In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On All Saints’ Day, just like the name implies, we celebrate and give thanks to God for all of His saints. Unfortunately, this is another one of those areas in the church where there are a lot of misconceptions, especially about what it means to be a saint, and who really qualifies for that title. Lots of times people think of saints as some kind of “super Christians.” In order to get that distinction, you have to do something really special like work a miracle or live a completely sinless life. But that’s not what the Bible teaches us about the saints, and that’s not what it means to truly be one in the eyes of God.

According to God’s Word, every Christian, by virtue of their baptism into Christ, is a saint of God and one of His beloved children. In fact, that’s what the word “saint” literally means. It means someone who is “set apart” or “holy.” But what makes us “set apart” or “holy” in the eyes of God is not all of the good things that we do, but the perfect things that Christ has done on our behalf. Remember how Saint John describes the saints of God who are going into heaven from the book of Revelation. He says, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” So, it wasn’t something that they did that made them saints and got them into heaven. It was the fact that they were washed in the blood of the Lamb. God cleansed them from their sins and clothed them with the robe of Christ’s righteousness.

And, of course, the place where God does that according to His Word is in our baptism. As Saint Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6, “But you were washed, you were sanctified (which is the same word for sainted, by the way), you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”

So, being a saint doesn’t mean that you are some kinds of super Christian, who never has any trouble with sin. It doesn’t mean you’ve never done anything wrong before or and that you always perfectly resist temptation. That’s the other way that this term gets abused. Sometimes people will literally say things like, “I’m no saint,” as if, being a saint is the same thing as never sinning. But again, that’s not what it means. The saints aren’t those who don’t have any sin. They are those who mourn their sins and trust in Jesus for cleansing. 

Just look at how Jesus talks the life of God’s saints in our Gospel lesson today from Matthew chapter 5. This is from the beginning part of the Sermon on the Mount called the Beatitudes, which is one of the first public sermons that Jesus ever preached. And what does our Lord say about those who are truly best in His sight?  First, He says, “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” To be poor in spirit means that you recognize that you have no spiritual worth or value on your own. When you look at yourself, you don’t see a person who deserves good things from God, you see someone who’ deserves the opposite. You see a poor, miserable sinner, who is worthy of God’s temporal and eternal punishment. You see someone who couldn’t even come to faith on their own, and is dependent entirely upon Jesus to save you. But that’s what it looks like to be blest in the eyes of God! Those are the ones who are going to inherit the Kingdom. It won’t be the people who think that they can get there on their own. It will be those who rely on Christ to get them there.

And what else does Christ say in our reading? He says, “blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” What does the Bible teach us that we are supposed to mourn above everything else? Are we supposed to be sad that we don’t always have as much money as we want, or not as many friends as we’d like, or that we never get sick or suffer? Those aren’t supposed to be the things that we mourn over. In fact, the Bible says that we’re supposed to rejoice in those things. “We rejoice in our suffering,” Saint Paul says, “because we know that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.” So, we don’t mourn our trials. We mourn our sins. We mourn our failures to go through God’s testing and not doubt God’s love. We mourn our inability to do the things that God tells us to do, which makes Him angry, and invites His wrath and displeasure. We mourn the fact that it is our own sins which put Jesus on the cross, and required His loving sacrifice to save us. And when we mourn that about ourselves, and live that life of repentance, which Jesus calls us to, then Jesus says that we are blest. That’s what it looks like to be a saint.

As Christ also teaches us, a saint hungers and thirsts for righteousness. We recognize that we don’t have any righteousness of our own, and that even the good things that we do ultimately don’t come from us, but from God working through us. Everything in our life that’s worth anything is a gift that we receive from the Lord. Salvation is a gift. Good works are a gift. Going to heaven is a gift. Being blest by God, and getting to be one of His beloved saints, is a gift. It’s all a gift.

And here’s another thing that we learn about God’s saints from out texts today. It’s not only that their lives aren’t necessarily free from sin and failures, but that they also aren’t free from suffering. Sometimes when people think about the saints as super special people, that makes them think that they should have super special looking lives. But that isn’t true either. Not only might their lives not look special to the world around us, but they will be persecuted by the world for what they believe.

Again, what does Saint John tell us about all the saints in heaven? He says, “these are the ones coming out of the great tribulation.” All Christians, that is, every saint of Jesus Christ, can expect to endure some kind of suffering and hardship for being His disciple. We all can expect to pass through that great tribulation before we come into the glory of God’s kingdom. And only God knows what that will look like for each one of us. Maybe we’ll have to carry the cross of losing a loved one. Lots of us know what it’s like to feel that. Maybe we’ll have to carry the cross of always being sick and rarely feeling healthy. I know that there are people in this church that are carry that one right now. Or maybe we’ll have to carry the cross of being alone, and not having as many people around us to help us as it looks like others do. The crosses that God lays upon us are different for each one of us. But when we consider them in light of the cross that Jesus carried, then we can have the confidence to carry them with the assurance of faith. Because if Christ would bear our sins as His own, we know that whatever He gives us to bear will be ultimately work out for our salvation.

Even if the world around us doesn’t get it. Even if they are the cause of some of our suffering. What does Jesus tell us? He says, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” The saints of God don’t always look like they have a rewarding life here and now. But their reward is coming. By His grace, God Himself will give it to them when they die. For those who hold the faith, and by the power of the Holy Spirit cling to Jesus and don’t let go of Him, they will receive the crown of righteousness that does not fade away. That’s what God has promised for all His saints, including you.

And lastly, we should also say a few things about what the saints of God do. It’s true that our good works and our good deeds are not what makes us saints in the eyes of God. Again, the thing that does that is faith in Jesus. It’s the forgiveness of sins which Christ gives to us in our baptism and that we receive by believing His promise. But just because we don’t become saints because of what we do, that doesn’t mean that we don’t do anything at all. On the contrary, those who love Jesus and trust in Him for righteousness, devote their lives to showing forth that righteousness by loving and serving their neighbor. As the book of Revelation also tells us, “Their works do follow them.”

Nowhere is it more obvious that the deeds of the saints follow them than on All Saints’ Day. I don’t know about you, but when I sing the hymn “For All the Saints,” which is one of my favorite hymns, I’m not thinking about all of those pillars of the church like Saint Peter or Saint Paul. I’m not thinking about Martin Luther, Martin Chemnitz, or C.F.W Walther, I’m thinking about my mom and my dad. I’m thinking about the people that God put into my life so that I would know that Jesus loves me and that He died for my sins. They aren’t famous. They aren’t we’ll known. They don’t look special. But they are to me. Because I know how God used them to save me. I know all the wonderful things that He did through them to teach me the Gospel and bring me to faith.

And that’s who I want to be like. I want to be like them. I want to be like my mom who got cancer but never stopped putting her trust in Christ. I want to be like my dad who made sure that we always said our prayers before we want to bed at night. I want to be like my grandparents who took their kids to church and made sure they knew the Catechism, so that one day they could teach me. I want to live a saintly life like they did.

You and I can’t always see our own good works because we have a hard time seeing past our sin, and rightly so. True saints know that they don’t earn anything by what they do and that everything we do, we do by the grace of God. We don’t brag about our accomplishes as if we were the only who really deserve the credit. We don’t boast in ourselves, but in the Lord. But when we are doing that, God promises to use us to the glory of His name, just liked He’s used so many people before us.

Being a saint doesn’t mean that you are an extra special Christian, and it doesn’t mean that you have an extra special life. You don’t have to be able to work miracles. And you don’t have to be able to live a perfectly sinless life. What makes you a saint in the eyes of God is the blood of His Son, which covers your sin and washes you clean. That’s what it means to be set apart and holy before God. If you hunger and thirst for the righteousness that comes from Jesus, because you know that you don’t have any of your own, then you are already one of God’s saints. And no matter what kind of suffering or sadness befalls you, you know that God will bless you through it, just as He has blessed all the saints before you. That’s what it means to be a saint.

As the hymn writer says so well, “Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might; Thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight; Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true light. Alleluia! Alleluia!” May it be so for us, just as it was for so many of our loved ones before us. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.