Sermon for the Octave Day of All Saints’
“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly one… for [God] hath prepared for them a city”
Fall, the season of harvest, the time of gathering, is also the time of barrenness, of the stark and grey emptiness of nature’s year. After the fruits of creation have been gathered in, the fields and gardens lie barren, desolate and emptied of their summer glory. The glorious and colourful array of the autumn leaves quickly give place to the sombre greyness of the twilight of the year.
Yet beyond the gathering of the fruits of creation, there is the spiritual gathering of the fruit of our lives to Christ even if we are in “the twilight of such day,/As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by-and-by black night doth take away,/Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest,” the twilight days and years of our lives, as Shakespeare puts it. The point is that there is a gathering of our souls into a communion and a community. It is a community of spirit, of love. If in Shakespeare’s sonnet (Sonnet 73) our perception of the passage of time makes “thy love more strong, /To love that well which thou must leave ere long,” in the Communion of Saints we are being called to the community of spirit in which our loves are eternal.
Jesus gathers us into the barn and grace of his kingdom. King and Shepherd, city and country are joined in his kingdom. He makes something glorious out of the seeming barrenness of our lives, come what may. There is a gathering of the fruit of human lives unto life eternal.
The Octave of All Saints celebrates the great festival of spiritual harvest, the gathering of all who have gone forth in Christ’s name and in whom we see something of the light of Christ shining forth through them. It extends to an Octave and to this day, The Octave Day of All Saints, which is about a kind of homecoming of spirit realized in “a better country, that is, an heavenly one,” in fact, “a city,” which is nothing less than a spiritual community and one in which we remember with gratitude those who have gone before us and into whose labour we have entered. That idea extends to Remembrance Day this week which is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. We remember those who made the supreme sacrifice for their country in the defining conflicts of the twentieth century and now, too, the twenty-first century. We remember them to God in the Christian understanding.
