Those who have gone before us in the faith have no more need of absolution, for their baptisms have been brought to completion and they are eternally free from sin and done with death.
Lutherans in North America generally observe All Saints’ Sunday as a day to remember the faithful departed, while our European counterparts often hold such a commemoration on the Last Sunday of the Church Year. Either way, it has become customary to remember with thanksgiving those in the congregation who have died in the past year, linking their memory with that mighty cloud of witnesses who have passed over from death to life. Hence, we call the Sunday after November 1, All Saints’ Sunday. Whether they are the recently departed whose beloved faces are no longer seen and whose familiar voices are no longer heard or those long dead whose footprints in history are no longer visible and whose earthly memory has been erased from all human minds, they are all one body, one communion of the saints in Christ. They are joined together in Him by His holy things, the Word which created faith, the one Baptism which did save them, and the body and blood given and shed for the forgiveness of their sins.
We confess in the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in... the communion of saints,” not I see the communion of saints. In a sermon on Acts 2:42-47, preached in the midst of World War Two, Hermann Sasse reminded the congregation that we do not turn the example of the early Church into an ecclesiastical law which demands we imitate these early saints by doing things exactly as they did. For example, the selling of all personal property and living in some communal form of existence as we see in the book of Acts. Sasse notes the danger of lionizing these early saints, making them into super-Christian heroes:
“No, the Early Church is something completely different than the Church of the holy in the sense that they were perfect and exemplary Christians for the Church to follow in the coming centuries. The Church of the first century was a communion of saints in exactly the same manner as the Church of all centuries is the communion of saints. They are a congregation of justified sinners.”[1]
They are saints, God’s holy ones, in the same way that we are, through the forgiveness of sins which is daily and richly preached in Christ’s Church.
“So it is that the Church is never an organization of pious people, but it is the Church of the Lord Christ. It is not a human religion. No, the highest and most beautiful blossom of human religions, the faith of a Peter or a Paul bases its glory in something else.”[2]
They are saints, God’s holy ones, in the same way that we are, through the forgiveness of sins which is daily and richly preached in Christ’s Church.
The glory of the saints is the Lamb: “For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and He will guide them to springs of living water; and God will wipe way every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17).
Those who have gone before us in the faith have no more need of absolution, for their baptisms have been brought to completion and they are eternally free from sin and done with death. They are forever with the Lord, beyond the grasp of temptation and the old evil foe. For them, death is no more. As stanza three of the hymn, “For All the Saints,” puts it, “We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.” We are one with them in the Lamb who is their Lord and ours. He has cleansed them and us by His blood. They, like we, are blessed beggars who live by the mercy of a Savior who has made us His own. Their names may or may not be printed in a church bulletin or read aloud in the Divine Service on All Saints’ Sunday, but they are written indelibly in the Lamb’s Book of Life, and Jesus will call them by name on the Last Day. When this happens, they will know the voice of their Good Shepherd and follow Him forever, not as super-heroes, but as forgiven sinners clothed in Christ’s righteousness.
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[1] Hermann Sasse. Witness: Erlangen Sermons and Essays for the Church 1933-1944, translated by Bror Erickson. Saginaw, MI: Magdeburg Press, 2013. 157-158.
[2] Ibid., 158.
