“How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined, and we are reconciled to God.”
This night, this Great Vigil of Easter, is hands down, my favorite night of the year. I have my mother largely to thank for this. We were always an Easter Vigil kind of family. I remember being a small child, enchanted as I watched the new flame spark into life outside the Catholic churches where we worshipped. I remember the feeling of awe as our little candles were lit from that flame, and the sanctuary slowly filled with a soft glow. I remember being drawn into the readings from scripture, those strange, evocative accounts of God’s saving deeds. And I remember watching adult catechumens experience the sacrament of baptism and witnessing their joy as they were fully welcomed into the life of the church.
As I got older, the Easter Vigil was one of the places where I began to feel my own love of the Christian faith beginning to take root and grow. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that during this time when I was realizing that church was something I felt drawn to in my own right, I was also falling in love with science fiction and fantasy. While I was memorizing the Nicene Creed, serving as an acolyte, and probably annoying all the other kids in the religious-ed classes at our church, I was also wandering across Middle-Earth with Frodo and Sam, slipping into new corners of the universe alongside Meg and Charles Wallace Murray, and searching for Narnia in the back of my disappointingly mundane bedroom closet.
With apologies to every single one of my seminary professors, I came to love church, through the Easter Vigil because it felt like magic. I yearned so badly to be a part of a story that would take me out of the ordinariness of my little middle-school life and allow me to live in a brighter, more fulfilling version of the world.
Now, quite a few years have passed since those formative vigil experiences, but I am still captivated by the sheer mystery of this liturgy, and I am even more firmly convinced that the present reality we occupy cannot be the only story God intends for us. We gather for the Easter Vigil mere hours after we recount the narrative of Jesus’ trial at the hands of earthly powers and his horrifying death on the cross. By rights, after experiencing the desolation of Good Friday, we should have no reason to hope. We can imagine how utterly lost and uncertain the disciples must have felt this night, after laying Jesus in the tomb. We can imagine the grief and the real fear carried by the women who went to that same tomb early the next day.
And God knows, all of us have likely experienced similar feelings, especially after these last two pandemic years. The world today, can feel like a dark, uncertain, and frightening space as we are faced with images of violent conflict abroad, as we confront the history of discrimination and abuse that has shaped the culture of our own country, and as we continue to live into a world reshaped by growing ecological crisis. Tonight might be the first service of Easter, but we cannot ignore the reality that Good Friday is also still very present in our life together.
And yet. This night, this space created by the words spoken and actions performed during our time together – they remind us that the tomb may be dark, and it may be empty, but it is not a meaningless or terrifying void. Rather, it is a space of potential, of anticipation. It is a space alive with the knowledge that something truly incredible has occurred. It not an end, in fact, it is the beginning of a story – a story that called a small group of people into an utterly new way of life two thousand years ago and that continues to shape the way all of us, gathered in this space tonight, choose to live in our lives now.
There is a special kind of remembering that we do when we come together as the Church. The word for this kind of remembering is anamnesis – we remember in a way that makes a past event somehow present. This Great Vigil of Easter, this entire service is basically an anamnesis. We have just heard the “record of God’s saving deeds in history.” We have been reminded that God was and is the creator of all that we call good. We have been reminded that God was the liberator who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and is still standing with those who remain in bondage today. We have been reminded that God was and is powerful enough to restore life to even the most barren and broken corners of the world. We have been reminded that God was and is in our midst, rejoicing with us and renewing us with love. As we have heard these stories about how God acted and spoke, we have been reminded of who God was, and is, and will continue to be.
But these ancient stories are not just about God. They are also about God’s people. They are about us. In just a few minutes, we will renew our baptismal vows. In doing so, we will not only affirm what we believe about our triune God and God’s church, we will also recommit ourselves to the promises that we made as people who have chosen to live in this world as followers of the risen Christ. I know it’s dark and you’ve all got candles, but just go ahead and take a look at the baptismal covenant – it’s next up in your bulletin (BCP 304). You will notice that these baptismal promises are full of gorgeous, active verbs like persevere and proclaim, seek and strive. These promises are about worship and prayer, yes, but they also call us outside the walls of this building, into deeper relationship with our neighbors and the wider world.
These baptismal promises move and inspire me every time I am called to reaffirm them, and they are one of the reasons why I came to love this Episcopal Church. While I was baptized as an infant, I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church as a teenager, and I think I can claim at least a small degree of kinship with those adult catechumens I saw baptized during the Easter Vigils of my childhood. The faith that I have found in this church is one that I chose to claim when I was sixteen and have continued to choose to claim every day since. Our baptismal covenant reminds us that the Christian faith is not something that we simply observe or receive. Rather, when we choose to accept God’s grace and love, we are called into an entirely new way of being, as members of Christ’s resurrected body and agents of God’s transformative, ongoing work.
I never did find Narnia in the back of a wardrobe, and my Hogwarts letter remained stubbornly lost in the mail. And although 12-year-old Catherine is still a little sad about this reality, present-day Catherine has received the gift of a story that is so much bigger and so much more hopeful than anything I’ve ever read in a novel. The story of God’s saving action through the glories of creation, God’s relationship with the people of Israel, and Jesus, God’s own child, who became human, lived among us, and died so we could enter new life, this story is the one that I have chosen to orient my life around because it is a story that has not ended. It is a story where I – and all of you! – have a real and meaningful part yet to play.
When we boldly profess that Christ has died, is risen, and will come again, we are stepping into a story that pushes us out of our finite, fundamentally human ways of thinking and opens space for a whole realm of possibilities. We can acknowledge, decry, and lament all the spaces where the death-dealing forces of this present time remain heart-breakingly active, while also joyfully proclaiming that God’s promised future is still to come. And what’s more, we can anticipate that future by cultivating hopeful spaces for resurrection and renewal to take root and flourish in our own lives and communities.
And so, my friends, before we move through the rest of this glorious liturgy and into the full celebration of this Easter season, let us linger here in the darkness for just a moment longer. In this night when earth and heaven are joined, let us pause to both remember and reclaim our deepest hope in the mystery of God’s yet-unfolding story that is alive and present in each and every one of our lives, tonight and always. Amen.
- preached by the Rev. Catherine Manhardt, St. James Episcopal Church, April 16, 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment