All Saint’s Sunday 2025

Texts: Luke 6:20-31, Ephesians 1:11-23, Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Two of my favorite spiritual writers, the monk Thomas Merton and the poet Robert Lax, best friends when they studied together in New York City, before they became who God called them to be, they pondered, like many of us when we are growing up, what their life purpose was. What form and what direction was their life taking? As two young men who encountered faith, they wondered what this profound encounter with faith might make of their lives. Here is how the writer Jim Forest relates this exchange documented in Merton’s autobiography, the Seven Storey Mountain:

Walking with Lax on Sixth Avenue one night in the spring of 1939, Lax turned toward Merton and asked, “What do you want to be, anyway?”

It was obvious to Merton that “Thomas Merton the well-known writer” and “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of freshman English” were not good enough answers.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”

“What do you mean you want to be a good Catholic?”

Merton was silent. He hadn’t figured that out yet.

“What you should say,” Lax went on, “is that you want to be a saint.”

That struck Merton as downright weird.

“How do expect me to become a saint?”

“By wanting to.”

“I can’t be a saint,” Merton responded. To be a saint would require a magnitude of renunciation that was completely beyond him. But Lax pressed on.

“All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.

We could switch, Merton’s responses with our own, perhaps we desire to be good Lutherans! But Lax’s response I believe is universally applicable, what we should desire, is to be saints! But what does it mean to be a saint? Is it just to be a good person? Is it to be an angelic human being with a halo, which, as we say in Puerto Rico, “que no rompe un plato”, a person so good they look like they can’t even break a plate? Our readings today point to a much more powerful reality. Being a saint is not about a cookie-cutter version of an innocent humanity, it is about unique human beings, sinners and imperfect human beings, aflame with the redemptive power of the Gospel, living out a life pleasing to God, because God loves them, and they love God back. Saints are human beings who have put on Christ as the center of gravity of their existence, real people with real problems who rely on Christ’s saving grace to guide them through the troubles. So when we celebrate a day like today, when we remember the saints, those who live, and those who have passed away, we celebrate God’s keeping of them as eternal reminders of His power to save and transform humanity towards divine goodness. We can point at our saints and cry out, how good is God that preserves us through trial and tribulation and holds us in His everlasting arms, and they in turn preach to us of what kind of God we follow and serve in this life.

So what is this life of sainthood? It is not much about a special title that is bestowed on special individual, but rather something that God desires to make of all of us. The saints live as those marked by what the prophet Daniel envisioned: “But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever–forever and ever.” The vision Daniel received was one where all the empires of the world,

represented by the different beasts, were overcome by God. Human beings give themselves to many projects of domination, they seek to impose their own authority over others by conquering and doing violence, but the saints do not live in such a way. They live according to the kingdom that is given by God in Jesus Christ, they do not expect to build from the nothingness of human empires, built on sin and death, always destined to disappear and turn to dust. We build from the cornerstone that is Christ risen from the dead, a foundation that springs from new life, the life of the resurrection that is good news to the poor and suffering. So we live in victory, Beloved. We love freely like Christ because we know the End, we do not forfeit our allegiance to Christ because we know He has given us the kingdom, we do not labor for power and self-gain, we labor for love because we know God’s Kingdom has the final word.

Then we hear in Ephesians, the saints are those called by God, chosen to inherit the Kingdom through Christ. And we are called not to hide Christ for ourselves. We are not to be selfish or greedy with Him. But Christ as the head of the church and we the body, we move about and have our being in Him. And we walk out sharing “the fullness of him who fills all in all“. As the Church, we are called to expand the reach of Christ in us so that He can be all in all. Our ancestors in the faith often perceived that we could perceive Christ as expanding throughout the entire cosmos! That even at the splitting of a twig we could see Christ present. So if Christ is our head, then our mind and thoughts are also called to look at the world through Him: “with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may perceive what is the hope to which he has called you”. What a revolutionary sight that is! He has called us to the hope of a life that can see

everyone and everything in Creation as someone to embrace and love with all mercy and compassion, to respond to the many sins of humanity with the love and justice of the Kingdom of God. What great desires God inspires in us, that we can overcome the petty authorities that arise that want to force the world into their own fallen and violent image, reducing it to nothingness, rather than embracing and uplifting it with grace.

And lastly, we hear Jesus’ great sermon in the Gospel, declaring to us the upside down view of God’s Kingdom, the blessings and woes that signal where true life is and isn’t. The saints are called to live according to the direction of Jesus, in this upside-down view of the world. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” For the saints of God, our life revolves around the fate of the poor and the downtrodden, for in God’s Kingdom, He uplifts the dignity of those who’s dignity has been robbed by their fellow human beings. As the Spanish theologian Jon Sobrino wrote, for us, there is no salvation outside of or without the poor. Their plight is our plight, the same way God made His life our life through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.” God advocates for the hungry, His grace is revealed in a feast that feeds all who come to Him, there is no rejection, no merit, no requirement for food to be at your table, the love of God for all who are hungry is enough. And thus the saints are those God calls to feed, not just spiritually, but real food and sustenance. How many hunger now, how many for unacceptable reasons withhold the plenty to those who need it. God is on the side of the hungry. For if the Communion of Saints in Heaven is to be a great feast, since the

saints live now in the flesh the glimpse of that future Kingdom, now is that we are also called to share the feast with the hungry.

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” Life on Earth is not a rosy path, it is real struggle, real suffering. Christ took on that same suffering for us, and therefore calls His saints, to witness and wipe the tears of those who weep. They hold together within the suffering, enduring together the cross of this life with the expectant hope that God’s final word will be to laugh again, to bring the light of the sun again upon a dark room. So many wish to suppress laughter, even worse, they intend to make us suffer, but God holds every tear humanity has shed, every suffering within Himself, and promises to arise from within us the laughter of joy. God weeps with us, and awaits with us the time when we shall all rejoice together.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven” To be a saint does not mean that we are to be liked by everyone. Many of the saints that enjoy the Lord’s light now were not popular figures for everybody. Let us remind ourselves of names like Dr. King, and St. Francis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Dorothy Day, and Oscar Romero; people who were sinners, people who were saints by the grace of God, and who stood for those that God stands for. Saints stand for something, they stand for the way of Jesus. And such a way is often disliked by the world, because it interrupts and pleads for humanity to change from their self-serving ways. Remember, Jesus was crucified, so no wonder the saints are also persecuted for following Him! If we hear again this Sermon from Jesus, it is more than evident! Loving like Jesus is a perfect way for the world to think you

are a problem. But Saints are called to not care for what the world says about you, care about what God says. Care about who God cares about. And you shall see that when we do just that, the world goes up in arms, and tries to flatter you into faithlessness, it tries to sweet talk you into losing sight of God’s Kingdom and His poor. The world offers riches, and power, and fame, but it can’t give you salvation. It can’t give you peace. It can’t give you grace. But the saints walk in the light of God, and therefore we walk in the assurance of these things revealed to us in Christ. And then, when the saint decides to listen to God instead of the world, the world rejects the saint, they curse, and do violence, they hate these meddling saints that can’t be subjugated into compliance. The saint is a rebel with a cause. God’s cause for the love of the world. Just a few weeks ago, a presbyterian pastor was struck in the head by an ICE officer for praying publicly for their repentance, because they were acting with cruelty to their unjustly detained neighbors. To be a saint can get you enemies. But unlike the enemies, the saint is capable by the grace of God to turn enemies into friends. This is what the Rev. David Black was doing when he prayed for their repentance, for their conversion into God’s way. The Gospel life is a radical reorientation of how the world works, and love is the ultimate goal of everything. The saint is called to seek this with a passion, and so even the saint’s enemies are caught in the net of God’s overwhelming movement of redemptive love. The saint operates under a different logic than the world, so instead of destroying people, the saint loves their enemies, they do good to those who hate them, blesses those who curse them, prays for those who abuse them. Saints are called to break the cycles of violence by proclaiming and witnessing to the Gospel.

And so Beloved, hearing all these things about sainthood, one might think, this is too much for me! I’m too much of a sinner to be capable of such things! The bar is too high. Beloved, precisely in this moment, is where the miracle happens. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said: “God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.” Nothing can be more right than what brother Soren says in this passage. Our sanctification is a grace, it is a miracle. You cannot make yourself a saint. That is truly impossible. But in Christ, all things are possible, including making each and every one of us sinners into saints. To be a saint is a desire that springs within us not as some categorical thing, like from now on I’m going to act like a saint. No, the reality of sainthood is much more quieter, it springs like a flower in our hearts, in the quiet of the morning as the sun rises and it seeks the light. Sainthood rises within us often with quiet acts of love, with gentle desires and feelings of compassion, with prayer. Each saint is unique in how God calls them to live the Gospel. Each and every one of you is uniquely called. Each and every one of us is called to live in to our miracle. Don’t we consider the lives of those saints that preceded us into heaven a kind of miracle? That they actually existed and loved us into being by their life and example? You are also called to ask for that miracle, Beloved. That’s why I love the Lutheran adage on sainthood: simultaneously justified and sinner, we are sinner/saints. It is never just an either/or reality. We are continuously on the way of repentance, each day bringing a challenge and a grace. It is simply life in the footsteps of Jesus. And we walk with His forgiveness and guidance until our last breath, by grace joining a community of fellow pilgrims on the way to sainthood. It is exactly as Robert Lax said: “Don’t you believe

God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it”. Let us then pray: