(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Hallo-What?”, originally shared on November 2, 2022. It was the 238th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What does it mean to say that something
is holy, and what does that have to do with everything that is missing in our
culture? Today, we’re going to find out.
This coming Sunday is All Saints Sundays for millions of Christians
around the globe.
I want to
start with a word about the world series.
The Houston Astros and the Philadelphia
Phillies are playing, and I think I am safe in saying that most Los Angeles
Dodgers fans are rooting for the Phillies. Why? Because the Astros are cheaters!
They cheated to beat the Dodgers in the 2017 World Series and they received very
little in negative consequences. They continued to cheat into the 2018 season
and nothing bad happened as a result. It’s not fair! Cheaters deserve to be punished
or at least be required to do good to make up for the bad.
Here’s the problem, though.
When it comes to Sin, we all have sinned and we deserve only punishment. God’s
response, though, is the cross. God offers grace. We can’t make up for what
we’ve done. We don’t even know the full reach of all that we have done. All we
can do is to turn around, to repent, to experience the gift of God that enables
us to experience new life because of God, and to live the Christian life in
response to God’s action with gratitude.
Martin Luther, the 16th
century Church reformer, said that Christians are, at the same time, saints and
sinners. We are sinners by our rejection of God and we are saints because of
the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.
We are sinners, and God is
holy. Yet God has called us to be his saints.
How can this happen except from
God? God who is holy. God who is outside of Creation, as its Creator, yet
intimately involved in it.
Nothing would exist if God did
not exist. God created everything out of nothing. This is not God’s superpower;
this is God’s nature. God is wholly other. God is divine. Yet, much of the
world acts as if God is a creation of the world. That, and Jesus’ answer, is at
the heart of the reading from the Gospel of John for this coming Sunday, All
Saints Sunday.
All Saints Day is always November 1st. All Saints Sunday is
the first Sunday after All Saints Day.
Are you Roman Catholic, or Anglican or Episcopalian,
or a member of any of the many Orthodox churches? Then you might say that All
Saints Sunday is a day to honor all the saints. That is, all people who the
Church has recognized as those whose lives were and are divinely empowered and
set apart to illustrate the power of God in a special way. So, these Christians
might refer to those recognized saints as St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Joan of
Arc, Santa Monica, or San Dimas, depending on their primary languages.
Are you a Lutheran, or a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a
member of a non-historical church, or any of the dozens of Protestant or
Pentecostal denominations? Then you might say that All Saints Sunday is a day
to honor all the saints. That is, all baptized believing Christians of all
time. You might point to passages in the Bible such as where Paul writes, in
his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 1, verses 1-3,
Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and
our brother Sosthenes,
2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in
Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place
call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and
ours:
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Or in Romans 1:7,
7 To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are
called to be saints:
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Or, in Ephesians 1:1-2,
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the
will of God,
To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Martin Luther believed that we
are all saints because we have been made righteous through faith, by God’s grace,
and in baptism. Only those mentioned and described in the Bible as a
part of the history of salvation could be given the honorific title of “Saint.”
So we say “St. Matthew” and “St. Luke”, but just “Francis” and “Joan”.
You know those round glowing things above
the heads of certain people in Christian art? That’s right, “halo’s”. They are
there to show that the person under them is a saint, or holy, or hallowed, as
in “hallowed be thy name”. Thy were, and are, called holy only by the grace of
God.
All Saints Day was once called, therefore,
All Hallows Day. The night before this day was All Hallows Eve, shortened over
time, to Halloween.
People during this time in the Middle Ages
believed that the forces that defy God were allowed to come out on the night
before All Hallows Day to try to scare Christians.
Christians would dress up to mock them and
to mock-scare each other because they had nothing to fear from them.
Those forces were then required to return
to whatever hole they came from at midnight, because that was the beginning of
All Saints Day.
The customs of our celebration of Halloween have
been rooted in the beliefs of a time in Europe when people who had been saved
were moving out of paganism and were seeing the world with a Christian
worldview.
Elements of pagan rites to appease the
lord of death and evil spirits at the end of summer were being recast as a
festival of life. Dressing up as evil spirits to disguise themselves and hide
from them was becoming dressing up as evil spirits to mock them.
They were mocked in those days. Today, in
our secular society, people celebrate them, pretending that scary things are
fun. I think that many non-Christian people make Halloween into a “fun” scary
holiday because they want to mock God. They want to show that they aren’t
scared because they don’t believe in any of it. Yet some people are frightened,
especially when left alone.
That is our
toddler spirituality: If I can't see it then it doesn't exist, if I can’t think of a reason to
do something then I don’t have to do it, if I don’t know of a reason to believe
something then there is no reason to believe it.
For we who are being saved,
however, God is divine, and therefore holy. God is what is real, and, as science
fiction author Philip Dick has said, “Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Christianity is not something
people made up. It is reality. It is reality itself.
That’s
why the Gospel text for this Sunday is so important in our present time.
Early in Jesus public ministry
Jesus says this to the crowds that have gathered to hear him, in Luke 6:20-26,
20Then he looked up at
his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom
of God. 21“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be
filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. 22“Blessed
are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame
you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and
leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their
ancestors did to the prophets. 24“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation. 25“Woe to you who are
full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you
will mourn and weep. 26“Woe to you when all speak well of you,
for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
Whatever the world says, Jesus says that the reality of this world is that it is the poor, the hungry, those who are weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed because of their relationship of faith with Jesus who are the ones who should rejoice! Those who are rich, full, laughing, those who the people of this world speak well of, are the ones who should be worried.
Why?
Because the people who come the closest to the holiness of God, are those who
draw near to God. They have nowhere else to go. They know that they can have no
confidence in this life. They are most likely to know that they need a Savior,
a living relationship with the one holy God. Those who are independent,
self-sufficient, who think that they have no need of anything outside
themselves, much less outside this world, who are the rising numbers of people
in our Western culture, are the most likely to believe that there is nothing
that they need outside of themselves, and therefore do not turn to God.
We see the difference between the two in
Jesus words about what that dependence upon God’s holiness would look like, and
how we see just the opposite more and more in our world, in the words of Jesus
that conclude this passage, in Luke 6: 27-31,
27“But I say to you that
listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless
those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29If anyone
strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away
your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30Give to everyone
who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them
again. 31Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Near the end of his book, Bad
Religion, Ross Douthat observes that the Christian Church has been in
decline several times in its history and two things have brought it back: holy
living and the arts.
I think that our churches need
to provide an alternative to the world around them in order to thrive, and that
it the only reason that they should. They need to demonstrate a holy
alternative in the presence of the one true holy God.
A self-centered spirituality
won’t. Neither will be identifying with the kind of political power we prefer.
Organizing to use our numbers as leverage to change society won’t either.
Success, power and prosperity will only hurt us, unless we define all those
things in the transformational power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the one
holy God to make all things new.
Let us live not by our own
efforts or strength, but wholly relying on the transforming power of the one
holy God. Let us live as the Body of Christ and invite others to do the same to
join us in this adventure. Let us be led and defined by the holiness of God
among all God’s saints.
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