A sermon for All Saints Sunday
6 November, 2005

The Rev. Dr. Bill Doggett ©
Chapel of the Resurrection
Historic Congressional Cemetery

 It is a treat for me to be able to celebrate All Saints Sunday here in this place with you. It’s not the kind of privilege I ever had until I came to Christ Church, because where I come from churches don’t have cemeteries. In California, nearly all the churchyards were closed in the early twentieth century in response to concerns about disease and the lobbying of the mortuary industry, and the dead were removed to garden settings on the edge of, or even out of town.  

We are lucky, at Christ Church, to live in the same neighborhood as our ancestors. Now most of you probably don’t have literal ancestors buried here, but they are your ancestors nonetheless. Buried here are people who built your houses and your church, who fought to protect your community from invasion, fire, flood and famine, and who planted the trees and the schools and the business that make our community strong and beautiful.

 You may have other connections as well – I know I do. The nearest town to the one I grew up in, for instance, is named after a man buried in Congressional Cemetery. The people wanted to name their town after a Civil War hero, and seem to have chosen a Union general not for any connection to anyone in the town, but because his last name sounded like a good name for a town. General Alfred Pleasonton was buried here in 1897.

 So here we are, celebrating the Lord’s Supper amidst 60,000 of our neighbors, ancestors, predecessors and benefactors. And on this All Saints Sunday, we want to make sure that all 60,000 of them join us at the feast. Or we could say we want to join them at the feast. The question is a little confusing, since cemeteries, like the communion table, are places where past, present and future all come together to give us a glimpse of eternity.

 It is easy to imagine, as we bless, break and share the bread and the wine in this small chapel, that the table at which we gather is larger than it at first appears. It is easy to imagine that it stretches out the door and makes room for our friends who are resting around us.

 One might imagine that it stretches further, down E street to the west, making a left at the Beghè’s house to join with the table where we usually gather, and on from there to join with the tables of all the communities that gather for the great feast today – in many places, but at one table.

 One might further imagine this table – and all those other tables –  stretching through time, until they are large enough for all who have gathered there, and all who will gather there to be seated together. And having done that, it is perhaps no great leap to imagine that all of those tables that are really one table have Jesus sitting at the head, offering welcome and sustenance to all. 

That is the image of the Lord’s supper that the book of Revelation tries to bring to us, with its strange but vivid images of the multitude gathered around the four-cornered sea before the throne of God – strange to us, but familiar images to any early Christian community that gathered to make Eucharist in the courtyard of a roman-style house, with the bishop’s chair before the central reflecting pool. So just as the vision in Revelation connected the worship experience of the first Christians to the eternal assembly of the faithful, so our worship today among our ancestors helps us to a larger vision of the community to which we belong, and with whom we celebrate. I believe it was G. K. Chesterton who once said he could not know the size of a congregation unless he knew the population of its churchyard. Here in our cemetery we remember that we are a large community indeed.

 And today, with sorrow, we remember that some of those we saw at the feast last year are no longer visible to us. We will, in a few minutes, read out the roll of the faithful departed: those whom we have loved and who have touched our lives who have died in the last year, and we will call on them to come rejoice with us. Let us remember as we do so that it is they, as they stand before the throne of God, around the four-cornered sea, who are continually calling on us to come rejoice with them.

Amen.