A sermon delivered on November 1, 2004, in Christ Chapel by the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Assistant Professor of New Testament

Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship. . ."

Dancing the dance of death, singing the Blessings of Jesus' sermon, gathering around the table whose center is the Lamb is a thirst quenching, nourishing, healing act of faith. We celebrate this most inclusive/encompassing/expansive of Christian feasts the day before Election day, as anxiety mounts, in a society that feels as though it is unraveling.

And this morning, the tear in our life, violent death of Michael Athey, graduate and friend, leaves us raw.

In the vision of the society of saints we human beings are linked one to another, bound, tied, as our collect says "knit." Loops of yarn interlock, soft and strong, make up a flexible garment that expands and contracts. We the living are looped together with the dead, intact only with each complete. Here are the extraordinary and ordinary, the famous and the nameless, our beloved whom we recall each day, those whose names we know from scripture and stories. We are all here equal, necessary, incomplete without our neighbor loop twisted into us. As each of us is knit together in our mother's womb and as the Creator spread out heavens and earth as a garment, so is the communion of saints a vast and seamless tapestry stretching back and forward from before time and forever. The language of the communion of saints heals and mends, makes whole. In this campaign season, the beauty and goodness of this image puts to shame those who use Christian rhetoric to vilify, divide, and destroy.

We human beings are created by God, chosen, given a sacred purpose that God intends to realize in us. We do not exist simply to buy, to accumulate, to compete, to subdue. We are ends not means. On All Saints Day, we proclaim that we are made in the image of God. We cannot be reduced to categories -- race, gender, denomination, generation, or class. We cannot be focused and polled and spun and sold and duped. The vision of All Saints Day gives us power to resist all who would use us and would diminish our humanity.

Throughout the ages, faithful people have resisted evil to the point of death and beyond. Members of God's people have fallen before rulers, principalities, and powers. As Jesus, Lord of Glory, was crucified, so have the righteous been stilled. We remember and mourn them today, and we know that they have come out of the great ordeal -- they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. We are in solidarity with them, and we pray to have a portion of their energy and courage.

Now technically these martyrs gathered around the throne are Christian witnesses. But I think that if Christ's death has permanently rearranged the powers, then we must mourn all those who die pointlessly at the hands of evil. I get the New York Times every morning. Perhaps they have changed their editorial policy for graphic photographs, or perhaps recent years have brought more atrocities, but I have seen Chechnyan children slaughtered at primary school, just-recruited Iraqi soldiers executed on the ground, Israeli tourists bombed in Kenya, Palestinian villagers caught in attacks, and women in Dafur murdered in the desert. I believe the expansive vision of All Saints encompasses these lives as well, taken up in the infinite love of God.

What do we see on All Saints Day? We see the communion, the knit together fellowship, the multitude gathered around the throne. And they are doing what we are doing -- or we are doing what they are doing. They are singing day and night worshipping God in his temple, praising:

"Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever."

We are doing here what they are doing. This is our act of faith -- this is the vision we have to proclaim to the nations. Jesus is risen. The Lamb that was slain has begun his reign. All the blood shed by those we never knew and those we loved, we remember and give thanks for. It is washed away, and taken up into the infinite love of God.

This vision we celebrate is a mystical vision, a transcendent vision, seen with the eyes of faith. But it does not take us away from here. Seeing it, feeling the communion of all the saints around us as palpably as the people sitting around us in this chapel, invites us more deeply into communion with each other in our sorrows and our joys. Seeing it calls us into the hurting, bleeding world. Seeing it gives us no choice but to participate in Election day and in the day after and the day after that and all the days to come with the Risen Christ in our midst.

Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

Thanks be to God.