Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, October 29th 2023, All Hallows' Eve

Halloween is a uniquely American holiday. It comes to us from the early colonies and has only gained in popularity year after year. Like many things in our country, its Christian origins tend these days to be forgotten. In fact, some people (Christian and non-Christian) seem to think Halloween is an anti-Christian holiday, a kind of ungodly protest against our faith. The truth is, Halloween only makes sense in terms of our faith and its Christian character remains for all to see. It is on October 31st because November 1st, the day after, is All Saints’ Day, the day we celebrate the lives of dead Christians who have not only gone before us, but in many cases died for us, so that we could live better lives–even in this world–than they did. One can only conjecture why the founders of our church named this church St. Paul’s, after a man who has been dead for nearly 2,000 years. After all, it could have been “The Church of What is Happening Now” or even “Brookline Community Church.” But no, instead, they chose to have the ongoing identity of the community they founded here to be tied to this act of remembering the faithful departed, celebrating their lives, keeping their faith, maintaining their hope, and imitating what was best about them. To make this abundantly clear, the founding date of St. Paul’s is October 31st, 1849, nearly 174 years ago to the day.

The more important a day is in the Christian calendar, the more likely it is to produce a preceding period of spiritual preparation for it. Easter is so holy that Christians invented 40 days of Lent to prepare for it. Christmas is so sacred, that Christians invented Advent to prepare for it. In America, All Saints’ Day, like Christmas and Easter, needed its own day of preparation, All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween. That is what we observe today.

I once visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Israel. That is the ancient church built over the place where Jesus was born and in that holy and ancient stone place, you can see the place where the manger once stood and where pilgrims have traveled to for centuries. What I didn’t expect was this. My highly connected friend who lived there took my down an old stone staircase, down below the scene of the first Christmas into a large open underground vault that it turns out is built underneath. It was filled with human bones piled high floor to ceiling as far as I could see. Bones on top of bones, all mixed together. I asked, “Whose bones are these?” Human bones, skeletons everywhere. They were the bones of Christians from as far back as the fourth century whose last act of faith was to have their skeletal remains be there in Bethlehem as a testimony to their faith in their resurrection, to their faith that death does not have the last word even for the dead.

Standing there silently, I was creeped out for sure, it was spookier than any haunted house. It was real, nothing pretend there, and today they still lie there waiting. I learned something right there that I have come to notice in all places where Christians have been a long time like our New England. Have you noticed how prominent our old cemeteries are with their aging tombstones? They were put there to be seen, to be walked around and through, and not to be forgotten. The oldest Episcopal Churches in Massachusetts have church yards that are full of tombstones. People know the Old North Church for its role in Paul Revere’s famous ride, but they don’t often know that the entire undercroft is a crypt with some 1100 bodies, the tombs of founders of our Commonwealth and Nation who chose to be buried in the church.  

If you go searching for the bodies of the founding generation of our church such as Augustus Aspinwall and Harrison Fay, they remain near us at the old Walnut Street Cemetery. Others you can find at Mt. Auburn Cemetery that was founded 18 years before this church. When you visit, it is clear for all to see that these places have a natural beauty to them. We bump into them because they are not hidden away. The dead are to remain visible in the midst of us. They placed their mortal bodies there, just like the ancient Christians whose bodies fill that holy vault in Bethlehem, to remind us of the hope that was in them. They wanted us to know the meaning of the words of St. Paul we read this morning where he said, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). It is in this exact hopeful tradition that the columbarium at the center of our church is also the graves of many of our loved ones and their names are inscribed one by one to be remembered and prayed for.

If you have gone to churches in Europe, one of unnerving things to get used to is that when you look down on the stones that you may be standing on, you notice that they are often tombstones with people names and years inscribed upon them. Or, even more so, the marked graves in front of and under altars. Holding the dead very close in our worship is a longstanding Christian tradition where, as in the scripture readings today, the line between the living and the dead becomes awfully thin. You have probably heard the phrase, “the communion of the saints.” Some things we mean very metaphorically and then there are other things that sound metaphorical but we are actually really literal about. The communion of the saints is a phrase that means that at the altar in receiving communion we think that the lines from God’s perspective between the dead and the living are very thin indeed.

When many Christians receive communion, it is part of that worship that to them they receive communion along with their faithfully departed loved ones. The whole logic of the Eucharist is that we offer to God what most matters to us and give it away, but then the astounding miracle of every Eucharist is that we receive it back in some form in a new way, blessed, elevated, and healed. And our loved ones are the same. We give them to God as what we have no rights to ever again, and yet, somehow, God is trustworthy and we have confidence that we will receive them back in the same way that we experience in every other Eucharist. We receive them back better, whole, and healed. Every Eucharist involves that same logic so much so that the altar burials of the Christian dead for millennia make sense as we bring what most matters to us here and offer it up to God, not only as we prepare for All Saints’ Day, but each time we come to this sacred place.   

The more Christianity loses its hold on the public imagination of Americans, the more invisible death becomes. I receive more and more phone calls from people who talk of scattering human ashes in any number of places, golf courses, Disney World, resort beaches. These well-intentioned callers don’t usually see how that very practice makes the dead more and more unseen. There are no grave markers to walk around, no exact place to return to and remember. As the faithful departed take up less and less visible space in our world and our imaginations, it can look like a loss of resurrection hope. It can look like the kind of despair where things are so terrible that, well, we don’t even talk about them. It can look like Halloween does when people no longer recall why on this day we remember the dead at all and why we would contemplate how they are not really gone.

Instead, here at St. Paul’s we commemorate All Hallows’ Eve today as we prepare for our celebration of all the saints’ next Sunday. We can honor the dead without despair here because we do not grieve as others do who have no hope. We can remember the dead today here because we continue the tradition of our ancestors of calling to mind those who have gone before us. These people in many ways taught us what we know and gave shape to our world. Although we probably take it all for granted most of the time, our human world is populated with ideas and achievements that they thought up, fought for, and suffered for. It is an almost unthinkable thought that the vast majority of us live in homes we did not build, were educated in schools that were there before we were ever named, go to hospitals that already existed before we ever knew we needed them, worship in churches that were already here before we ever needed them, and so on and so on. It is because we are a people with the faith that we have that here, when we make big decisions, the dead can still cast their vote in the holy democracy that is the church. Their aspirations and dreams and wisdom carry on and in no way are defeated by death, which–despite everything–does not win among us Christians.

We can speak of death and face our fears here, because, to quote the Bible, “for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither floods drown it” (Song of Songs 4). May that Divine Love, fierce as the grave, unite us to past and future generations, and be what lives in our bones as an abiding source of hope both now and forevermore. Amen.