All Saints’ Sunday, Year B: Isaiah 25:6-9
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
November 7, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
“Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth…” – Isaiah 25:8[1]
This morning we’ve come together to observe All Saints’ Day. This festival has been celebrated throughout the Church at various times since at least the 4th Century and became a principal feast with a fixed date in the Western Church by the early 800’s. As a principal feast, All Saints’ officially ranks with our celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. It was originally a three day festival, beginning with a vigil service on All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween) and continuing through All Souls Day on November 2. Popular fiction associates this feast with the ancient Druidic Samhaim festival, but modern research suggests the timing is entirely coincidental, with many of the modern aspects of American Halloween practices being traced back to English customs associated with both All Saints Day and Christmas.[2]
If you’ve ever attended a funeral or memorial service in the Episcopal Church, you may have noticed that some overlap with today’s Bible readings. We think of funerals as times of sadness and mourning, but from a broader Church perspective, funerals are celebrations of Resurrection, which makes their function similar to our Easter services. It can be a confusing experience, with the Paschal Candle, triumphant white vestments, and shouts of “alleluia” throughout the service conflicting with our sense of loss. Although All Saints’ Day has a weaker connection to mourning than a funeral, as a commemoration of all Christian lives who’ve come before us, follows that same line of funeral/Easter/Resurrection thought.
Our Lectionary today opened with a passage from Isaiah where the prophet proclaims their vision of a time when the Lord, the Divine God of Heaven, will set out a vast banquet of food and wine on top of an unnamed mountain. In the ancient world—even in monotheistic Israel—people thought of mountains as places that connected heaven and earth. They were, quite literally, the homes of the gods. The last mountain mentioned before our passage was Mount Zion, the home of the Temple in Jerusalem, so that’s our most likely location for this feast. Mount Zion wasn’t particularly tall, but to the Israelites it was the most special mountain in the world, because it was where the Lord, the Chief of the entire Council of Gods, chose to dwell. It was God’s home. So here we see the Lord hosting a banquet not just on some green hillside with nice views and cool, clear air. This isn’t a retreat center in Ruidoso or a cabin up in Cloudcroft. Our undisputed Ruler of all gods is preparing a feast in their own abode, not just for other supernatural entities or the greatest names in history but for “all peoples”—every kingdom, tribe, tongue, and nation. It’s the great and final supper for anyone and everyone who has ever waited in hope for the Lord.
But what’s going on, really? Why take the trouble of hosting this lavish feast? The answer combines not just “why” but also “when.” The supper will occur when—and because—God destroys, on that same mountain, “the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations.”[3] This is the point where God displays God’s ultimate glory and “swallow[s] up death forever.” We join this meal for the ultimate funeral and the ultimate celebration: the end of the age and the death of Death itself. At that time, God “will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth.”[4]
No Christian festival is or ever has been a commemoration of Death or of the dead. All of them—be it Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, All Saints’, or any other lesser feast—are for the living—but not just for those of us sitting in the pews today. The core of these holidays is the gratitude for and joy of resurrected life. Today we aren’t just memorializing lives well lived, nor are we simply looking forward to the hope of someday joining our loved ones and other forebears in heaven. Instead, we join in the ancient celebration of the Church, the corporate, living body of Christ united throughout all ages and across every branching of time and space. Today we celebrate Communion with a capital C. In the Eucharist, we feast not just with those sitting and breathing next to us but with all who have gone before. We come forward to join the full experience of the reality of the mystical communion of the saints—those past, those present, and those to come. Our God is not a god of the dead, but of the living!
At the Lord’s Table, together with not only one other and our departed loved ones but with the angels of heaven and the Trinity itself, we realize the great and holy Marriage Supper of the Lamb. This is no simple symbol or stretched analogy. Every time we celebrate communion, we are heralding and participating in that great feast that marks the end of this world of disappointment and pain and celebrating the beginning of the glorious New Creation.
Today, as we prepare ourselves to gather at God’s holy mountain and join in this Feast of the Ages, we celebrate together—in the fullest possible aspect of that word—the dawn of new and boundless life. Entering the joy of this heavenly celebration, the everlasting Wedding Supper of the Lamb, we join with all the living host of heaven and proclaim,
“Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us!
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation!”[5]
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] https://historyforatheists.com/2021/10/is-halloween-pagan/
[3] Isaiah 25:7
[4] Isaiah 25:8
[5] Isaiah 25:9