All Saints

St. Paul tells us that “the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). The natural man, that is, the sinful nature, cannot understand anything that belongs to God, and what things are these? What belongs to God? As we heard from the revelation of St. John, salvation belongs to our God. Blessing and glory and wisdom belong to our God. The natural man understands none of these things. And the saints too belong to God, purchased with His own blood. Once again, the natural man cannot comprehend the saints. It cannot know who they are nor how they come to be saints.

Because every one of us begins life as an unbelieving natural man before baptism, we carry many of our misunderstandings about God, about salvation, about what constitutes a blessing, and about the saints into the Christian life. Jesus must teach us to think differently, and He does so in the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps you were taught to think of the Beatitudes in terms of what you must do. Here is how you must live and act, the Be-attitudes, as though they were a New Testament version of the Ten Commandments—not quite as severe, a little bit less thunder, but just as many laws that at the end of the day are impossible to keep. But this is wrong. Nothing about the Beatitudes is about what you do. The Beatitudes are not prescriptive. They are descriptive. Jesus is not telling us to do anything. He is describing His saints. And this description is utterly foreign to every idea that the natural man has about the things of God.

The whole world is on a quest to become spiritually rich. Why? Because everyone knows that you need a high spiritual credit score to get into heaven. This is the conventional wisdom. But Jesus says the opposite: “The kingdom of heaven belongs to the spiritually poor. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3). Conventional wisdom about the things of God leads to hell. The natural man who trusts his feelings and follows the whispers of his own heart walks upon the highway to hell.

People often say, “I’m not good enough. I could never be a Christian.” But a Christian says, “I’m not good enough, so I have no choice but to be a Christian.” Jesse Ventura once said that religion is a crutch for weak-minded people, but the truth is actually worse than that. The religion of Scripture is not for the spiritually weak; it is for the spiritually dead. Christianity is the religion of the spiritually bankrupt. Spiritual losers, so to speak, are the only ones who can enter heaven. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don’t think that anyone has ever daydreamed about becoming poor. Poverty is considered a terrible thing, perhaps even a curse. But Jesus calls spiritual poverty a blessing. No wonder the natural man can’t receive the things of God. Blessing belongs to God, but this blessing is the last thing on anyone’s list. And what does spiritual poverty mean? What does it mean to be poor in spirit? It means, simply, that you believe what the Bible says about your human heart, that it is deceitfully wicked above all things, that you have no spiritual goodness to offer up to God. And if this is true about you, and it is, then Jesus says that you are blessed. Why? Because God delights to exalt the humble. He raises up the poor out of the dung heap. Do you hunger and thirst for the righteousness that avails before God, knowing that in and of yourself you do not have it? Once again, Jesus says you are blessed, because it is His good pleasure to fill the hungry with good things.

In the revelation of St. John, we hear of the great multitude of the saints, those who have passed out of the great tribulation of this life into the eternal rest of heaven. The Bible says that they are clothed in robes that have been washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb. Who are these saints? Are they extraordinary souls who lived amazing, sin-free lives? No. The majority of the saints in heaven are people no one alive has ever heard of, people forgotten soon after their deaths, people who lived such ordinary lives according to human standards that there would have been nothing worth writing of them in the history books. The saints are those who faced the same common struggles against sin that you face, those who fell far short of the glory of God in their lives again and again. That is the great tribulation.

But the saints are the ones who have come through this tribulation victorious. And what is our victory? Finally gaining mastery over sin in this life? Creating in ourselves a pure heart? No. “This is our victory,” St. John writes, “even our faith.” Sainthood is not about achieving perfection in this life by conquering your sins. Sainthood is about believing the promises of the only perfect One who conquered sin for you. Saints know that of themselves they are spiritually bankrupt, that their own righteousness is as filthy rags. And so the saints are joyfully clothed in the robe of the perfect righteousness of Christ.

When St. John sees the vision of the 144,000 saints, and this is not a literal number, by the way, the angel asks him, “Who are these arrayed in white robes, and where did they come from?” “Who are these saints and how did they get here?” The answer, “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Dear Christians, the transformation from sinner to saint does not begin from the inside, from within the heart. It begins and ends from the outside. Salvation, which belongs to God, is His gift that he places upon the spiritually bankrupt, upon you.

And when did this happen? When were you given a robe that has been made white in the blood of the Lamb? You know the answer. Salvation was delivered to you through Holy Baptism. Did you notice the record of those who had been sealed at the beginning of the prophecy? Of the tribe Judah twelve thousand were sealed; of the tribe of Reuben twelve thousand were sealed (Rev 7:5). And on and on it goes. Did you wonder why this is in the Bible? And why do we read it on All Saints day? What you heard read this morning was a baptismal record, a reading from the Lamb’s Book of Life. God takes these records very seriously. In fact, nothing on earth is more important than this. St. Paul writes, “Having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance” (Eph 1: 13). When you were baptized, this was God’s guarantee of your salvation, certified by the seal of the Holy Spirit. And no matter how Satan whispers that a sinner such as you could never be saved, could never be a saint, God’s promise can never be broken.

You may not look like a saint. You certainly won’t always act like a one, not yet, not this side of heaven. But from God’s timeless perspective, it is already done. St. John writes in our Epistle reading, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in [Christ Jesus], purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 Jn 3:2–3).

We cannot see yet what God has made us to be through Holy Baptism. What we see is still our spiritual poverety. But we have been given the down payment, and we know that the best is yet to come. And so, in this life, we walk by faith according to the promises of Jesus. This is our victory. Even when we do not feel blessed or appear blessed, Jesus says that we are. He calls us his family, his saints, and so we believe His words. The natural man cannot receive it, but the new man joyfully clings to this wonderful promise by faith. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Amen.