Tuesday and it will all be over. All of the campaigning, all of the advertising, all of the phone calling, all of the polling, all of the mudslinging, all of it. Come Tuesday morning America will vote. We will make our choice, elect our candidates, decide our ballot initiatives and be done. And guess what, for the people of God who are signed sealed and delivered as His forgiven saints – it doesn’t matter one iota! We will have a new president, new state and local representatives, new laws and not a one of them will change what we have to do here as the people of God. Today is All Saints Day. Today we can forget about what the rest of the world is doing out there and we can settle in and focus on what God is doing here. Because that is what really matters, that is what really counts.
And what is God doing here? More than you could even begin to imagine. Over the last few months we have heard lots of people make lots of promises. Most of those promises are going to be broken the day they are sworn in to office. Today Jesus has made a promise that will last forever! Today Jesus made a promise to little Clara Barbara Andrews. Today Jesus put the sign of His Cross on her forehead and on her heart. Today Jesus spoke her name in Heaven – “Clara Barbara” he said, “I baptize you in my name. You are mine; you will be mine forever and ever. No one can ever take you away from me.”
Friends, that is a big deal.
Today Clara has joined us – what Ancient Christians have called the “Church Militant” – that is to say, the Christians who live in the world – this corrupt and sinful world that is ruled by sin and the Devil. It is called the Church Militant because it is a church that is armed & ready and that is engaged in battle. Every day, every Christian gets up and gets out of bed and straps on his spiritual armor to get ready to go to battle. Every day we fight against sin, against temptation to sin, against the devil, against the world around us and the battle is tough. It is hard fought and it is bloody. And there are casualties. There are Christians who die in that battle. There are Christian martyrs who suffer for their faith, who suffer for sticking by what the Bible says and refusing to give it up.
Make no mistake, Jim and Erin, and all you other moms and dads out there, you are not just raising sweet little innocent angels for a life of peace and happiness – you are raising warriors. You are sending them out to do battle. So arm them. Equip them. Get them ready for the fight. Make certain they have a strong hold on the Christian faith. Paul tells us that faith is our shield that puts out the Devil’s flaming darts. Make certain that they have a firm grip on the Sword of the Spirit. Make sure they know the Bible, that they know what it says.
Parents, God has given you such an amazing gift. Here at St Paul’s God has given to you a Lutheran School that will help you to train your children for battle. This is such a blessing. Every day as we teach our children to learn the word of God, to sing hymn, to recite the catechism we are outfitting out little warriors for this battle. They are being trained for the fight that they will have to endure every day of their life! Parents don’t take this lightly!
But today is All Saints Day. Today is about those Christians who have fought this battle and won! It is about the Christians who have been victorious over sin and even over the Devil himself and who are now celebrating the spoils of their victory in Heaven. St John was given a rare treat. He got to see those saints (we call them the Church Triumphant ) in all their glory. Standing before the throne of heaven. Surrounded by all the angels, praising God in a giant shout! Singing with one voice. John got to hear their song! It must have been a glorious sound!
Imagine every voice in heaven singing as one. All the angel choirs, the same angels who sang out in praise on the night that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the same angels who stood by as Jesus suffered on the cross. The same angels who rejoiced on the day that he was raised. The angels who came and rolled away the stone. The angels who announced Jesus’ resurrection to the women on Easter morning. Every last one of them was there singing praises to god. And before the angels gathered around the throne, singing together with the angels, John saw those who were “coming out of the great tribulation”.
John saw the survivors. Those who had come through the battle. Who had fought long and hard. Who had gone into battle and who lived to tell about it. Those who fought hard to hold on to their faith, who resisted the many temptations to lay it down and set it aside, who resisted the many temptations to give in or to fit in, to take the path of least resistance, to go along and get along. They fought, they battled and they survived. And here they are joining in heaven’s song!
John describes them. They were dressed in white robes. What John means to tell us is that they were righteous. They were clean from their sin. To wear your own clothes is to wear your sin, it is to believe that you don’t need to change your style because you think you already look pretty good.
We are conditioned to worry about how we look, what we are wearing and if we are wearing the right fashions. As much as we think that fashion makes us individuals, it mostly just makes us look the same as everyone else. Sin is the same way. In a sinful world, sin is what’s in fashion. Sin is what’s hip and up to the minute. To follow in line with what everyone else is doing, to buy in to the philosophies of Oprah’s reading list is essentially to dress yourself in the latest, the hottest, the up to the minute sin. No matter the kind of clothes you choose to put on your body, the type of spiritual clothes that are in fashion in a sinful world are and always will be sin. Sinners dress themselves in sin.
But heaven has a strict dress code – no sin is allowed. Check you coat at the door. Take off the sin and leave it behind. The only fashion that fits-in in heaven is the fashion that is made by Jesus. He takes your old dingy sinners’ robe and he plunges that deep into his blood. He custom fits you with a robe of righteousness. The saints in heaven, the warriors who hung up their battle gear were given new outfits to wear. They were given sparkling white robes.
And in their hands they were holding palm branches. We have seen palm branches before. On Palm Sunday Jesus rode triumphantly into Jerusalem and he was greeted by people waving palm branches. Palm branches were for celebrations, for victory celebrations. They were waved for kings who returned home from battle, who came back after defeating their enemies. The Saints in heaven were celebrating their victory that had been won for them by Jesus who sits on the throne. Jesus had gone into battle! He had strapped on his battle gear and gone off to war. He went to fight.
And fight he did. Demons were terrified of him. They begged him for mercy. Satan himself tried his hardest to knock him off his course and distract him from his purpose. Even Satan’s servants, the Jews who rejected him and the Romans tried their hardest to send him back where he came from. They gathered together all their strength, they dragged him before their courts, they sentenced him and they executed him. They nailed him to a cross! And on that cross he died! And just when it looked like he lost the battle, just when it looked like his enemies won, Jesus turned the tables. As it turned out, his enemies had only plaid right into his hands. They did what he was hoping they would do all along. He wanted to die.
Jesus died for you and me. He died for our children, our grandchildren. He died for our mothers and fathers, for our grandmothers and our grandfathers. He died for all of us. To pay the price for our sin. And since the price was paid in full he was raised to life! And so now in heaven he is seated with the Father on the throne. The heavenly choirs gather around him and sing, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb.” They shake the rafters of heaven with their song, with their joyous celebration. John saw it with his own eyes. He heard it with his own ears. What an incredible sight it must have been!
We belong to the church Militant. We are the warriors. We are the ones who are in the middle of the battle. We fight along side one another. We encourage each other to keep up the fight, to not loose heart, to not give up. It is a hard fight, and we have lost some from our number over this past year.
Since we last recognized All Saints Day there have been a few who have been taken from us. We remember Marcella Dellinger who died in April. Harold Gaulke who died July. Truman Nicol who died in September. They struggled through to the end as members of the Church Militant. But those deaths are never a defeat. Jesus has already won and the war is over.
While we remember All Saints Day and while we remember those who have gone out of the Church Militant, what we are remembering is that right now they are in that picture that John saw. They are in heaven with all of the angels, the saints, and God himself who sits on the throne and Jesus the Lamb. They are singing at the top of their lungs. In fact, they joined their voices just a moment ago when little Clara was baptized. The Scriptures tell us that there is rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents. You all saw your pastor take a little baby in his hands, sprinkle some water and speak some words from the Bible. Those were Jesus’ words. When I spoke them, Jesus spoke them. Jesus spoke them in heaven!
Every time you go to a sporting event, they always announce birthdays of those who are in attendance on that day. Fans get a kick out of hearing their name spoken over the sound system and seeing their name up on the jumbotron. Today, Clara’s name was spoken by Jesus himself in heaven! And all of heaven erupted in rejoicing. There was a celebration even greater than what you would hear in Ohio Stadium after a Buckeye touchdown. And you can bet that Truman, Harold and Marcella were celebrating along with them.
And so today we celebrate. We celebrate the victory given by God to the saints in heaven, even to our own friends and loved ones. And we celebrate the new life given to Clara this morning as she has been outfitted with a brand new suit of armor to do battle here in the world. And most of all, we celebrate Jesus who has given to us all the victory over sin death and the devil when he washed us all in His blood.
Amen.
