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ssaints02
"A Sure and Certain Hope"
Text: Matthew 5:1-12
Date: All Saints' Day 
11/3/02
When we confess the Nicene Creed, I want you
to notice that we do not say, "I hope for the resurrection
of the dead and the life of the world to come" as if there may be
some question about whether it will happen or not. Rather, we say,
"I look for the resurrection… and the life…." The Christian
hope of resurrection and eternal life after death is so sure and
certain that we look forward to it as something that will certainly
happen. The reason we believe, teach and confess this doctrine,
after all, is because God has revealed it to us in his holy Word.
"Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise.
You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy!" says the Lord
God through the prophet Isaiah [Isaiah 26:19]. Psalm 118 declares,
"I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the
Lord" [Psalm 118:17 (ESV)]. The words of Job in the Old Testament
proclaim the hope of resurrection:
"For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and at the last he will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been thus destroyed,
yet in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see for myself,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another" [Job 19:23-27
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The Book of Daniel clearly sets forth this hope also as it says,
"But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose
name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep
in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life,
and some to shame and everlasting contempt" [Daniel 12:1c-3 (ESV)].
The doctrine of the resurrection was part and
parcel of the lively hope of faith in the Old Testament as God's
people waited in anticipation for the Messiah, God himself to come
in the flesh: the promised offspring of Eve, of the seed of Abraham,
of the house and lineage of King David, to be born of a virgin in
the little town of David called Bethlehem.
Yet, because the doctrine of the resurrection
depends solely on the Word of God and on faith in that Word, and
because no one had observed, much less experienced resurrection
from the dead, that hope and that faith in that Word can grow weak
and even die. At the time of Jesus we hear of a movement, the followers
of which were called the Sadducees. They held a liberal theology,
as do some in our day, in which, among other things, they denied
the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and of a future life.
No wonder their anger and rage at Jesus who had raised the widow
of Nain's son right in the middle of the funeral procession [Luke
7]; and the young daughter of Jairus the synagogue ruler [Mark 5];
and the raising of Lazarus [John 11]. Even after Jesus' own death
and resurrection the Sadducees persecuted the Apostles and put them
in prison for preaching the resurrection [Acts 4 and 5], and the
Apostle Paul caused not a little disturbance in Jerusalem at his
trial by pitting the Pharisees against the Sadducees over this very
issue [Acts 23].
It is true, ever since the curse and wages
of sin was first spoken-remember that "you are dust, and to dust
you shall return" [Genesis 3:19 (ESV)]-"As for man, his days are
like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows
over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more" [Psalm
103:15-16 (ESV)]; "You turn men back to dust, saying, 'Return to
dust, O sons of men.'" "You sweep men away in the sleep of death…All
our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a
moan. The length of our days is seventy years-or eighty, if we have
the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they
quickly pass, and we fly away" [Psalm 90]. Death is our experience.
Though death is evil, wrong, "the last enemy" as scripture calls
it [1 Cor. 15:26], it is all we know. No wonder we try to deny it
or dress it up as something it isn't, to make a friend out of death
simply because we are powerless against it.
At the death of Lazarus, Jesus consoled Martha,
saying, "Your brother will rise again." "Martha said to him, 'I
know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.'"
She knew and believed that because God's Word said it, even as we
know and believe and look for the resurrection of the dead and the
life of the world to come because God's Word says it. But there
is more to it than that! For we, too, can grow weary in faith almost
to the sad point of disbelief if we think resurrection and eternal
life are things reserved only as a future event. Therefore, Jesus
defined resurrection to Martha in the words, "I am the resurrection
and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he
live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die"
[John 11:23-26 (ESV)]. When we confess in the words of the Nicene
Creed, "I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of
the world to come," we confess it with joy as a sure and certain
hope because our faith is in Jesus who, by his death has destroyed
death, and by his rising again has brought us eternal life. By Holy
Baptism into his death and resurrection, we already walk in newness
of life because, as St. Paul says it, "I have been crucified with
Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I
live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me
and gave himself for me" [Gal. 2:20].
Today we are mindful of that host of those
who have gone before us in the faith, arrayed in the white robes
of Christ's righteousness before the throne of the Lamb in his kingdom.
How did they get there? And how do we hope to join them and look
for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come?
It is in this round-about way that we get to our text, the Gospel
for this day and celebration, the Beatitudes.
If we see these eight sayings of our Lord as he began
the Sermon on the Mount as qualities you need to develop to qualify
for heaven, you are looking at them wrongly, with Law eyes and,
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