God Comes Down To All the Saints

 All Saints Day

For All the Saints
Elizabeth Wang

Luke 6:20-31

November 6, 2022

 

I’m sorry I missed Reformation Sunday last week.

Thanks Rick, for covering for me again.

But if I was here, I would have wanted 

to get one fact across

that was so important to the Reformation

and Luther’s theology and what he said

he would not give up on, even on the threat

of death and exile

 

That is that God comes down to us.

We don’t ascend to God in our works or behavior.

God always comes down to us.

Our seminary professor illustrated it with a ladder.    

People trying to climb their way to God.

 

The Christian church spent almost a thousand

years telling people that we could climb and

claw our way up to God with enough prayers,

church attendance, good works,

and of course money.

But Luther said it doesn’t work that way.

The scriptures don’t say that, and God doesn’t

work like that. God comes down to us.

Just look at Jesus sermon on the mount.

Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry.

Blessed are the hated, excluded, reviled.

Blessed are you. By God and by Jesus.

 

Jesus didn’t say, “come on people,

work your way up here, pull yourself up by

your bootstraps, God wants you to live

your best life now. Climb that ladder.”

 

Jesus said Blessed are they.

And they are they because they are

ready to receive God when God

comes down to meet them.

 

On the other hand

Woe to the rich, the full,

the persistently happy and satisfied ones.

Woe to the ones who haven’t struggled

who haven’t mourned.

The ones who think they’ve got it

all buttoned up. Who think they’ve

successfully climbed that ladder to heaven.

They’re going to miss God.

Because God is down there with the

poor and the hungry and the hated ones.

And it’s a long fall down for the self-satisfied.

 

All Saints Day was originally a day to remember

those who had attained some sort of prestige

And had been declared “saints” by the Roman Catholic Church.

It was originally made to remember the people that had done it.

That had climbed their way up the ladder and achieved

blessedness for themselves

they believed to be just a few rungs below God and Jesus.

Definitely better than any one of us.

 

For those of us who grew up Catholic, maybe we remembered that.

They would take time in worship to talk about the lives

of particular Saints in glowing terms

talking about all they did and

all the things that made them so special.

They seemed perfect to me. So perfect.

 

I remember specifically as a girl growing up listening

To the priest talk about Elizabeth Seton.               

She was the first American to be canonized

as a saint in 1975 so they made a big deal out of it.

I remember them talking about all her accomplishments

the way she gave herself in service,

the way she adopted and raised 11 children,

how she became a nun, how she opened a home for needy children,

and the miracle she was responsible for

(because all the saints had to have caused some sort of miracle)

She seemed absolutely selfless and so perfect

And extremely serious.

 

I think the idea behind telling everyone about these perfect

examples was to show us something that we should aspire to be like.

What we might try to live up to,

what we could do if we applied ourselves spiritually.

How we too could work up that ladder.

But, it did not inspire me. It kind of did the opposite.

I remember sitting there and thinking,

I will never be that good.

I’m never going to be as serious as this woman seems.

And then when they got to the miracle, I tapped out.

Even though my parents acted like everything

I did was amazing and wonderful,

even at a young age, I was pretty sure I was never going to

be a party to a miracle and I wasn’t going to up

to even the next rung on that ladder.

Nope. This is never gonna be me. I will never live up to this.

Not even gonna try.

I don’t think I was alone in that.

 

Luther wasn’t crazy about that idea of saints either.

 

Luther rejected the idea that these people were somehow different

or contained special powers that they should be honored for. 

He thought that people should look up to other people

as examples of what faith could do.

 

But he didn’t think they had achieved some special

status or that they were some super-humans

worth venerating worth praying to or through.

He didn’t think they had climbed up the ladder to God.

 

Luther wrote:

“At whatever time God’s Word is preached taught,

heard, read, or pondered – there the person,

the day, and the work is hallowed.

Not on account of the external work

but on account of the Word, that makes us all saints.”

 

Luther thought that the thing that made a saint

Was being touched by God’s love in Christ.

We were made saints because God came down to us.

 

All of us who have experienced God’s

love, we are all saints. No matter what we’ve

done or haven’t done in our lives.

 

We were all saints 100%

And we are also sinners. 100%.

As human beings we can do nothing else.

We all sin. Everyone of us has fallen short of

God’s glory. Even Elizabeth Seaton and

all those who have been called saints.

We all have our difficult moments and

sometimes those times even outweigh the

good and holy and beautiful moments.

 

We need God’s grace and love.

We need God to come down to us.

And when we realize that need,

that’s when we know God the most.

 

I don’t think it does any service to white-wash life

and call it a saint. To show people

something that we can never attain

and then tell us we should all aspire to it.

It takes the honor and glory away from God and turns it onto us.

 

I was much more inspired to read about people

who have struggled with their faith and with the

world around them and still found God’s grace.

 

But take, for instance, Augustine of Hippo.        

He lived around the 300’s. He is considered one of the church fathers.

He was a prolific writer and was named a doctor of the church.

He was an influence for so many people and a great influence

On Martin Luther especially. He was a saint, but no one would

have thought he was perfect, least of all himself.

 

He wrote an autobiography of his life in which he was

very honest. He talked about sin and his own temptation,

He wrote about when he was young, being tempted by the pears in

a tree in someone else’s yard that he was not supposed to eat from.

 

He remembers he stole the fruit, not because he was hungry,

but because "it was not permitted."

His very nature, he says, was flawed.

"It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own error—

not that for which I erred, but the error itself.

From this incident he concluded the human person

is naturally inclined to sin, and in need of the grace of Christ.”

You can see why Luther liked him so much.

 

He struggled with his wants and desires.

Early in his life he lived with a woman and she had his child

and then his mother forced him to leave her so he could

marry a woman of better standing.

But he was so mournful about leaving her,

that he never got married.

One of his famous quotes was:

“Give me chastity and continence, only not yet.”

 

His other great quotes. (He has many)

“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.”

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”

“In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.”

 

This is a saint I can relate to.

I am very glad that Augustine wrote down

His thoughts and struggles in a book so

That we can’t sanitize his life.

I’m very glad that we don’t venerate certain people on this day,

but that we celebrate every life that has been touched by God.

 

Augustine and Luther both knew that their struggles

Did not make God love them any less.

Their struggles actually helped them to find and experience

Christ’s love more deeply in their lives.

 

There is no ladder to God or heaven.

God has come down to us.

The blessed, the woeful,  those

who have done great things and those who

have done less than great things.

That is what makes us saints.

 

We are not loved by God because we’re saints.

We are saints because we are loved by God.