Pastor's Corner: Gratitude for all the saints

It is over a week away, but I'm already thinking about the Sunday after next, Nov. 1. Not because it's my husband's birthday (he's not much into big celebrations for his birthday). And not because it's the last Sunday before what will surely be a tense election week in what seems like a never-ending political campaign season. But because this is a year where the specter of death feels ever-present, and Nov. 1 is All Saints' Day.

This feast day of All Saints began many, many years ago to commemorate early Christian martyrs, those who had died as witnesses to the faith. Churches still remember both martyrs of old and those we might traditionally think of as saints, people like Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, or Mother Teresa. More recent traditions have made it a time when churches remember the Dearly Departed of Havre, those beloved members of our families, congregations, and communities who have died in the past year.

Perhaps it seems strange to think of those more recently deceased as saints. After all, we knew them. We experienced their vices and failings. Popular imagination often thinks of "saints" as people who are particularly holy. Historically holy, even! Does it make sense to remember the life of a neighbor from down the street or an uncle who we weren't that close with on a day set aside for celebrating the saints? Well ... yes!

In my own Lutheran tradition, All Saints' Day is a good chance to remember that holiness and saintliness are not statuses we achieve. They are conditions of possibility, states of being, given to us freely by God out of God's ever-abundant loving-kindness. Even those we consider as having historically holy lives are simultaneous sinners and saints just like the rest of us.

When we confess in the Apostles' Creed our belief in "the communion of saints" we aren't envisioning some heavenly party where the really righteous are hanging out while the rest of us work on getting good enough for a ticket to the party. We are confessing that the Spirit unites all those transformed by the gift of Christ's love - past, present, and future - into the family of God. We are confessing that the church is a gathered body of saints, those God has claimed as God's holy ones. You, me, and St. Francis, made saints, made God's children through God's love.

The reality that we are saints can be hard to live into, but accepting the truth of this gift is a crucial first step toward living into God's love as fully as we can in whatever time we have on this earth. One of our All Saints' Day texts from 1 John 3 urges us, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. ... Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed."

In a time of uncertainty, great fear, and tragic death, may we trust that we are God's children, claimed as saints of God, made holy by a love that transforms our broken selves and world into a glorious goodness which has not yet been fully revealed. And may we celebrate the lives of all the saints - those history remembers, those we remember, and even those saints unknown. As the novelist George Eliot wisely concludes in Middlemarch: "for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

O Lord, for all the saints, known and unknown, we give thanks.

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Pastor Megan Hoewisch

First Lutheran Church