Sermon for the Feast of All Saints
BEHOLD, A GREAT MULTITUDE
THAT NO ONE COULD NUMBER
Theme: Worship is not only for you. Worship also for whom you will leave behind
when you die.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen. In today’s first reading, St. John peeked into heaven:
I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every
nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne
and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,
and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the
throne, and to the Lamb!”
Dear Christian friends:
You frequently hear me tell you, both from the pulpit and in everyday
conversations, that it is important for you to be regular and faithful in your
worship attendance. I habitually say these things to you for your individual
benefit and for the sake of your Christian family:
· Skip worship and you skip the miracle of resurrection and life that
Jesus pours out for you and your loved ones here.
· Fail to gather here and you fail to receive the many assurances of
forgiveness and peace that your Lord Jesus relentlessly piles upon you and upon
your neighbor during the course of the liturgy.
· Miss Holy Communion, and you miss the most important meal of the week.
You might get the impression, hearing from this pastor in particular, that
worship is all about YOU, what YOU receive from Jesus, and how YOU benefit from
being here. I will not apologize for that. If the only thing I managed to
accomplish in the past nine years was to help you to know and to believe that
Jesus is the one who truly serves you here in worship (and not the other way
around) I have no regrets.
More work needs to be done concerning the way you love and serve your
closest and dearest neighbors here in worship. Stated another way, your
faithful attendance in worship to gives great assurances and consolations to
your dear loved ones and your fellow Christians. After you have died, your
mourners will carry these consolations in their hearts and minds for the rest
of their lives.
Today is All Saints Day. Today we remember with joy all those who have
gone before us in the Christian faith, and who have now joined that “great
multitude no one could number, from every nation.” As you think about those
Christians who were closest to you who have now died in the faith, what gives
you the greatest joy and the sweetest comforts concerning them? Don’t tell me
it was their sense of humor, or their love for the outdoors, or any of the
other things you commonly read in obituaries. What gives you joy and
consolation at the memory of your Christian dead? The memory of their faith in
Jesus does.
· You remember their favorite Bible stories and their memorized verses
that they frequently repeated.
· You remember their prayers at the table, even when they ate alone and
thought no one was watching.
· You remember how they taught Sunday School or served as usher or lent a
hand when the church building needed repairs.
· You remember how they sang the hymns, especially at Christmas.
· You remember them sitting in these pews, or in other pews in other
buildings.
Today is All Saints Day. Today we rejoice, but not merely that our Christian
dead are now in heaven with Jesus. We also rejoice because these departed loved
ones of ours lovingly let their Christianity be known to us. They did this
through the words and deeds that our God miraculously produced in them through
His powerful Word.
On the other side of the coin, how do you handle the memory of those Christians
whose faith was not nearly so apparent to you? What comforts do you have
concerning those whom you want to think were Christian, but you are not really
certain? You want in the worst way for them to be in heaven, but you cannot
speak about it with certainty because they never put forth much effort making
their faith known to you. What do you do with them?
I know what you do because I do it too: you grasp at straws. You search your
memory and you cling to even their smallest expressions of faith. Whenever I
visit a deathbed, I search for the evidence of Christian faith and I gather up
every shred I can find.
· I once prayed the funeral liturgy for a woman whose one and only
evidence of faith shown to me was that she squeezed my hand when I spoke God’s
promise of forgiveness to her in Christ.
· I buried a man in the Christian faith because I asked him, “Do you
believe this?” (John 11:24) and he nodded his head with nearly his last bit of
strength—and that is all I ever got from him.
· Another man received a Christian funeral from me because, not long
before he died, he interrupted his barrage of profanity long enough to tell me
he truly believed in Jesus and he knew he could have done things differently
with his life.
In each of these cases, I would have loved to have more—more assurances of
faith, more expressions of love for Jesus, more good deeds of Christian
charity, more to hold onto as I grieve their deaths. You know what I am talking
about because you also have suffered deaths such as these. How much happier
would you be today if your Christian dead had been careful and pointed about
showing the Christian faith to you while still in this life?
I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every
nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne
and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,
and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the
throne, and to the Lamb!”
Our heavenly Father is exceedingly rich in His grace toward us, and He has gone
to great lengths to gather up into salvation as many people as possible. Other
than God Himself, who knows from whence they all came, or even how they all got
there! The Lord Jesus lovingly and earnestly snatches people from the fire as
though by the hem of their clothing. The heavenly Father commits His angels to
the care and protection of His dear saints, so that travail of this life might
not become to great for them and they end up falling from the faith. God wants
you and all people to be baptized because He wants to give you His promise and
seal that you are His child and shall never be abandoned. He wants you and all
people to hear His words preached to you so that these miraculous Words can do
their good work of destroying doubt and unbelief. He wants to give you and all
people His miracle of Holy Communion because here is the body and blood of
Jesus, God’s very
best gift for you, given for the forgiveness of all your sins.
“A great multitude that no one could number…” Would to God that we see
many people—even unexpected people—in that great multitude on the Last Day.
Would to God that we see those people whom we lost before we could become even
more certain about their faith: the baptized child who was never brought to
confirmation; the wayward son or daughter who was trained in the faith but who
now seems too busy or too disinterested to be concerned with it; the angry
fellow Christian whose indignation prevents him from coming to worship; the
lazy or sidetracked or over-scheduled Christian who has more important things
to do. can it be that our God would jealously guard His precious gift of faith,
even against the temptations of our own flesh?
When people die on what seems to be the fringes of the Christian faith,
we will console ourselves as best as we can. We will pick up whatever
expressions of faith we can find, like gathering walnuts one by one. We will
give them Christian burial, but in the backs of our minds we will always wonder
and in the forefronts of our minds we will always wish for more.
On a lot of Sundays, you might get the impression from me that worship
is all about YOU, what YOU receive from Jesus, and how YOU benefit from being
here. I’m still not going to apologize for that. Worship is still primarily
about you. Just don’t forget your neighbor.
Today is All Saints Day. Do not let today merely be about those saints who have
gone before. Think also about those saints whom you will leave behind when you
die. What gift will you give to those who mourn your death?
· Don’t worry about a big inheritance. You probably should spend all your
money before you die, lest your heirs be tempted by a false god.
· Don’t content yourself merely to pass on your family genealogy and
folklore. Tall tales are likely only to grow taller.
· Teach your family—and your fellow Christians here with you—the
Christian faith. EVEN MORE THAN THAT, give your Christian loved ones beforehand
the assurances and comforts they will need when it comes time to mourn your
passage from this life.
o Tell them that you love them, but that you love Jesus your God and
Savior even more.
o Show them your hunger and thirst for righteousness by making regular
visits to the banquet of our Lord.
o Do not hide your sin from them. Wear it on your sleeve. Sin openly if
you must and repent all the more. Make no bones about the fact that you have
nothing apart from Christ, but that in Christ you have all things—including the
certainty of your place in the “great multitude no one could number.”
o Leave behind something more than a headstone. Show your fellow saints
who are still here on earth how to live and how to die—fully wrapped in and
never too far away from the gifts your God gives to you here in worship.
Make no mistake about it, my dear, baptized Christian! You have your place in
God’s eternity, earned for you by Christ, and no one can ever take it away from
you. You have been given God’s life in His miracle of Baptism; you have been
assured of your forgiveness of sins in the absolution and in the preaching of
the Church; you have been nourished by the Body and Blood of our Lord, by power
of which you shall without doubt live eternally.
Keep coming back for more. These things will serve you well so long as you
remain in this life. Praise be to God! These things in your ears and in your
mouth will also serve your Christian family and friends long after you are
gone.
___________________________________________________________________________
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