Two Kinds of Saints                     P24c           November 4, 2007   

This is All Saint’s Sunday, and in a few minutes during the prayers of the church, we’re going to name all those who died since last year on All Saints Day. We will give thanks for their life with us. We will pray for their families and friends who mourn their absence. As we say their names and we hear the peal of the bell, we will remember that they are now in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ.  For me, this ritual action is one of the most meaningful ones we do in the year. As the bell rings, I’ll remember those whom I knew. I give thanks to God for all the chance to know and to serve each one. We call them all saints, but this evokes a question. What do we mean by “Saints?” There are two camps and with differing opinions on what we mean by the word “saint.” In one camp, we have those who think of a saint as one who led an exemplary Christian life, we call them the sanctified saints. The “sanctified saints” are those who were models of Christian life. They showed us the love of God in what they did, what they said, and how they loved the Lord.

For many churches, including Lutherans, there is a traditional list of recognized sanctified saints. St. Luke, St. Mark, St. Matthew, St. John are saints because of the gospel accounts that bear their name. Other sanctified saints include St. Francis of Assisi. We have a statue of St. Francis under the picture of Jesus in our narthex. The Catholic Church adds the list of saints from time to time. For instance, they will probably add Mother Theresa, if they haven’t done so already. She spent her life helping the poor in India.  The other camp sees the saints as those justified by the grace of Jesus Christ as his cross. This is what we can call the “justified saints.” Jesus forgave us at his cross, and promises life to all who will follow him in his resurrection. So these justified saints are the forgiven of their sins who follow Jesus, and we can all hope that list includes our names, as well.

Martin Luther was one theologian who gave the topic of saints considerable attention. He proposed that we are simultaneously saints and sinners.

November 11, 2007 I Know That My Redeemer Lives 24th Sunday After Pentecost

Do you know the story of Job? He was a really good man, a righteous man. He was successful, wealthy, admired and respected. He was the kind of person everyone wants for a father, a brother, a neighbor or friend. The scriptures tell us he was richly blessed by God, until everything changed and his life became FUBAR. Everything went bad, really, really bad. He lost his wealth, lost his family, lost his health. The losses were given by God, according to the story, to find out if Job really trusted God, or was just another fair-weather believer. His story begs the question, ‘What is God doing when life is so unfair? Where is God when we do everything we’re supposed to do, and bad things happen to us?

After Job loss, the book of Job has verse after verse of conversations with family and friends trying to help him figure out where he went wrong. Most of the advice was very poor, and that made Job angry and depressed. He cried out to God, and in the middle of his angst and sorrow, Job screams out, “I know that my Redeemer lives.” What can we learn today from Job?

Job’s was like many people who say if you did the right things, and believed the right things, God would reward you with a happy life. It’s the message that says if you’re good, and you’ll get the goodies. Job heard that message over and over again. Job thought it was true, but suddenly it wasn’t true anymore.

The first thing we can learn here is that this false gospel of success has been around since the time of Job. In fact, that belief has been around since the beginning of human history. Since the time when humans first appeared on earth, the ancient people reasoned the gods rule the universe. Or in the case of monotheists like the Hebrews, one God rules the universe. And those gods like people to appease them through their offerings and platitudes.

You can hear that message in all the early human religions. Many were an attempt to ward off the evil spirits and attract the good spirits. They wanted their gods to make their crops grow and give them victories over their enemies. They were hoping their god and their offerings were better than other gods and other religions.

This has infected Christianity over the centuries by luring people into a particular church and follow a charlatan guru by promising that if they give them their offering, and do what their guru says, they will pay off more than any of the others gurus.

Today, that desire is still deep within us. Every watch children arrange their teddy bears on the bed just so in order to keep the monsters safely in the closet? At a ball game, have you ever seen grown men and women wear their rally caps? They wear their baseball caps upside down hoping it will help them win. Have you ever been to a craps table, and watch the people blow on the dice, hoping the gods of gambling will let them win the big one? This behavior is cute in children; it’s silly for adults. But when it gets into the Christian faith, it’s deadly.

Why? Because it tangles us in desperate attempts to earn our redemption from a god who doesn’t exist. There’s only one God, and only one Jesus Christ. Only through his suffering can our suffering be reconciled. Those other gods cut us off from God from the reconciling power of the forgiveness we have in the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

I don’t mean to be hard on Job. That was the religion in which Job was brought up. It’s what many of his friends and family believed. No, it was not a correct understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac Jacob or Moses. But it was the popular understanding of many in Israel and many others. You have to sympathize with him for thinking that way.

The problem is there’s just enough truth in all that religion to make it sound right. It’s true that good deeds do have good consequences; sinful acts open the door to evil and death. Most of us could do a lot better if we tried harder. Much of the bad things that happen are things we do to ourselves. We are our own worst enemies. All that is true. The problem comes when we try to use our good works to earn God’s love. And we all do it, I suppose.

After listening to all the bad advice, Job finally comes to the truth of the gospel. This morning we hear that gospel by way of Job’s surprising confession: Job, while literally watching his life fall apart and his skin fall off, crying out, “I know that my redeemer lives.”

What in the world did Job mean? A redeemer is someone who can bail us out of a mess, regardless of whose fault it was, or purely an accident. The redeemer is like a hero who comes to our rescue in our moment of desperation. Somewhere out there, says Job, is my redeemer. What happened to me cannot be God’s final judgment. But somewhere out there, my redeemer will help me.

Job’s friends and his wife were no help at all. His wife told him to curse God and die (2:9). Somehow I have this picture that they were in the kitchen fighting, a picture of her drinking heavily as she said that. Sounds to me like she was even more depressed than Job.

Did you ever know someone who is so caught up in despair, she or he just wants to give up on life? Shakespear’s Macbeth is like that. One of his famous lines is “Life is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Those who have no hope of a redeemer often give up on life, but Job won’t go there. He said, “I know my redeemer lives.” Everything I thought I knew about life may be wrong, but I know that God is good. I won’t let go of God. I know that my redeemer lives!

Job lived long before Jesus showed up to redeem us from death and despair. Today, we know what Jesus did. We know that Jesus is our redeemer of God who lives eternally. He taught us about the kingdom of the living God. His enemies killed him on the cross, but on the third day, God raised him from the dead. In his resurrection, we know that or redeemer lives.

In our gospel today Jesus had a debate with the Sadducees who denied the resurrection. Unlike the other Jews, they believed that the only sacred scripture was Moses books of the law. That would be only the first five books of our Bible. They omitted the book of Job and all the other writings in what we know as the Old Testament. The Sadducees believed that if there really were a resurrection, then God would have told Moses, and Moses would have put it into their Bible. Since their books of Moses didn't say anything about it, they reasoned that there is no resurrection of the dead.

The Sadducees asked Jesus a hypothetical question. Suppose a man had a wife when he died. According to their tradition, his brother had to marry that wife in order to keep the dead brother’s name alive. And then he died, and in time all seven of his brothers died. According to their tradition, the woman was passed from one brother to another like a used car.

Now I have to ask, why would a brother dare to marry her if all his other brothers died? But that’s not part of this hypothetical question. The question was, whose wife would she be in the resurrection?

Jesus was not impressed by their clever question. He tells them flat out, they are wrong, because they don’t know scriptures nor the power of God. Those who rise from the dead do not get married because they are like angels who never die. They are children of the living God and children of God’s resurrection.

This means that the business of marrying and having families are necessary gifts God gave us for life in this world. Otherwise, the world is lonely and filled with despair about life and death. But for children of the resurrection, there is no anxiety about overcoming death. There is no loneliness, no death no reason for marriage and rasing families as we know them in this world. In the resurrection, we are all-in-all, everything is everything, and all will celebrate life with the living God.

The important thing to grasp is that God the Father is a living God. In God, there is no such thing as death. He gives a quote from the book of Exodus: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

Jesus’ point was that when God spoke to Moses, God tells him that he is the God of the three patriarchs who were dead at the time. The point is this. To God, they are not dead, but alive. This is the good news of the gospel. All who belong to God are alive to God. They may be dead to us, and that’s a huge problem for us. But they are alive to the living God. Jesus is trying to help them and us understand the implications of the resurrection.

Let me put this way: for us being is the opposite of being dead. We’re not dead, so we must be alive. For God this is simply not the case. For God being alive has nothing to do with being dead. Being alive is a matter of belonging to the living God, in spite of anything that happens to us.

As far as I can tell, this really is the only reason to worship here today. By our baptism, we belong to the living God. We worship and give offerings to God because we know that this is where God shows up. Our redeemer lives, and no matter what we’ve done, what has happened, or how we feel at the moment.

We didn’t come here to satisfy God’s ego so that God will be nice to us. We are set free from the terrible burden of hoping that if we live right God will reward us with life. We can say with Job’ “I know that my redeemer lives!” We came to worship to hear God’s good Word, to taste God’s goodness and mercy, and to surround ourselves who belong to the living God. Here and now, God’s Son comes down to us in his Holy Supper, and we can receive his steadfast love. He forgives all our sins. Welcome to the communion of saints. AMEN