SERMON FOR ALL SAINTS SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2019
     Last week I read a book well-suited to the back-to-back celebration of Halloween on October 31 and All Saints Day on November 1. The author is Greg Garrett, a faculty member at Baylor University, where, according to the blurb on the book jacket, “he teaches classes in fiction and screenwriting, literature, film and popular culture, and theology.” In his book, Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), he makes uses of materials from St. Augustine, Dante and Shakespeare to Batman and X-Men comics, television shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Game of Thrones, Fear Factor  and South Park, to name just a few, 114 movies, computer games, songs by the likes of Judas Priest, Madonna and Snoop Dog, and, oh yes, the Bible and the Koran. Professor Garrett explores the way our understandings of the afterlife are revealed in and shaped by sacred writ, high art and popular culture, and how these reflections on what is to come influence the way we live now. He discusses the contemporary fascination with ghosts, vampires and zombies, the widespread belief in angels, demons and the devil, and then he explores the various meanings of heaven, hell and purgatory at work in our culture. Professor Garrett reflects on the relationship between the dead and the living as portrayed in his wide array of popular sources. Think, for example, of Jacob Marley coming back from the dead to force Ebenezer Scrooge into repentance. Or the faithful praying for the holy souls to speed their release from Purgatory and entry into heaven, where then, they will return the kindness and offer their prayers on behalf of those still struggling along their earthly pilgrimage. Professor Garrett concludes:  “. . , the relationship between the living and the dead is fluid, not fixed. The dead need the living; the living need the dead. And all of us need to work through the trials and tribulations of our story in order to reach a happy ending, whatever that possibility might be” (p. 189).
     I am not advocating belief in either ghosts or purgatory. But I am convinced that on this All Saints Sunday, when we remember those who have died, we should think of the saints not as the “dearly departed” but as the “faithfully present.” Their ghosts don’t haunt us; their spirits dwell among us. At the time of the Reformation the church had built up a lucrative trade around the dead. No person still carrying the marks of their earthly sins could come into the presence of God and behold the Lord’s glory, and that was pretty much everybody. Given the vast difference between the divine and the human, the requirement of personal purity made common sense. As the 6th-century pope Gregory the Great stated, “a shoddy unfinished soul” is not prepared to meet God. Some form of suffering is required to purge the soul of blemishes. That reasoning, along with some slight scriptural evidence, gave rise to the doctrine of purgatory and its cleansing fires that prepare the dead for entrance into heaven. Hell and purgatory are similar in that both subject souls to punishment but with crucial differences. The souls of the damned suffer eternally in the fires of hell as punishment for their earthly sins, while the souls in purgatory endure their suffering for a set period of time so that they may ultimately be saved. Still, their torment is horrible, and they depend upon the living to help shorten the time they spend there. This is why the sale of indulgences, which so outraged Martin Luther, was such a money-maker for the church. You could buy an indulgence and have it credited to the account of a deceased loved one. It took time off their purgatorial sentence, although it is not clear how doing that furthered the process of their moral cleansing, which was the point of purgatory in the first place. Indulgences had earthly benefits as well. For example, some of the proceeds from the campaign that prompted Luther to write his 95 theses were used to build St. Peter’s in Rome. For the Protestant reformers, the traffic in indulgences represented the worst of works righteousness and ecclesiastical corruption. The grace of Christ was all sufficient, and saved was saved. There was no need for some intermediate state where the efforts of human beings, dead and living, were necessary to complete the process of redemption. The dead were safely in God’s hands, wholly beyond our reach, and so the lighting of candles and prayers for the dead, as well as the saying of masses in their memory and the purchasing of indulgences on their behalf were all done away with. These reforms aimed to keep the believer’s eye on the one and only thing necessary, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. To forego all the familiar rituals performed for those who had died, to simply walk away from the grave and leave them to their own devices in the courts of the Lord, was a powerful Protestant witness to their evangelical faith. But it also had the effect of setting a sharp boundary between the saints below and the saints above. The heavenly hosts at rest, the holy souls enduring the fires of purgatory and the believers on earth, fighting to keep the faith and resist temptation, no longer worked together as one church to bring everyone to the same blessed ending.
     Martin Luther argued that abuse does not do away with proper use. For example, the fact that there are drunkards does not mean that one should abolish wine, nor was getting rid of women the way to remedy male lust. One may apply the same principle to the saints. In one of the great documents from the Lutheran Reformation (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article XXI), Luther’s friend and colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, insisted that while it was wrong to worship the saints, we must surely remember and honor them because of their witness. He writes: “This honor is threefold. The first is thanksgiving: we ought to give thanks to God because he has given examples of his mercy . . . [W]e ought to praise the saints  . . . for faithfully using their gifts just as Christ praises faithful managers. The second kind of veneration is the strengthening of our faith. When we see Peter forgiven after his denial we, too, are encouraged to believe that grace truly superabounds much more over sin. The third honor is imitation: first of their faith, then of their other virtues , , , . “ Melanchthon faulted his Catholic opponents for their exclusive concern with the invocation of saints. That practice, he points out, is both illegitimate and wholly unnecessary. There is no need to seek from them the grace that Jesus so willingly and freely gives. The saints cannot save us, but they do surely help us. We don’t pray to them, but we can talk to them, making them present here and now as we reflect on their lives and feel again the power of their love. Imperfect people who knew what it is to be forgiven and to forgive. Cherished companions whose good works transformed our world, whose hope and generosity brought the kingdom of God near to us. They continue with us until the day we join them and receive our inheritance with all the saints in light. Then we too shall bless the living with our legacy of gratitude and grace. Amen.