Resurrection Lutheran Church, St Catharines

Who are you going to be? That was the big question among children last week as they thought about their Halloween costumes. Who are you going to be: a superhero; a fantasy character; or something scary? Now, the day after All Hallows Eve, the apostle John seems to think the question is still on your minds. In the Epistle Reading from All Hallows Day (All Saints Day), we hear from St. John’s first letter to the church making sure that we know who we are so that might have an inkling about who we will be. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared” (1 John 3:2).

 

Who you are now in your life in this world also determines who you will be in the world to come, when Jesus returns. Now that might cause you a bit of worry and anxiety if you look at the things you have done or not done in this life and try to determine what that might have earned you for the life to come, for eternal life. But St. John’s letter is not meant to increase that worry, anxiety, and fear but to calm our fears and relieve our anxieties and dispense with our worries.

 

How does this work? It is not in the Buddhist scheme of multiple reincarnations according to how you have lived your life, so that with increasing good you become higher and higher forms of being. It is not even like the Roman Catholic idea of purgatory, that you go somewhere after this life is over until you get pure enough to get to heaven. Rather, St. John indicates that what we will be is not antithetical to what we are now, but that what we are now is the greatest indication of what we will be in the resurrection. Yet it is not based on what we have done in this life.

 

On this All Saints Day when we think about the saints who have gone before us in life and into everlasting life, we do ponder the good things they have done. But their eternal life, and ours as well, is not based on those things no matter how good and blessed they have been. Our eternal life is based on whom God has declared us to be. He has declared us to be His children. And what we will be is just that, His children. Yet in an even more full and complete and perfect way than we are now.

 

And now, it is pretty good to be His children. What defines us as His children is that we are those to whom He has given His love. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1). We are those whom He loves. He loves us like a father loves his children. Or, more precisely, fathers love their children in imitation of how God loves us. At least that is what they ought to strive to do.

 

The kind of love that God the Father has for you is greater than any earthly father could love his children. For earthly fathers have their own sins and shortcomings which get in the way of their love for their children. But God does not have that problem of sin or any shortcomings. His love is perfect and abundant. Love is defined by God’s relationship to you.

 

When we try to describe what love is, the proper description is that of God. It is St. John who, in this very letter, tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). And he goes on to tell us how God has so perfectly and divinely loved us. “In this the love of God was manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (4:9).

 

The love of God for us is the fully comprehensive atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the cross for the forgiveness of every one of your sins and to redeem you from the sinful state into which you were born and from which you cannot escape. God’s love is that He paid for you to be cleansed from your sins and set free from them by the holy, and precious blood of His own Son shed for you when He suffered and died in humiliating agony.

 

By the blood of Jesus, the heavenly Father has loved you and made you His dear child. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us.” Why? “That we should be called the children of God; and so we are.” We are God’s children, not by how we have loved Him, but by how He has loved us.

 

Today is All Saints Day, a day on which the Christian Church remembers all of the saints because we don’t have the opportunity to commemorate them all in each calendar year. This year, because their appointed days fell on a Sunday, we remembered the Confession of St. Peter and the Conversion of St. Paul and St. Luke the evangelist, and St. Michael and the angels. Even the daily seminary chapel services cannot recognize all of the saints days on the calendar.

 

November 01 is designated for all saints, whether they have their own special days or not. And today’s celebration is a good reminder for us that when we celebrate any saint, we remember that they have their status not because of how they loved God, but because of how He loved them. They did not purify themselves, but they were purified by the blood of Jesus, like you and me and all those whom we have loved who departed in the Christian faith. The number of saints is countless and they come from every tribe and language and people and nation.

 

Quite often the saints that we commemorate have died at the hands of the wicked in this world. They were killed for their confession and belief that Jesus Christ died for their sins and to be the Saviour of the world. Many of them we call martyrs, and others confessors. They were persecuted and hated by the world because they are God’s children. And it is not surprising that as God’s only-begotten Son was hated and put to death by the world, so they would also hate and put to death God’s other children, though they be His through adoption by His gracious love.

 

We also notice that the world hates us, the more that it knows of our identity as God’s children. Around the world, Christians are still being killed just because they are children of the heavenly Father, brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus Christ. Recently there has been an upsurge in Islamist attacks upon Christians at worship, as the recent attacks killing six of the congregation in Jordan, and 49 of a congregation in Kenya. In Nigeria there have been thousands killed and thousands more missing as militants try to exterminate them from the nation.

 

Members of our own Canadian Parliament have been trying to get our government to recognize the increasing attacks upon Christian worshipping communities in Canada. In the last few years there has been an alarming rise in the number of assaults, threats, and burning of churches. But the government does not see us worthy of any increased protections as enemies escalate their acts of hatred.

 

The wicked world lashes out against us because it does not really know us. It does not know our love for the world, even for those who do not yet believe in Jesus Christ the Saviour. The world thinks it knows us as arrogant, self-righteous, bigoted, unloving people who will not accept their wicked ways, who stand in the way of them freely wallowing in filthy sin without bringing pain to their conscience.

 

They know us by the guilt they feel of their own sin, and they know us also by the sins that we have committed against them (sins for which we need to repent and receive God’s forgiveness). But they don’t really know us and our love for them, because they don’t really know Jesus, in whom all of God’s children find their true identity.

 

If we only knew ourselves by our sins, then we would not truly know ourselves either. And then how could we be sure of who we will be when Jesus comes? It is that question leading up to Halloween again. Who are you going to be?

 

Are you going to be a superhero saint? Well, if you are not one now how can you expect to be one then? Are you going to be a fantasy saint, the person you can only dream to be? If you are not that now, how can you expect to be one then? What are you going to be? You are going to be what you are now. “Beloved, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been revealed, but we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is” (3:2).

 

We are God’s children now. We are brothers and sisters of our Lord Jesus Christ. And that is who we will be, God’s children, only more so. We shall be like Him. As He is sinless and pure so we shall be, cleansed of all of our sins by His precious blood and pure with His everlasting righteousness. As we look into the blessed face of Jesus and know God’s love for us fully with unveiled eyes and no longer as through a mirror darkened by our depravity, then we will become what we see Him to be: holy and righteous, cleansed and pure with even the chains of original sin removed from our being.

 

It is not our good deeds that will so purify us. It is not some kind of process in purgatory, painful or penitential. It is not through repeated reincarnations to higher and higher levels of purity. What purifies us is our hope, our hope in God’s declaration that He has made us His children by His love for us in Christ Jesus. This hope is faith. We are purified by faith in God keeping His Word: to declare us His children, to forgive our sins, and to cleanse us completely from every impurity through the death and resurrection that unites us to His holy and pure Son.

 

It is no costume. It is not just for one day. It is the resurrection into the eternal life of God.

 

All the saints have been purified by this same hope, this faith in the cleansing blood of Jesus. We remember them all today as they have all been given this same gracious love from the Father, the same gracious love that He extends to us. And as the saints have lived in that hope and so revealed the love of God in their own lives, in their confessions, and in their deaths, so we remember that we hold the same hope and the same calling from God. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God; and so we are... we know that we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”