All Saints Sunday
Texts: Luke 6:20-31;
Dan 7:1-3, 13-18; Eph 1:11-23
YouTube: https://youtu.be/DEO0jZlAe0E
Sermon Take-Home Notes
“ALL SAINTS” MEANS STRIVING TO EQUALLY
SHARE ONE ANOTHER’S SUFFERING
Martin Luther chose to nail 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Church door — what is generally considered the beginning of the Reformation — on All Hallow’s Eve, aka Halloween. Our celebration of Halloween has certainly eclipsed Luther’s actions. Very few celebrate, or are even aware of, the beginning of the Reformation on Halloween 1517. Our celebration of Halloween today as a fun holiday has become second to none except Christmas in terms of decorations. The guy who lives kiddy-corner from me has at least $1000 worth of decorations in his front yard, which he’s had up at least for the past month. I have to admit that I’m one of those who wonder exactly what we are celebrating with these decorations. Are we just trying to have some fun before the Zombie apocalypse fully arrives? Is it a day of fun, in other words, in a world that seems headed toward a frightening apocalypse of violence and death? I guess I can understand that, even if I don’t quite get on board with that.
My preference is to work like hell to avoid the frightening apocalypse we seem to be heading toward. To that end, I’d like to go back to the possible significance of Luther’s having chosen All Hallow’s Eve to launch the Reformation. You can’t have All Hallows Eve, aka Halloween, without having All Hallows Day, aka All Saints Day. One of Luther’s most famous teachings was to put the matter of sainthood into a different perspective. The Catholic Church had had a long tradition, and still does, of elevating a select few people to sainthood. Kind of like the Hall of Fame for Christians, including a very elaborate, long process of being named a saint.
Martin Luther didn’t necessarily seek to abolish this process altogether, but I think that it was significant for him to choose All Saints Eve as a day to begin his protest. Because one of the things he sensed was wrong in the church was the growing divide in between the priesthood and the peasant in the pew. So one of the things Luther is famous for is the idea of the “priesthood of all believers.” And this was all grounded in a celebration like that of All Saints Day — a celebration that all followers of Jesus are in some sense saints. He used a phrase in Latin, “Simul Justus et Peccator,” which translates “simultaneously saint and sinner.” This means that in the eyes of God, Christians are both righteous and sinful at the same time: they are saints because their righteousness comes from their faith in Jesus Christ, but they are also sinners because they still struggle with sin in their lives.
I believe that these insights from Luther were on the way to the crucial insights we’ve been emphasizing from the Gospel of Luke for several months now. Luther saw the disparity between the rich and powerful and everyone else, and his notion of equality in sainthood sought to at least change things in the church. But, ultimately, he let go of that equality as something only achieved finally in heaven. This is not how I’ve come to understand the Gospel over my forty years of preaching. Equality is fundamental to God’s reign both in heaven and on earth. We pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is n heaven.” This means that God has created every person for an equal chance at having a life that is abundant and flourishing, so things like the persistent gap between rich and poor that happens in our human reigns, well, that should not be. The gap between rich and poor under our typical human governance is against God’s intentions for creation.
So God’s reign in Jesus the Messiah is about leveling the playing field. The rich and mighty are brought lower and the poor and lowly are lifted up. This is what we’re praying for in the Lord’s Prayer. This is the theme of Luke’s Gospel from beginning to end, one that is highlighted even more than in the other three Gospels. We can cite some of them: It begins with Jesus in Mary’s womb as she sings her song about the mighty coming down from their thrones and the lowly being lifted up. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus inaugurates his ministry in Nazareth citing Good News to the poor — ‘This is what it’s all about, folks!’ In our Gospel today, Jesus’s Beatitudes are quite different than in Matthew. I highlight some of those differences in the Sermon Notes — things like changing Matthew’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit” to simply “Blessed are you poor.” Luke leaves out four of Matthew’s Beatitudes and really focuses on the plight of the poor and hungry. Finally, through six encounters with rich men throughout the middle section of Luke’s Gospel, Luke features a message from Jesus on the dangers of wealth. We will conclude those encounters beginning next Sunday with some good news in the story of Zacchaeus, the wealthy tax collector, who repents.
This morning, on All Saints Sunday, I want to complete Luther’s insights about all of us being saints by once again going beyond justification. That was last week’s theme on Reformation Sunday, that Luther and subsequent Protestants became overfocused on the theme of justification. We saw it a moment ago when I characterized Luther’s theme about everyone being saint and sinner at the same time. Through the lens of justification, Luther saw the equality of all people in God’s eyes when we are justified, that is, when we are declared “not guilty” from the sentence of sin, so that those with faith in Jesus may enter into eternal life. But the full Gospel we have been encountering through Luke’s Jesus takes us far beyond justification. We aren’t just equal in God’s sight in terms of being justified for entrance into heaven in the afterlife. In God’s reign through Jesus, we are equal in God’s eyes for being able to enjoy the fruits of God’s creation in this life, too. All children of God, every person on this earth, should have an equal opportunity for sharing in the abundance of God’s good creation. Until that actually happens, God’s reign in Jesus Christ is working to make it happen, and inviting us to join in the work.
Until that happens, we will continue to see an inequality in suffering along the lines of rich and poor, powerful and lowly. On Wednesday, that was an insight we discussed as we concluded our book study of Kate Bowler’s No Cure for Being Human. Let me set you up for that insight by rehearsing some of the basics about this book. Kate Bowler was born in 1980. When she turned thirty-five in 2015, married to Tobin with one one year-old child Zach, she was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer and not given very long to live. There was one chance for a different outcome. Her cancer had a chance to respond to a new drug treatment called immuno-therapy, which was new to the scene in 2015. Her book takes us on the journey over the next five years, of being treated with this new drug. There’s many ups and downs along the way, including a grueling surgery to remove much of the cancer in her liver. But the overall effect of the new drug is to find herself living without cancer five years later. The doctors will not say “cured,” because the drug is still new. But she certainly has more hope at the end of the book.
If we do our math, though, five years later from 2015, that brings us to 2020, the fateful year in which the whole world faced the diagnosis of COVID-19. She had faced a gruesome diagnosis of cancer for the previous five years. Now, she faced the threat of COVID-19 along with every other person in the world. Her personal suffering over the previous five years helps her to one of the most important insights in her book. She writes:
I turned forty just as the unimaginable happened to everyone, all at once. The whole world was overcome by a deadly disease, and we all had to take shelter, the lives we’d imagined suspended in midair. . . . [N]o matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. . . . [During that time I see:] A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend’s business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students [at seminary], now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair.
The truth of the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils — discrimination, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation — roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone.
Siblings in Christ, on this All Saints Sunday we confront the truth of suffering that is not meant to be, namely, that in this current world dominated by human reigns of inequality, suffering is unjustly distributed. And we embrace the truth of abundant, endless life, that in God’s reign the goal and promise is equality for all God’s children, of all the saints, to work towards an equality of mutual flourishing. God’s promise is that our lives do not end with our earthly mortality but are held in God’s power of life until we receive resurrection bodies like Jesus to enjoy the creation coming to its goal of no more suffering.
Until then, we continue to confront the evils of suffering unjustly distributed. And we embrace the goals of God’s reign to equally share in one another’s suffering until that day when suffering is ended. In our nation right now, we see the opposite. We see the suspension of programs like SNAP and Obamacare subsidies, which work to alleviate suffering. Every day in a myriad of ways we see a rise of greater inequality between the rich and poor resulting in an ever increasingly unjust distribution of suffering. Let us instead claim our sainthood in working together to turn the tide from inequality to equality. Let us embrace the work of God’s reign to seek a mutual flourishing for all people. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, November 2, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/DEO0jZlAe0E
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Our guide through this section, featuring the “Six Rich Men Sequences,” has been Ched Myers and his book Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress, 2025). For an overview of the six encounters, see the Sermon Notes for next week (Proper 26C).
2. Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human: (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) (Random House, 2021), 183, 185.
