Using our Sainthood for Love and Justice

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the Savior of the world Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Some of my earliest memories took place within the walls of my home church – Spring Garden Lutheran in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. The people there who make up the congregation are a lot like the good folks here – many of them farmers, many of them compassionate, and their favorite conversation topic revolves around either, “Well, the forecast doesn’t look too good”, or “Geez Louise, I think we have enough rain now.” Growing up on a farm, being faithful to ones’ church and community was raised hand in hand with an honest work ethic. Going to church was a family affair – we would finish chores in the morning in order to slide into the back pew promptly at 10:30, with my grandparents always seated a few rows ahead of us. I grew up listening to my grandmother’s clear Norwegian soprano voice as she sang her favorite hymn “Beautiful Savior”, and would watch tears slip down her cheeks when we sang “Borning Cry”. Throughout all of it, every ordinary Sunday morning, though, there was a lesson: the sacred matters. Being in community matters. Our voices, individual and together, matter. You matter to us and you matter to God – and these are lessons that have sustained me in dark and difficult seasons. My pastors, Nick and Cindy Fisher-Broin, never shied away from difficult questions from us Sunday School and confirmation students – about life, about death, and about life beyond death. In both growing up, and now in my adulthood, I give thanks for the people who had a part in instilling the faith, both living and dead. Think for a moment to yourself – who are those people for you? Who has imparted their vision of faith or their thinking about God, which has formed you into who you are today?

Today is All Saints’ Sunday, where the majority of the Christian Church around the world remembers those stories of faith from those who have gone on before, and cherishes the stories of those still living. In All Saints’ Sunday, we remember the wideness of our Christian tradition – from the very beginning of creation up until now and even into beyond our present moment. God has been active in history through the hearts of millions and billions of faithful people who have brought good news into this world and lived in the way of Christ: healing the sick, caring for the lonely, and building community in spite of isolation. Today, we reflect upon what it means to be a saint. So often, when I think of saint, I think of people who are long dead, who lived lives that changed the course of the Church: Paul, the disciples, Church fathers like Origen, Tertullian, reformers like Martin Luther or John Calvin. It is a bit more unusual for us to think of saints as more recent: Jim Simonson, Ruth Garnatz, Muriel Kulsrud, Delores Kiehne, Daniel Shanks, Larry Bangs, or Kari Schultz. Their lives, in the same way, revealed something more to us about what it means to be a person of faith as they valued community, family, and love of church and creation. Their lives taught us how to value the divine, the transcendent, and this particular moment. They lived their lives in ways that reflected the love of God and the love of Christ for each and every one of us, and now live in the fullness of their baptismal promises, rejoicing in life that defeats death.

This Sunday, I would encourage us to also think of ourselves, who are still on our earthly pilgrimage, as saints. Martin Luther is famous for his teaching “simul justus et peccator”, or the dynamic that we as human beings are both simultaneously sinner and saint – we have the capacities for good as well as for harm, and we live in that tension every moment of our lives. I think we are good at recognizing our sinfulness – there’s a reason that we practice weekly confession and forgiveness as a whole congregation, and we keep up with world events – there’s a whole lot of evil out there. Yet, oftentimes we don’t think ourselves to be saints – I know I don’t – because I haven’t lived the kind of history-altering, church-altering life that a person given sainthood typically does. I think, on this All Saints’ Sunday, it’s time to throw that notion out the window and for us to claim our sainthood in the midst of our imperfect lives. What if we committed to living fully in the ways of Jesus – radically loving, welcoming, healing, teaching, feeding, and sharing – so that we might do our part to live into our freedom? God calls us, throughout all of Scripture, to be free to serve our neighbors, free to love our fellow earthly sojourners and ourselves, and free from the threat of fear, danger, and harm.

Our Gospel text today from the Gospel of Luke does a really beautiful job of lifting up the reality of sainthood, because it captures conditions that human beings have experienced and felt since the beginning of time. The Beatitudes in chapter 6 of Luke’s Gospel is a beautiful framing of Jesus’s teachings, which focus on love and humility rather than force and exaction. The kingdom of God is nothing less than a major reversal: the poor inherit the kingdom, the hungry are filled, those who weep will laugh. Conversely, the rich will sent away, those with full bellies will know hunger, those who are laughing will one day weep. This text always strikes me, because I find myself in both the categories of blessing but also woe – I have wept, but I have also laughed. I imagine I am not alone in this experience of trying to understand what this text means. I believe that Jesus, in this teaching, is desiring for us to tread lightly in our human experience, and be mindful of how we carry ourselves, always leaning into the power and truthfulness of love and mercy. The last few lines call us to consider what radical hospitality looks like: “Love your enemies…bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Now, I want to be abundantly clear: this does not mean that anyone should be forced to endure abuse or harm or hatred for the sake of fulfilling a religious mandate. I don’t believe that these verses call us to live in situations that are life-threatening or harmful. Rather, I think that Jesus is calling us think about love, goodwill, mercy, prayer, and blessing, in ways that cover the multitudes of our human experiences and thus widen how we understand God’s love, beyond our own capacities for love. Love looks like many things in this text: lifting up the poor, feeding those who hunger, but also speaking a word to unjust and immoral power – those who laugh at the expense of others, those who are full of injustice or harm against others; to them will be brought woe and condemnation. This, the very fullness and complexity of our lives, in our great capacity to seek love as mercy but also love as justice rendered, is sainthood. This is the reality that God calls us to live in, and this is the lineage that we honor today in remembering the lives of those who have gone on before us.

Might we continue, this day and all days, to remember the power of our sainthood, and use it for good, love, and justice. Today, as we celebrate All Saints’ Sunday, so too we celebrate a baptism – Kendall Brekke is being welcomed as one of the newest members of God’s family, where her life will be sealed with the Spirit and marked by the cross of Christ forever. Together, across all generations, let us continue in the way of Christ’s love, and in the reality of our sainthood, that the ways of sin, death, and pain will be no more. Let us carry the lessons we have learned from those who have gone before us, and cherish the stories of those still with us, because by God’s power we can begin to transform our world into greater justice and mercy. Blessed be the memory of all of our saints, and thanks be to God for the life and community we share. Amen.