All Saints Day 11/6/2011 149 Revelation
7:2-17 1 John 3:1-3 Matthew 5:1-12
Grace mercy and
peace to you from God our Father though our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our text today is the epistle lesson just read, especially these words,
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called
children of God; and so we are.” Thus
far our text.
Dear friends in
Christ. Today is All Saints Day, the day
we celebrate the lives of all our loved ones and friends who have died in the
faith over the last year. Each of us
knows several people that we cared about who have been lost over the last year. We have had friends who died from Cancer,
from heart problems, from sickness and other things. We have felt the sting of death, as it struck
our hearts with hurt and sorrow and loss.
Death seems to
fill our lives, whether it is the pictures of countless people dying in wars
around the world, or whether it is in our own close knit community, we are
surrounded by death. Every year more
people that we love leave this vale of tears, and every year, we are left
behind to mourn them and miss them.
Death is our lot
in life, one of the things that life assures us to happen. For just as we mourn those who have gone
before us, we know too that one day it will be our turn. Death will find us, we cannot escape it. One day our life will come to an end, and we
will be the one who is mourned, just as we mourned during our life.
The reason for all
of this pain and suffering is clear from scripture. “All have sinned and fallen short of the
glory of God,” St. Paul writes in last week’s text. “And the wages of sin is death.” From our very first father and mother, Adam
and Eve, the plague of death has gone on.
Genesis recounts life after life, “Adam lived 930 years, and he died. Seth lived 912 years, and he died. Noah lived 950 years, and he died. Abraham lived 175 years, and he breathed his
last and died.” They all were steeped in
sin, and they all died.
Friends, we
continue in that very tradition. We live
our lives, and “The length of our days is seventy years-- or eighty, if we have
the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass,
and we fly away” according to Psalm 90.
We spend our entire life trying to lengthen our life to save ourselves,
and we fail. We cannot escape death on
our own, because we cannot escape its root cause. For our sin is too great. In sin we were conceived, and in sin we will
die.
But as our text
today says, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should
be called children of God; and so we are.”
We are God’s children whom he cares for, whom he loves. And what a love it is that He has for
us. For even though we deserve a world
of death, of pain, and of sin, that isn’t what God promises us. He didn’t create us and then abandon us as
soon as we He gave us Christmas, the incarnation of his son in human flesh, to
save us from our sin. His Son came with
one purpose in mind. To bring the
Kingdom of God to us poor dead sinners.
This path involved
suffering for Jesus, suffering he didn’t deserve. It involved pain for Jesus, pain he didn’t
deserve. It involved sin for Jesus, sin
he didn’t commit. In fact all the worlds
sins, all my sins, all your sins, every last one of them were laid upon
Jesus. The sinless Son of God became the
greatest sinner ever, as your sin was washed upon him.
And then he killed
it. He died the death of sin on a cross
in Jerusalem. He gave up his life for
you, in your place, for your guilt. Jesus
died, and now you are free.
See what kind of
Love the Father has for us, that we should be called children of God, in the
blood of Jesus. You see, this is the
hope of our message today. This is the
goodnews for All Saints Day, that in Jesus death is not our end. In Jesus we have no end. For we now get what
we do not deserve, we get life forever in heaven. We get peace of being with Jesus and God
resurrected, made whole, forgiven with Jesus.
And so our first
reading pictures you and me, and all who believe in Jesus before the lamb of
God who takes away the sin of the world.
“No more shall they hunger, neither shall they thirst, the sun shall not
beat down upon them. For the lamb in the
midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and will lead them to springs of
living water, and God will wipe every tear away from their eye.” This is the gift God gives to those who trust
in his son.
And it is the same
gift that he gives to you. Today, you
have a foretaste of that feast. Today
you get to taste the heavenly banquet in the very presence of Jesus Christ. Here, with angels, and arch angels and all
the company of heaven, with all those loved ones you miss, with all those
people who are no longer on this earth, you eat bread and wine in which the
very person of Jesus exists. A little piece
of heaven on Earth. A promise of forgiveness. A reminder of where you will go when you
die. A blessing beyond all understanding
– all in a little piece of bread, and a little sip of wine.
Hear our text
again, and listen for the promises of heaven contained therein. “1See what kind of love the Father has given
to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are…Beloved, we are
God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that
when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies
himself as he is pure.” Happy All Saints
Day. Amen.
