382 The Saint in The Mirror

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The Saint in The Mirror”, originally shared on November 18, 2025. It was the 382^nd  video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.) 

   If you wanted to find a saint, where would you look? Do you feel very saintly? Well, maybe you should. 😊 Today, we’re going to find out why.

   What a World Series! The Dodgers needed to win both games in Toronto at the end of the series. They won game 6 with mental strength, some spectacular defensive plays, and just enough offense to get the job done.

   And, it’s been said that the most exciting 7 words in all of sports is “The seventh game of the World Series!”, and game seven was certainly all of that! It started as a mess, became a tense struggle, and ended with a broken bat double play! What a game!

   But I think that my favorite game was game 3.

   Sally and I stayed up way past our bedtime to watch the third game of the World Series. What a game! Or maybe better, “What a two games!”

   Eighteen innings filled with drama, new records, underdogs stepping up, stars losing their shine, swan songs, fan songs, and outrageous ticket prices that I doubt anyone regretted paying once the game ended shortly before midnight!

   Freddy Freeman’s walk-off home run, and the storyline of reliever Will Klein, who only joined the Dodgers last June, who had not pitched more than two innings straight with the Dodgers, and who was the last of the relief pitchers in the bullpen to be called into the game, pitched four scoreless innings to finish the game, and the grit of every player, who parents all over the world pointed to and said to their kids, “See that. Never give up.”

   It was the kind of game where, in the end, I felt for the Bluejays, because they are a really good team, and they competed hard and well. All respect to Toronto.

   But it was the values of two of the Japanese players on the Dodgers’ team that really inspired me. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who had pitched a complete game two days before game 3, his second of the postseason, went to manager Dave Roberts when they were almost out of relief pitchers and volunteered to get in the game and pitch as a reliever. And Shohei Ohtani, possibly the greatest baseball player to every play the game, who I saw get hit on the arm by a pitcher during the regular season and who immediately waved his team back to stop a brawl, who has been setting records all season and postseason, breaking some that have gone back decades, and a least one that goes back 120 years to the beginning of professional baseball, including getting on base nine times in that one game, and who, when he was being interviewed after the game and was asked how he felt about breaking all these records, said that he was just happy that he could help his team win.

   Those values of selflessness, of restraint, of self-control, and of seeking the good of others above self were inspiring.

   I think that we admire them because we recognize their source in God and the lives our relationship with God leads us to live.

   They are the characteristics that Jesus points all of us to in the lesson that was read on All Saints Sunday, Luke 6:20-31, in the vast majority of churches in the world on November 2^nd.

   They are why, during the Middle Ages in Europe, Christian influence replaced the ideal of the “real man” with the ideal of the “good man”.

   All Saints Sunday is celebrated every year on the first Sunday after November 1^st, which is All Saints Day.

   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, as was said in the Middle Ages, a hallow, or a person who is hallowed, or is made holy as God is holy, as we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “hallowed be thy name”.

   All Saints Day was once called All Hallows Day in Western Christianity. The night before was called All Hallows Eve. It was shortened over time to Halloween. We talked more about that last week.

  The customs of our celebration of Halloween today are rooted in the beliefs of a time in Europe when people who had been saved were moving out of paganism and into a Christian worldview.

   The forces that defy God 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.

   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, even if I am afraid.  

   That’s why the Gospel text for today is so important in our present time.

   Early in Jesus public ministry Jesus is speaking to his disciples, including 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 values, 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!

   It is those who are rich, full, laughing, and are those who the people of this world speak well of 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 are most likely to know that they need a Savior, a living relationship with the one holy God.

   Those who are independent, self-sufficient, those who think that they have no need of anything outside themselves, much less outside this world, are the most likely to believe that there is nothing that they need outside of themselves, and therefore they do not turn to God.

   We see the big differences between the two in Jesus words about what dependence upon God looks like, 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.

   But the world, even some in our churches, does not share these values.

   I read an interview with an editor of “Christianity Today” magazine who is a former church leader in the Baptist denomination. He said that pastors are increasingly telling him that church members are coming up to them, after even parenthetically mentioning the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the…) section of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 5:1-12, and seen again in this week’s Gospel reading from Luke, and asking their pastors where they got those “liberal talking points”.  

   When the pastors would say that they were literally quoting the words of Jesus Christ, the response was, “that doesn’t work for me anymore. That’s weak.”

   God does not see the world the way the world sees itself, especially those who believe that they are in power. God values the relationship with God for which we were created.

   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.

   What do our churches need to do in order to thrive? Our churches need to provide an alternative to the world around them, 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, as the world measures them, will only hurt us, unless we redefine 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 by relying on the transforming power of the one holy God, and proclaiming it to those around us. Let us be led and defined by the holiness of God among all God’s saints.

   What is a saint? The writers of the New Testament letters to churches often referred to those church members as “saints” in particular places. Are we saints?

   Martin Luther, the 16^th century Church reformer, 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, if you see people as either saints or sinners, you might be taking a harsh approach as in the “fire and brimstone preachers”, or even an aspirational one as in Oscar Wilde’s observation that, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

  If you take a more Lutheran approach, though, you might say that we are saints and sinners at the same time. How is that possible?

   As I mentioned above, Luther believed that we are all saints because we have been made righteous through faith, by God’s grace, and in baptism. But we still struggle with sin and sometimes we fail.

   Who can deliver us when we fail? We see the answer, and the source of our saintliness, in Jesus’ power over death itself.

   We who have been saved have no need to fear death. It’s just a transition to another way of living. But we feel that pain in the pain of others even as we rejoice in the promise of eternal life given to us by Jesus Christ on the cross.

   It is those who know that they are sinners, broken and in need, who have nowhere else to turn except to God that are most likely to open their heart to receive the gift of reconciliation given to them at the cross.

   The powerful think that they don’t need any help. What is our ministry to them? To reflect the light of Christ.

   Robert Fulghum, in his book It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It, told the story of a Greek philosopher, whose lecture he had attended, who answered Pastor Fulghum’s question on the meaning of life with this story about living as a boy on a Greek island during the Nazi occupation during World War II.

   One day, he came upon a wrecked German motorcycle. He picked up the broken pieces of the rearview mirror and, unable to put them together, kept the largest piece, which he filed down to a disc with a stone.

   He played a game with that mirror, seeing what deep pocket of darkness he could illuminate by reflecting light into it.

   He still had that mirror in his wallet, he said. He believed that it was the key to the meaning of life: that he was not the light or the source of the light, but that he could be a reflector of the light, bringing light into life’s dark places. He didn’t have the whole mirror, but he had a part of it, and he could do what he could with what he had.

   We are not the light. We are reflectors of the light.

   That’s what the reversal of the world’s values means in today’s Gospel reading from Luke.

   The light overcomes the darkness.

   Like in the story of two brothers who ran a small town. They cheated, they stole, and they bullied their way into control, and everybody hated them.

   One day, one of the brothers died. The surviving brother, though nobody could remember him ever being at all religious, went to the pastor of a church in this town and made a proposition.

   “My brother and I owned this town and everyone in it. And now I own it by myself,” he said. “I want my brother’s funeral to be in this church and I want you to lead it. And I’ll give a big donation to your church but, in exchange, I want you to say at the funeral, ‘He was a saint.’ What do you say?”

   To everyone’s surprise the pastor said, “OK”.

   On the day of the funeral, the brother directed everyone in town to attend.

   When it came time for the pastor to speak, the pastor went to the casket and said, “Everyone knew this man. He and his brother ran this town. He was a bully, a thief, a coward, and a cheat. He thought that he could buy anyone and anything. But, compared to his brother, ‘He was a saint!”

   That’s pretty much not what it means to be a saint. Being a saint comes only as the result of the transformed life lived in response to the gift of a living relationship with the one true living God. It’s not achieved, it’s received. On All Saints Sunday, we celebrate all those saints who have gone before us, who have been models for us in the Christian life.

   Being a saint doesn’t mean that we don’t still struggle with sin. But, as Luther said, “You cannot keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.” He described the Christian life as that of being both a saint and a sinner at the same time. And sometimes we fail. We are sinners, but Jesus died on the cross to make us righteous before God, so we are saints. All baptized and believing Christians have put on Christ and therefore are saints.

   Sally and I sometimes drive through Beverly Hills on our way to and from doctors’ appointments or Sally’s work as a volunteer at the Museum of Tolerance. We regularly see an illuminated road sign that saus, “Welcome to Beverly Hills. Police drone in use.”

   We used to see signs that said, “Speed enforced by aircraft,” though I don’t think that I ever saw any aircraft. Drones would be cheaper and probably more effective than aircraft but, now, I’ve never actually seen a drone.

   Maybe it was only a deterrent. A threat.

   There is no threat in All Saints Day. Just the opposite. God isn’t some buff guy up in the clouds, looking down on us, like a drone, waiting for us to mess up so that He can inflict punishment. God calls us his saints by the transformed life won at the cross by Jesus Christ, God in flesh, for all who receive the gift of the relationship with God for which we were created, even when we mess up. All we “do” is to repent and receive God’s gift of love.

   We see humanity’s dry bones on Halloween, but that’s not the end of the story. We see our status before God in the new life won for us on the cross.

   Jesus has made us saints! He has made us righteous before God through faith. We who believe and have been baptized are all saints in Christ, we are made a new creation!

   So, the next time you wonder what a saint looks like, look in your mirror, and use that mirror to reflect the light of Christ into the lives of those who are still in darkness.

   Jesus is the light of the world. You are a saint! Reflect the light of Christ.