SERMON FOR ALL SAINTS’ DAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2020

          Luther and his followers had to reform the understanding of sainthood. In one of the charter documents of the Lutheran movement we find this statement: “Our confession approves giving honor to the saints. This honor is threefold. The first is thanksgiving: we ought to give thanks to God because he has given examples of his mercy, because he has shown that he wants to save humankind, and because he has given teachers and other gifts to the church. Since these are the greatest gifts, they ought to be extolled very highly, and we ought to praise the saints themselves for faithfully using these gifts just as Christ praises faithful managers (Matt. 25:21, 23). 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 (Rom. 5:20). The third honor is imitation: first of their faith, then of their other virtues, which people should imitate according to their callings” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article XXI, The Invocation of the Saints) .

          Saints instruct us and inspire us because they are forgiven sinners. The proof of their holiness is not first and foremost a life of good works and honorable ways; it is their dependence on God’s mercy. Peter betraying Jesus in the courtyard, the desperate thief beseeching the Lord from the cross — these are exemplary Lutheran saints, remembered and revered because their stories show us the depth of God’s grace and give us hope. If they can find forgiveness, then surely so can we. If Christ keeps faith with them in their shame, we can trust him to be there for us when we fall.

          The Lutherans were adamant that while we are to honor the saints, we are not to pray to them. There is nothing in Scripture, they argued, that teaches us to call on the saints as intermediaries or plead for their help. “For there is only one single reconciler and mediator set up between God and humanity, Jesus Christ” (1 Timothy 2:5). Here the Reformation parted ways with centuries of piety and practice in the church.

          The cult of the saints has its roots in the Roman experience of patronage. The common people    had minimal social influence and political power, and so they depended on the favor of those of superior standing for protection. Such a patron could help remedy injustices and mitigate punishments. What these patricians accomplished on their behalf in the earthly realm, the saints offered in the courts of heaven, where their sins would weigh heavily against them in the scales of divine judgment. So people prayed for the saints’ redemptive intervention.

          As this practice became more and more deeply established in the lives of the faithful, it made sense to have not only feast days for individual saints but also one specific day to honor the indebtedness of the church on earth to the whole company of saints, gathered around the throne of God, pleading on its behalf. As the historian Alan Jacobs points out, “. . . we do not know who all the saints are. No doubt men and women of great holiness escaped the notice of their peers, but are known to God. They deserve our thanks, even if we cannot thank them by name. So the logic went, and a general celebration of the saints seems to have begun as early as the fourth century, though it was not until 400 years later that Pope Gregory III actually designated the first day of November as the Feast of All Saints” (Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History, 71).

          Although there was no denying that all had sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, there was still a hierarchy within the ranks of the faithful. Some accrued an abundance of grace and with that came the power to make their prayers persuasive, their interventions effective on behalf of those with no claim to holy distinction of their own. No wonder the common Christian was devoted to the saints!

          Sometime in the late 10th or 11th century a second celebration was introduced: the Feast of All Souls on November 2. It’s a strange story. A man showed up one day at the Benedictine monastery of Cluny in eastern France. He was returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when he was shipwrecked. He ended up on a desolate island in the Mediterranean, inhabited only by a devout hermit. This holy man told the castaway that there was a chasm on the island from which one could hear the groaning and wailing of tormented souls. The hermit had also heard the complaints of the demons in charge that the suffering of their prisoners was greatly lessened by the prayers of the faithful. These demons denounced the monks of Cluny in particular. The souls in torment begged for their prayers specifically because they were so effective.

          After hearing this story, the abbot established a day devoted to prayer for the souls who, while not damned, had not entered into blessedness and required help to do so. All Saints’ aristocracy of the holy ones on November 1 now gave place to All Souls’ democracy of the faithful on November 2. Alan Jacobs describes the celebrations as matching bookends: “As the pilgrim’s story makes clear, there are suffering souls who depend on the ordinary mass of the faithful just as the ordinary mass of the faithful depend on the saints. While the prayers of the pious monks of Cluny held special powers, no prayer by any Christian is useless. Some are stronger than others, but all can pull on the same rope, and every little bit of energy helps the cause” (Ibid., 72). Everyone who received could also give.

          It seems to me the Lutherans reformed All Saints in the spirit of All Souls. They rejected purgatory and its torments. No one languishes in some dreaded way station to paradise, dependent on the prayers of others to secure their release. But they magnified the equality that undermines every attempt to separate “us” from “them”. There is no saint who is not also a sinner. There is no sinner who cannot be a saint. We all depend on God’s mercy, and that mercy flows freely to all. Amen.