Feasting at the Heavenly Banquet

cemetery near Dunvegan, Isle of Skye, Scotland

November is a beautiful month in North Carolina. The days are crisp and sunny with achingly blue skies, and every autumn colored leaf imaginable welcomes the shift in weather by falling to the ground.  But it is a month of great heaviness to my spirit, in spite of the shift in temperatures and the glory of seeing another season come around.  Daylight Saving Time ends, and the days get darker sooner, and there's All Saints' Day and then anniversary of Scott's mother's death, and then the anniversary of my mother's death.  I miss her.  I miss her smile.  I miss her beautiful blue eyes.  I miss the way she called me "Shug" and "Baby Buns"--  (don't ask!) And I really miss her cooking.  I miss eating the wonderful Southern food she prepared every single day and fed to us with so much love.

Since I'm on transition leave and not serving a church right now, I've been visiting other churches, and it was important for me to worship with a congregation that observes All Saints' Sunday with some solemnity -- and with the sacrament of holy communion.  I also had the opportunity to worship at Duke Divinity School for their celebration of that day, so I got a double dose of "For All the Saints" and the sharing of bread and cup.  There is something powerful about this observance that speaks of the pain and reality of separation that comes from the death of someone you love but also of the hope and reality of the communion of saints and the promise of resurrection and life eternal with them in God's presence.  Perhaps not surprisingly, food plays a big part in that future hope.  The communion liturgy of the United Methodist Church includes these words:

By your Spirit make us one with Christ, 
one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world, 
until Christ comes in final victory 
and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Feasting with Christ and all the saints at the heavenly banquet as a future hope is also a present reality for us when we come to the table and share the sacrament.  Nothing new there, but I recently learned something I didn't know on Preach the Story, Leonard Sweet's Facebook page.  It's a beautiful description of why some churches have their communion rails built in a half-circle.  Sweet learned it from David Wahlsted, who got it from Charles Henrickson (a Lutheran theology professor and pastor), and Henrickson in turn quotes a Swedish churchman named Bo Giertz:

 Where the circle ends at the chancel wall, the fellowship still continues; in the churchyard is the resting place of the dead, the Lord's faithful, who now are partakers of the great banquet in heaven. They are with us as a great cloud of witnesses, they continue the small circle of people around the altar in my parish church, a circle that widens and is extended both back in time through the centuries and forward into the eternal world. It is a table fellowship without end. Shoulder by shoulder are they with us: our own faithful ancestors who once received the sacrament here at this altar, saints and martyrs elsewhere through the ages, and finally the Lord Himself and His apostles in the glorious kingdom in heaven above where the circle comes to its conclusion. This is 'communio sanctorum,' the communion of saints in Christ's kingdom of grace. Celebrating the Lord's Supper with my brothers and sisters in Christ, I am connected with the saints who sit at the Lord's Table in the heavenly kingdom. I am counted as one of God's holy people.

John Wesley would have warmed to that idea. All Saints' had special meaning for him, and he mentions it in his journal several times, describing it as a "day of triumphant joy" (1756) and calling people "superstitious" who think it wrong to give God "solemn thanks for the lives and deaths of his saints!"  It is clear that he and his mother Susanna had a special relationship, and he certainly numbered her among the saints of God.  He writes movingly of her death:

I went to my mother, and found that her change was near. I sat down on the bed-side.  She was in her last conflict; unable to speak, but, I believe, quite sensible.  Her look was calm and serene, and her eyes fixed upward, while we commended her soul to God. From three to four the silver cord was loosing and the wheel breaking at the cistern; and then, without any struggle, or sigh, or groan, the soul was set at liberty. We stood round her bed, and fulfilled her last request, uttered a little before she lost her speech:  'Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God.'

Susanna Annesley Wesley Garden, Lake Junaluska, NC

In his book Susanna Wesley and the Puritan Tradition in Methodism, John Newton notes that Susanna's daughter Anne was also present at her deathbed, and that she wrote in a letter to brother Charles who was not there:

A few days before my mother died, she desired me, if I had strength to bear it, that I would not leave her till death, which God enabled me to do. She laboured under great trials both of soul and body, some days after you left her; but God perfected His work in her about twelve hours before He took her to Himself.  She waked out of a slumber; and we, hearing her rejoicing, attended to the words she spoke, which were these: 'My dear Saviour!  are you come to help me in my extremity at last?'  From that time she was sweetly resigned indeed; the enemy had no more power to hurt her. The remainder of her time was spent in praise.'

I have found God's comfort and grace every year when November rolls around, even in the grip of the sadness that inevitably steals over me as I grieve for my mother, I remember that in her last days she, too, was filled with praise of God.  Before she was no longer able to speak, we recorded her singing "This Little Light of Mine" in a voice that was barely above a whisper with a face that, though gaunt from illness, shone with a quiet glow that had everything to do with the One who was present with her through it all.  Perhaps if I had known it,  as soon as my mother was set free I would have sung these words written by Charles Wesley a few years after his mother's death:

'Tis finished! 'Tis done!
The spirit is fled,
The pris'ner is gone,
The Christian is dead!

The Christian is living
In Jesus's love,
And gladly receiving
A kingdom above.

Amen!  Thanks be to God!

communion table, John Wesley's Chapel (New Room), Bristol