Our readings all deal with death, particularly with the tears of sorrow and mourning. Yet, these readings bring a message of hope and of triumph over death, when “tears will be wiped away from all faces. “And I heard a loud voice from voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’”

Here while we have an acknowledgement of our suffering and sorrow that comes with the cross that Christians bear, and of the grief they too, just like everyone else, feel because of the reality of death, we also are shown the limit and the goal of that suffering and of that cross that while it culminates in our Lord’s passion, points beyond his death to his resurrection that brings an absolute end to all pain, suffering and grief. Paul Gerhardt, the famous 17th century Lutheran hymnwriter, expressed it well: “Our Christian cross is brief and bounded, One day ‘twill have an ending. When hushed is snowy winter’s voice, Beauteous summer comes again; Thus ‘twill be with human pain. Let those who have this hope rejoice.”

This kind of hope was already imbedded deep within the tradition that Jesus inerited and himself is part of. The prophet Isaiah, speaking of Israel’s travail of national humiliation, exile and disaster, speaks of a day of redemption when there will be a feast to celebrate the fact that the people’s mourning will have been turned to joy, when God himself will have swallowed up death forever, and when tears will have been wiped away from all faces. Then will Israel be reborn. She will receive a new life when the Lord speaks his word of salvation, and her long years of travail will have come to an end. This is a hope that is very close, is it not, to what we believe about the Eucharist, when the living Christ himself comes to us at a feast to comfort us with his presence and to give us hope and new life.

We also read today that Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. But he crowd misread his tears. Some thought Jesus was weeping because he was moved by death’s reality and power. They misread Jesus, because his weeping was not because he feared and respected death, because death does not posses any real power. He wept in solidarity with those who mourned, as one who was fighting for them in order to accomplish death’s demise.

The saints, whom we honor today, are those whose baptism has been completed, and so fully participate in Christ’s new life; for as in baptism they were incorporated into Jesus’ death and resurrection, it is only in their death that they fully participate in that reality complely, and receive completely the gift of that new and abundant life that was promised them in Christ. The saints are those whose time of waiting and cross-bearing has ended.

But of what value are they to us now, we who still wait and hope and pray for God’s redemption? We just celebrated the Reformation. It is sometimes assumed that the Lutherans, who did object to the late medieval cult of the saints, threw the baby out with the bathwater and rejected the saints themselves along with the devotional abuses connected with their cult. While the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, one of the important Lutheran confessional writings, shows why the Lutherans rejected the invocation of the saints as a practice that compromised the saving power of Christ, the only true mediator of salvation, it also goes to some lengths to deomonstrate why the saints are worthy of our honor. I quote from the Apology: “Our confession approves giving honor to the saints. This honor is threefold. The first is thanksgiving: we ought to give thanks to God because he has given examples of his mercy, because he has shown that he wants to save humankind, and because he has given teachers and other gifts to the church. Since these are the greatest gifts, they ought to be extolled very highly, and we ought to praise the saints themselves for faithfully using these gifts….The second kind of veneration is the strengthening of our faith…The third honor is imitation: first of their faith, then of their other virtures, which people should imitate according to their callings” [Apology XXI.4-7].

All in all, however, for many of us, All Saints is something of a mystery and an anomily. We are people for whom that which has been passed down to us by those who have gone before us are things to be discarded along with yesterday’s garbage. As Americans we have come from all over the globe to institute something totally new. We quite literally invented ourselves as a nation and still regard ourselves as a people the likes of whom the world has never seen. The experiment and the dream live on as we continue to reinvent ourselves at almost every opportunity. That experiment includes American religious life that is lively and dynamic and always re-creating itself. That we should pause to remember in more than a merely sentimental way those who have gone before us, to learn from and recover their faith and emulate their witness in our own time, to find in them examples of righteous behavior and lives worthy of our emulation, simply boggles the modern American mind.

We would rather see them as markers along the path to spiritual enlightenment that we have advanced beyond. We would rather take their faith and witness as primitive examples of a life and a morality and a spirituality that, while deserving of our honor and respect, nevertheless is a life and a morality and a spirituality that religious progress has left behind. Today we speak of new revelations, new biblical interpretations, new theologies, and new forms of Christian life and witness. We assume that these are offering us a glimpse of that new heaven and new earth spoken of in the book of Revelation. Really? We’ll have to wait and see; for these new revelations have to stand the tests of time and discernment of the Spirit to see if in fact we are talking about the same faith for which the saints sacrificed their lives.

I have my doubts. Ludwig Feuerbach was a 19th century German religious philosopher, who believed that religion—and here he had in mind Christianity especially—is our delusional attempt to project our wishes, hopes, fears, and desires upon something called “God.” “Spirit,” what today we might call “spirituality,” is simply the human spirit projected into infinity. Theology (the study of God) is really anthropology (the study of humanity). In other words, when we speak about God, as one of Feuerbach’s interpreters put it, we are really speaking about our selves in a loud voice. I often wonder if it is Feuerbach’s version of religion that today, wittingly or unwittingly, we are prone to emulate.

Is this the faith, a projection of our wishes onto that which we call “God,” what the saints struggled to make known in their lives, the faith they suffered and died for? I don’t think so. What they lived and died for is a God who shatters every delusion and projection, who gives new understanding both to the confused and to those whose minds are alreadly made up, and new life to those whose lives have reached a dead end. The saints knew that God’s gift of life is to be lived according to his word and promise, revealed in Holy Scripture and confessed by the church throughout the ages, or it will be no life at all. They lived and died for the God who is both the world’s final judge and its only true redeemer. May we learn from their example, and marvel at their faith.

-Amen-