Sermon for November 2, 2025
All Saints Sunday
Luke 19:1-10
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
Do any of you have a favorite saint? Someone who has inspired your faith and life? For me this year, I’ve taken an interest in St. Brendan the Navigator. He was born in Tralee, Ireland in the year 484, and was kind of a local hero on the Dingle Peninsula where I went on pilgrimage. After I returned home from Ireland, I’ve learned more about St. Brendan. It turns out that for hundreds of years he was one of the most popular saints, and the stories and legends of his sea voyages across the Atlantic in a humble boat with a few fellow monks were written down and spread throughout the medieval Christian world. This summer I even read a much more recent telling of these legends in a novel by the Presbyterian minister Fredrick Beuchner, called simply “Brendan: A Novel”.
In St. Brendan’s life and ministry—despite his fame and heroic stature—we find examples of how he wrestled with the kinds of things we all must navigate in the life of faith. Questions like: What does God want me to do with my life? Are my decisions being made so that I may humbly glorify God, or am I making them to feed my own ego? What are the sins that cling to me like barnacles, for which I need to seek forgiveness and transformation through Christ? What are the wonders and mysteries and beautiful things of the world that inspire awe? What things break my heart and cry out for mercy, grace, and justice? Will I have the courage to face the unknown, and to allow God to lead me when I’m lost and confused? How can I nurture my relationships, so they are mutually life-giving? Will I open my heart to the gifts other people have to offer? How can I best use the gifts God has given me, so that I may love and serve other people? As I face the storms and challenges of life, will I trust that Christ promises to be with even me?
The saints, such as St. Brendan, are gifts of God for us, because they show us how people of faith have answered these questions in their own lives—and how we might answer these questions for ourselves. They show us that God really does act in the lives of his people—and that there are people who really do put to use the gifts God has given them to love and serve others. And even though we tend to put those famous Saints on a pedestal, they were just as human as any of one of us. They had no choice but to rely on God’s grace and mercy to make it through the highs and lows of life. They were not perfect; they were simply faithful.
And as we look at their faithfulness, it’s important to remember that they did not turn themselves into saints. Sainthood is God’s work alone. And as Christians we believe that God is at work in each of us. The Holy Spirit has united us with Christ in the waters of baptism. The Holy Spirit has poured the gift of faith into our hearts. The Holy Spirit has forgiven our sins, and keeps on calling us to follow the way of Jesus, so that God may transform us—over our lifetimes—to be reflections of Jesus in our daily lives.
And so our gospel story today about Zaccheus is a good example of how God makes saints. St. Luke describes Zaccheus as “a chief tax collector and rich”. Back then, in a time and place where tax collectors took people’s money to send back to the Romans who had conquered and oppressed them, and who also kept some of this money to line their own pockets—that was enough for the people of Jericho to look at Zaccheus and say “there goes a grade-A sinner!” And yet this grade-A sinner wants to see Jesus—there was something inside of him that wanted to reach towards God. And that “something” working inside of him is what we call the Holy Spirit. Being a short man, lost in the crowd, Zaccheus even climbed a sycamore tree to get a better look. As it turns out, even before he was reaching out towards Jesus, Jesus was already reaching out and looking for him! “Zaccheus,” Jesus calls up to him in the tree, “hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”
“So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.” This may have been the first time anyone in Jericho was nice to him! But it’s more than kindness. Because Jesus asks Zaccheus to host him at Zaccheus’ own house! Even the home of a grade-A sinner is not beyond the reach of Christ’s presence. Even the despised tax-collector has a place in God’s kingdom and a place to eat at Jesus’ table of grace.
Zaccheus shows us that the more we humble ourselves to the presence of Jesus—who is already there with us before we even realize it—the more Jesus can go about transforming our lives, so that we can join him in blessing the world. And that’s what Zaccheus did. A man who had been living like a king by pocketing the little money the people of Jericho possessed (or even defrauding them), now took responsibility for trying to set things right. “Lord, I’ll give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything I will pay back four times as much.” And Zaccheus being a “chief” tax collector, I’m guessing he still probably had enough left to live on. But now a burden had been lifted from his shoulders as his relationships with the people of Jericho were going to change; become life-giving instead of adversarial. Jesus tells him “Today salvation has come to this house.” God’s grace reaches across boundaries to include more people than we tend to imagine.
The people of Jericho don’t like it; at least not at first. They grumble. They want their nemesis to be punished, not reconciled. They don’t want the same Jesus who has blessed them to go around blessing a grade-A sinner. They want to set their own limits on who God can be gracious and merciful to. And if we were in their shoes, we’d probably feel the same way. It goes to show, we all need God to be working within us. We all need Jesus to be re-shaping us, welcoming us to his table of grace, walking with us—as he did with Zaccheus, and the Jericho townspeople, and St. Brendan the Navigator, and countless others—on the path toward sainthood in our own lives.
God’s work of somehow making saints out of us won’t make us perfect or even heroic. It simply means that we’ve been forgiven through the cross of Christ, and are therefore set free to put our faith in him. These simple gifts of God’s grace connect us to a community—the Creed calls it the communion of saints—a community that reaches beyond these four walls, out into our community, out to every race and nation and people; a community beyond the present, as Christ embraces in his loving arms the saints of the past, and the saints yet to be born in the future; a community beyond the limits we want to set for God’s abundant grace and mercy.
For Christ is risen and living, and he invites us today to join him in a foretaste of the great feast at his table of grace. There, as he comes to us in his holy supper, Jesus brings us into communion with all the saints, all those in whom God has been at work, on earth and in heaven. Amen.