All Saints' Day sermon

All Saints’ Sunday
November 1, 2009
This time of year, alot of people like to hang out in graveyards. The Sun Herald has been chock-full of listings of cemetery tours and haunted houses this week, and even NPR did a story on a ghost hunting expedition to a haunted estate that was built on the burial ground of a Native American tribe in Florida. This is one of the few times when the liturgical calendar of the church and the pop-cultural Hallmark-fueled calendar of holiday observance are in alignment, and even we Christians find ourselves hanging out in a graveyard this morning.
In our gospel reading for today, we see Jesus, hanging out in a graveyard. He has arrived too late to save his friend Lazarus, and so he joins the mourners outside Lazarus’s tomb. But the story does not end with a tour of the graveyard. Instead, Jesus acts, commanding that the grave be opened, offering a prayer to God, and then commanding Lazarus to come out. And the result of all this, the writer of Luke’s gospel reports, is that “the dead man came out” still bound and wrapped in his funeral cloths.
In our worship this morning, we also will spend some time in the graveyard. First, we will take this sweet, innocent baby, Virginia Anne Wolford, and we will bury her with Christ in the waters of baptism. She will then come through Christ’s death out the other side to be a new creation, marked as Christ’s own forever and a member of the body of Christ. In baptism, we are acknowledging what has already happened, that this child is a beloved child of God, but in that process, death must occur. And we remember that death and new life, that powerful transformation, in our own lives as we renew our own baptismal vows.
Then, later in our Eucharistic prayer, we will read the names of the faithful departed, those whose lives have impacted ours, who now dwell in the communion of God’s saints, among all God’s faithful believers. This reading of the list of the faithful departed of our lives and the life of St. Peter’s is the equivalent of meandering through the graveyard and placing flowers on each grave, and it is also so much more. It is reaffirming our connection with those who are with us no longer and also reaffirming our hope in Christ that one day we are all united at the Great Eucharistic feast, the heavenly banquet at which God will wipe every tear from our eyes and will make all things new.
The Celts of the British Isles, our ancestors in our Anglican heritage, maintained that there are “thin places” on this earth, places where the boundary between earth and heaven, between past, present, and future, is so thin that it can be crossed over. For whatever reason, we often find such thin places in graveyards, and All Saints’ Day is also such a thin place. Even as we remember and celebrate our past and those who have made us who we are, we celebrate our present and our future as the body of Christ—those who have died and been resurrected through our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection.
And so we also gather today, during this thin place, to make our pledge to support the continued work of Christ’s body in the world through support of St. Peter’s over the coming year and on into the future. We remember those who have given of themselves to make this place a sanctuary and a haven for us, those who have blazed a trail or paved the way before us. We look around and give thanks for all those present with us here today, our fellow pilgrims on a journey, fellow travelers on the road. And we also look forward into the future of St. Peter’s and give thanks for those who will come after us to continue our work and our mission in this world when we are nothing but dust in our graves in the graveyard.
In closing, I leave you with some words of hope from a portion of the poem “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant. So live, that when thy summons comes to youTo join the innumerable caravan, which movesTo that mysterious real, where each shall takeHis chamber in the silent halls of death,Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed,By unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,As one who wraps the drapery of his couchAbout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

And let us be thankful for all that was, all that is, and all that is yet to come