Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them, take our minds and think with them, take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen.

I am sure most of you have heard of the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” It’s great for passing time on road trips.  The game works something like this.  You give me the name of any actor or actress and I have to connect that person to Kevin Bacon through six movies or less.  For example, if you were to give me the name Carrie Fischer, I would respond: Carrie Fischer was in Star Wars with Harrison Ford who was in The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones who was in Batman Forever with Val Kilmer who was in Heat with Robert Dinero who was in Sleepers with KEVIN BACON!  Just, FYI, my favorite Kevin Bacon film is without a doubt Footloose.

Anyway, for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” is a game devised by a trio of Pennsylvania college students with way too much time on their hands.  From this humble beginning, a web site was created, a book was published and a nationwide fad was born.  The game is based on “Six Degrees of Separation (not Kevin Bacon, Separation),” the play and movie, which suggests that all people are connected to one another by no more than six stages of circumstance or acquaintance.

We get a kick out this game, because we've all had small-world experiences, discovering that we are linked to complete strangers by surprisingly small networks of relationships. Back in the 1960s, sociologist Stanley Milgram was intrigued by this small-world phenomenon, so he aimed to prove that one individual could reach anyone else in the country, maybe anyone on the planet, through a chain of just a few people. Using the mail system, he devised an experiment that involved mailing folders from individuals in rural areas to targeted strangers in cities, and he claimed that it took only five people in six jumps to get the folder from the starter to the targeted stranger.  Any person, who takes the Scientific Method seriously, upon observing Milgram’s results, would have to agree that the experiment was a failure.  Nonetheless, the experiment is intriguing and speaks to the fact that intuitively we know that there is an interconnectedness or interdependence among and between all people in this world.

Tonight as we gather most appropriately in All Saint’s Chapel, we celebrate All Saint’s Sunday.  The word saint in the New Testament is not reserved for those members of the church who lived their faith in extraordinary ways—like a Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks who was buried this week.  Instead, saint, in the New Testament, is used to refer to every single person in the church, every single person who is a follower of Jesus as Lord and Savior.  At the beginning of tonight’s service, we sang that wonderful hymn, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.”  A British woman named Lesbia Scott wrote that hymn.  She wrote it for her children in the 1920’s to remind them that the saints of God are just folk like you and me.  The saints of God are doctors, and queens, and shepherds, and soldiers, and priests, and some, she tells us, are even slain by fierce wild beasts.  Most importantly, she reminds us that there is not any reason, no, not the least, why we shouldn’t be one too.    

So on All Saints’ Sunday, we celebrate the intercommunion—the interconnectedness—between all people in the body of Christ both the living and the dead—those Christians who make up the universal Church today and those who already live in the nearer presence of our Lord.  Like Kevin Bacon, who is apparently connected to every actor or actress in the buisiness, we are connected intimately to every Christian who was and is and is to come.  We are connected first as children of God created in His image and second as co-heirs with Christ of God’s eternal kingdom.  We are all brothers and sisters in Christ.  We will all serve God side by side around his heavenly throne.  We are all invited to sit down and feast at the great banquet table of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.  And, on that day, when it comes time to take our place at the table, prince will be seated next to pauper, black next to white, Arab next to Anglo, Catholic next to Protestant because we are all saints, not by virtue of our status or accomplishments but because of our faith in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Tonight’s New Testament lesson assigned for All Saints’ Day is from the book of Revelation.  A man named John of Patmos wrote Revelation.  This is a different person than John, the beloved disciple, who is credited with writing the Gospel of John.  John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, was an itinerant prophet and preacher who traveled throughout Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) preaching in the small house churches that were emerging throughout the Greco-Roman world in the first century.  John was preaching in the 80’s and 90’s AD just 20 or 30 years after the death of Paul and 50 or 60 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.  During this time, the Roman Emperor Domitian had begun persecuting Christians throughout the empire.  Some scholars suggest that John was exiled to the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea by Roman authorities for his preaching.  It was there, on Patmos, that John was given the prophetic vision that we call the book of Revelation.

So how do you and I read Revelation?  How can we appropriate John’s vision in our day to day lives?  Well to being with Revelation is not a prophetic road map indicating particular events along the course of human history for us to use as signs and omens to predict Jesus’ second coming.  Instead, Revelation is a profound, prophetic word about the liberation of God’s people.  It is the hope that God will intervene once again in human history, as He did in creation and on the cross, to heal our broken world—a task that you and I, even at our best, simply cannot accomplish on our own.  The vision of Revelation reminds us that God hears the cries and feels the pain of his children and will enter history again to do something about it. 

In tonight’s reading, in particular, John sees a vision of the heavenly kingdom, and seated on the throne at the center of the heavenly temple is God and the Lamb.  The Lamb is none other than Jesus Christ who sacrificed his life to save the world from bondage to sin and death.  Standing around the throne are angels and people clothed in white robes.   In one voice, the multitude cries out, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!  Amen!  Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!  Amen!”  The multitude of people surrounding the throne is too many to count.  John tells us they come out of every nation, every race, every ethnicity, speaking every language.  The great multitude of people are all those saints who have already passed into eternal life. 

One of the elders in the heavenly gathering tells John that the ones dressed in white, the saints, are, “they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed there robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”  You and I are still in the great ordeal.  We call the great ordeal life, and our lives have been bloodied and soiled from trials and temptations, distractions and interruptions.  We are pushed, pulled and sometimes pulverized by earthly events—family problems, financial concerns, our own poor choices, conflict with neighbors, war, social injustice, etc...  Nonetheless, though we have been bloodied by life, like the saints who have gone before us, by our faith we are washed clean through the sacrifice of Jesus’ life, the Lamb of God, on the hard wood of the cross.  And because God did not leave Jesus in the tomb but instead raised him from the dead, we can share with one another a profound hope that in the fullness of time, God will be all in all.  That Christ will come again, to usher in God’s peaceable kingdom. 

And, on that day—the day of Christ’s return or for that matter the day of our own passing—the degree of separation between God and us and the degree of separation between the saints will be far less than six degrees.  There will be zero degrees of separation.  We will stand Coram Deo—before the face of God, and, at the very same time, we will stand alongside each saint no longer as strangers but as one human family.  The pain associated with life will be past and all will be one. 

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