Sermon — November 1, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Do this in remembrance of me,” writes Dom Gregory Dix, one of the great 20th-century scholars of the Eucharist, the 744th page of his whopping tome on the Eucharist. “Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. [We] have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church… One could fill many pages with the reasons why [we] have done this,” Dix writes — and believe me, I just cut out about three paragraphs of examples — “One could fill many pages with the reasons… and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.”[1]
“Do this in remembrance of me,” on “a hundred thousand successive Sundays”—until, that is, this March 15.
It’s been a long time since any of us has done this. Eight months ago, I never could have imagined that this is what it would look like to start celebrating the Eucharist together again. I remember having so many conversations in March and April, serious and silly alike, that began, “When we’re all back together again…” It was in that early phase of the pandemic when many of us non-professionals still assumed there would be a switch flipped at some point: yesterday there was a plague, and today it’s under control and we can come back together, and celebrate together, and share this holy food and drink.
Of course, it didn’t go that way. Instead, here we are. A few of us, scattered around the church. More of us, still joining from afar. Gathering once again to obey the command: “Do this in remembrance of me,” but scattered, separated from one another, missing and grieving what life once was.
But every Eucharist has always been this way.
Every Sunday of the past when we gathered for worship in our various churches, we were only ever a fraction of a church. I’m not making a joke about church attendance. I mean that every single one of Dom Dix’s “hundred thousand successive Sundays” has been marked by absence and grief. From the very first time that Jesus’ disciples gathered after his death down to the present day, every Sunday’s congregation has been incomplete. Every Sunday, even in ordinary times, some of us were carrying the memories of departed spouses and parents and friends. Every Sunday, we greet those we love and mourn those we’ve lost. Every Sunday, not just All Saints’ Sunday, we gather with “all [God’s] saints still striving,” and we waited to be reunited with “all [God’s] saints at rest.”
All Saints’ Day, after all, is not a day on which we celebrate all of the people the Church has officially canonized as saints, all at once. And it’s not only a day on which we pray for those who have died. It’s the day we celebrate and pray for all the saints, all the holy people of God, all those who have ever been baptized, past, present, and future, “from all tribes and peoples and languages.” (Rev. 7:9)
When we share the Eucharist, we join in a celebration that’s larger than any of us, larger than all of us together. When we “lift up [our] hearts,” we are “lift[ed] to the Lord.” We “[join] our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven.” We join in that heavenly worship John saw in his Revelation that transcends time and space, and we receive just a taste of that wonderful future, in which we “will hunger no more, and thirst no more… and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.” (Rev .7:16-17) When we stand before this altar, in other words, we stand united with all the saints, and worship God side by side.
So no, not all of us can be in church today; probably not for quite a while. But God has been gathering her people now for going on three thousand years. God’s used to worship we would call “remote.” If God can raise the eyes of St. John the Divine into heaven so that he sees “a great multitude that no one could count,” (Rev. 7:9) from every place and every time, then surely God appreciates a miniature multitude of little Zoom squares from our little patch of the kingdom.
We don’t know when we’ll all be together again. We don’t know when the saints in church and the saints on Zoom and the saints who need a break from Zoom will worship together again. We don’t know when we saints on earth will be reunited to our long-lost saints in heaven. But, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) Amen.
[1] Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy. London: Dacre Press, Adam and Charles Black (1945), 744.