Sermon for All Saints' Day - Matthew 5:1-12

Tonight is a night rich in symbols. All feast days in the church are, but there is something especially moving about the symbols on All Saints’. We have banners to honor those buried from Christ Church in the last year. We read the names of our loved ones in the prayer for the departed. We use incense to lift our prayers and our spirits. The choir’s voices bring the musical notes of Salieri’s beautiful Requiem to life. The white vestments call our minds to the joys of Easter and to the resurrection of the dead. The seven branch candles and the lovely flowers remind us that this night is special, as we honor the communion of saints. And I’m quite sure that the feast prepared for us by Tim Day after the service will be a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Symbols upon symbols tonight draw our imagination up to heaven itself.

I want to suggest to you that these symbols are not just symbols. They are something more. Theologian David Tracy has been on a campaign for years to help us understand their true nature. He was known for his formidable presence at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He talked loud and fast, in complete paragraphs of complicated language. He was on a passionate campaign to help his students understand the true nature of religious symbols. He was particularly famous for correcting any poor student who called something “just a symbol.” He would pound his fist on the desk, almost yelling the words, “Never say just a symbol!” For Tracy, a symbol is not just a representation of something. A symbol, especially a religious one, participates in the reality to which it points us. And a Christian symbol in particular participates in the event and person of Jesus Christ. Such symbols have what Tracy called an excess of meaning, which provokes our understanding in the present with a kind of permanent timeliness.

Tracy called this the analogical imagination. Here’s how it works. We compare things here on earth to things in heaven or to the things of God in order to understand them better. Take human love, for example. We trust that the love we experience in this life is like God’s love. In the analogical imagination, human love, as a symbol of a divine reality, participates in God’s love. While God’s perfect love cannot be exhausted by the symbol of human love in all of its imperfections and shortcomings, the two are connected. If that makes your head spin just a bit, you’re in good company with all of Tracy’s students. And with worshippers of God across the centuries. The symbols around us tonight draw us into eternal truths that can hardly be put into words.

One of those truths is the communion of saints, past, present, and yet to come. It is a divine mystery. But we know something about that communion based on our experience of community here on earth and especially here in church. Our gathering tonight is a symbol of that much broader gathering of saints. Medieval mystics believed that liturgy is a way to connect with the ongoing angelic liturgy, the perpetual worship and adoration from those in the eternal presence of God. On a night like this, it seems possible for our worship to touch that reality.

In addition to the vast communion of saints, there are also smaller, personal symbols tonight that connect us to heavenly truths. The names on the banners and the names we read in the prayer for the departed are symbols of our loved ones. Tonight we trust that they are not just symbols. The names participate in the reality of bonds that can never be broken, even across the mysterious divide between life and death. Our symbols tonight connect us to the communion of saints as a whole, and also to our own saints for whom we pray.

If you are joyful on this All Saints’ night, there are symbols of the heavenly banquet all around for you to enjoy. May they lift you to the joys of heaven.

And if you mourn tonight, there are symbols all around that are especially for you. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” The mourning of which he speaks is broad, from the loss of a loved one to grief over the state of the world. Whatever weighs on your heart tonight, let the symbols around you lift your spirit. May they comfort you and assure you of connections that can never be broken. May the symbols that surround us reveal the larger realities in which they participate, in resurrected life that never ends, and in the eternal congregation of the communion of saints. And remember, never call them “just symbols.” They are so much more than that.