear. He speaks, you hear. He speaks into you, you are the passive receiver
of His amazing work of salvation, of making you a saint.
Hearing ones recognize that they are holy ones. They recognize they are
holy by grace, as a gift, purely by the mercy of their Lord, that they are,
simply, hearing ones. They recognize the joy to hear their Lord. They rejoice
in the many opportunities their Lord gives them to make known to others the
salvation they have received by hearing. They give thanks their Lord calls them
into a fallen world where they can serve others and where others too have the opportunity
to hear and be saved.
They recognize, by grace, that they are saints in exactly the same way
as the saints who have gone before them are, by grace. By hearing. The saints
in heaven have gone before us and await as we do the glorious day when Christ
will come again to call us to join with them in the everlasting Banquet in
which we will hear our Lord speak to us and lavish His love and grace on us.
In the meantime we hear here on earth. We gather around this altar
hearing our Lord say to us, Take, eat, this is My body; take, drink, this is My
blood. We gather around the altar at this rail. When you look at it you see
that it forms a half circle because there’s the wall that prevents it from
continuing on to form a full circle. And yet, because we are those who are
hearing ones we recognize that this isn’t simply a feature of the church’s
architecture but rather of a visual sign of what is happening at this altar.
What is happening is that the holy ones of God here on earth are gathering with
the angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven to hear and receive
from their Lord. We kneel at this half of the circle knowing that the part that
is unseen is occupied by the saints who have gone before us, holy ones. Holy
ones as we are. Hearing ones now and always. Amen.
SDG
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