This sermon was preached for All Saints' Day, Sunday, November 3, 2024. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 24, Revelation 21:1-6a, and John 11:32-44.
My grandfather died five years ago this past Wednesday, on October 30. At the time, I remember being so grateful that it was a quote unquote “good death.” Stephen Honan was surrounded by all his children and his beloved wife in the end. I had anointed him and prayed those powerful prayers of release and peace, and Psalm 23, too. I took great comfort in how close his death was to All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ and All Souls’, too, holding on to the hope that in some mysterious way, his passing was made easier by the thinning of the barriers of this world and the next. In good Irish tradition, our family gathered around his body, cousins, uncles, aunts, and there was joy and life there, too. Two of the littlest great-grandkids had just begun to walk - a sign that the great family my grandfather began was continuing on. Our family filled a long table at lunch right after, laughing and drinking and remembering. Even in our grief, we knew we were blessed: blessed to have been loved by him, blessed to be together.
The truth was that we didn’t actually know how lucky we were that my grandfather died when he did, in fall of 2019. We couldn’t have known that just a few months there would be no gatherings at deathbeds. No funerals, no wakes. We couldn’t have known that the virus that descended on the whole world in 2020 wouldn’t just steal lives away, it would steal our ability to grieve in the sacred ways we know best: anointing, presence, feasting, hugs - even sharing a sympathetic smile not hidden by a mask.
All throughout that year, I heard stories of brave nurses, doctors, and hospital workers who were determined to do their best to make sure no one died alone, even at risk to their own lives. My heart ached every time, at every story. Part of the reason I’m a priest is my deep conviction that no one should die alone, that no family should have to navigate death and grief alone. It’s part of our vows, part of our commitment to our people; that we will do everything in our power to bring the presence of community and Christ into moments of death and grief when it matters most. It’s why hospital chaplains respond to every Code Blue and why priests are on-call 24/7 with backup pastoral care coverage and why every police force should have a chaplain. But in those dark days, do you remember?, how we couldn’t be there for you, not in the way our tradition teaches. And so there was grief on grief. A collective trauma the world seems eager to forget. I don’t want us to forget.
“Lord, if you had been there,” Mary’s accusation begins. “Lord, if you had been there, my brother would not have died.” How often has that phrase echoed through the minds of the grieving: If only I had been there. I wasn’t there. At these words and at the weeping of Lazurus’ loved ones and friends, Jesus begins to weep, too. I don’t think this was a stoic and dignified single tear, by the way, not for a second. The text says Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. I believe Jesus was weeping, that kind of weeping that shakes your whole body and covers you in snot, the kind of weeping that howls inside you and all around you. I believe Jesus knew in that moment, felt in that moment, all the regret and anguish and pain and loneliness of every loved one who has ever lamented, I wasn’t there.
Three years after my grandfather’s death, on All Saints’ Day 2021, my family gathered again to baptize my son. This time there were masks, and tests, distancing and awkward fist bumps. We kept things small. The world had changed. But death had not won - life was continuing on, our family was still growing. And so was God’s. We celebrated my son’s adoption into that wide, spiritual family of God’s. A family that includes the living and the dead, a family in heaven and on earth, a family that is perpetually gathering around the font and the table to eat and drink, celebrate and remember.
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| Baptism of August Cyrus, November 1, 2021 |
Most times when we celebrate a baptism, we’ve got a bright bouncy new baby to enjoy. So we don’t usually dwell on some of the most powerful teachings and themes of baptism: sin, renunciation of evil, death. But today is one of the traditional high feast days when Episcopalians reaffirm our baptismal vows whether or not we’ve got someone to baptize. It’s also the feast day we remember and reflect on our beloved dead, so all in all the perfect moment to recall that baptism is not just a sharing in new life and new birth. In baptism, we share in Christ’s death. Paul writes in Romans, “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
Immersion baptism drives this scriptural image home a lot more effectively than our little demure Episcopal sprinkling. In immersion baptism - the sort of baptism Jesus himself had - you are fully submerged in water. You symbolically drown, your body buried in the water. We die with Christ. Time collapses, as it always does in ritual. And so we die, too, with all the Christians that have come before us and every Christian to come. We are united in death.
Here then is the Good News in all this symbolism and ritual. Baptism means that no one dies alone. Even the one in the room by themselves, even the one on the side of the road, even the one lonely and forgotten who will lie undiscovered for days, even your loved one you did not make it in time to be with: they do not, they did not, die alone. Has anyone told you that? They did not die alone. We have already died with them, and with all of God’s people. At the moment of death, whether submerged in the waters of baptism, or in the hospital bed, or in the foxhole, we belong to God and one another. Nothing can break that. Nothing can take that away.
There is a great family in heaven and on earth that gathers at every font, every Eucharistic table, and at every deathbed. There is rejoicing in heaven, a feast.
“On this mountain,” Isaiah proclaims, “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” And Revelation adds, “and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”
Our scripture says “will” and for us, here on earth, it is a “will be,” a time to come. But for all the saints, that mountain is already here. That feast is already well underway. We catch a glimpse of it, here at this table, and here at this font. But it is ready for us, waiting for us. And we are all invited. Amen.
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