Saints By God

 Sermon preached on All Saints' Sunday, November 3, 2024 at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, NY:  Isaiah 25:6-9, John 11:32-44

Last week we heard the story from Mark’s Gospel of Blind Bartimaeus, whose persistence got him an audience with Jesus. When Jesus called him, the Gospel writer tells us he leapt up and threw off his cloak.

And I talked about how we have cloaks we must throw off if we are to encounter Jesus and be ready to receive his mercy and grace.  Those cloaks we wear are often, I said, “cloaks of acceptability,” that we think hide our vulnerability or our shame.”

Let’s continue this thought today as we celebrate the Feast of All Saints.

The prophet Isaiah tells us this is an ancient idea, an ancient proclamation of good news.  Isiaah’s vision of the last days are of all people being drawn to a feast on the holy mountain.  There God will destroy the “shroud,” the cloak, that is cast over us all.

What does Isaiah see is this shroud, this cloak.  What does it seek to hide?  It is death itself.  It is the tears that this life brings. It is the disgrace we feel in this life, the shame we carry around for any number of reasons.

There’s an important difference between what the prophet Isaiah sees and what the story of Bartimaeus included.  Bartimaeus threw off his own cloak.  Isaiah sees that, in the end, it will be God who removes that cloak, that shroud. The Lord will take away the disgrace of his people.

The Letter to the Hebrews puts it another way, in two different places. Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters (2:11) and God is not ashamed to be our God (11:16).  In both cases this is not because of anything we have done, but that God has done for us.

I need to say a word about “shame.” These days shame has a bad name.  Some of that is deserved, especially when it is the shame we too easily cast on other people. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

I think it is true we could do without the need to shame other people into acting the way we want them to act, to be the person we want them to be.

But there is a place for feeling shame in any human being’s life. I do feel ashamed when I get something terribly wrong, especially when I hurt another person or creature, whether I intended to do so or not. Having no shame means having no conscience, and that can never be a good thing.

But it’s important that we understand what God’s intention is in regard to our shame.  God does not see it as the last word in our lives.  It is God’s intention to throw it off, to forgive, and to restore.

Now here is how this fits into celebrating All Saints.  Those we call saints are not people who have never done anything to be ashamed of.  We often talk about them as if that were the case.  The saints were those who got it right, who earned their status as examples of how to live a godly life.

Yet if you read their stories this is hardly ever true.  If the saints were those people who got it right, what they got right was their knowledge of God’s abounding love for them regardless of what they had done, for ill or for good.

The saints are the people who know that they could not make themselves saints, they could only seek the love of God, or, rather, to let the love of God seek them, because it is that love and that love alone, that made them right with God, right with one another, right with the world.

I suspect most of the people we have pictured around us today would have protested if someone suggested they were a saint.  They might have gone so far as to be offended that someone should call them that.

I don’t know 98% of the people pictured here, either in icons or in photographs, but I can tell you that every last one of them was wrong in believing they were not a saint.  They were right that they could not make themselves saints, Oh, very right indeed.  But they were wrong in thinking that was how it worked.

The saints of God were and are and always will be the objects of God’s amazing grace, God’s boundless mercy, God’s steadfast, unshakeable, love.

There is nothing we can do to make God love us.  There is, in fact, nothing we can do to make anyone love us. That is one of the great secrets of life.

Love is something we can only receive and let it beget in us the kind of love for God or for one another that expects nothing in return, that we totally, completely give away.

That’s how we participate in God’s project of throwing off the disgrace, wiping away the tears, and destroying the power of death forever.

Jesus called out to Lazarus, “Unbind him and let him go.”  It was the ultimate throwing off the shroud, the cloak.  And our response to God’s love should cause us to be making the same declaration. That is the great of those who have known God’s love, to cry out to another, “Unbind him, unbind her, and let her go.”  Let her, let him, throw off the cloak of acceptability and fall into the arms of the God of love.