A sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter
April 16, 2022
For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven: By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.”
Do we believe this? Over this Triduum, these three holy days, I have been asking this question. Do we believe? We say this statement week after week in the Nicene Creed, but is it something we truly, really believe? That Christ came for us, that he died for us, and that he was literally and bodily and physically raised from the dead, for us and for our salvation?
I have been telling us Ann’s story. Her story is not so different from ours, really. A respectable woman in a middle class family. She grew up in the church, but fell away for years. She came back when her kids were teenagers, not for them, but for herself. She needed Jesus, and she met Jesus at her church, just as we do, week after week. Several months after she started coming back, the Bishop visited. Her teenagers and her husband were confirmed; she renewed her baptismal vows alongside them, just as we did earlier in this service. She reaffirmed her renunciation of evil and renewed her commitment to Jesus Christ. She said, “with God’s grace I will follow him as my Savior and Lord.” And that’s what she has done–by God’s grace.
When I met her several years ago, it was in a Sunday school class. We were all sitting around a table. It was the Easter season, and she spoke up. She wasn’t shy about sharing her opinion. “Can I be honest?” she asked. “I have always had trouble with the Resurrection. I mean, how can someone who is dead come back to life? We know that isn’t possible!” We spent the rest of the class talking about the Resurrection and what it means.
Our reading from Luke takes us to that empty tomb. We don’t see Jesus, not yet. But the women see a couple of angels. “Why do you search for the living among the dead?” they ask. “He is not here, but has risen.” The women rush back to tell the others. But Luke tells us, “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” Ann would have probably called these words an idle tale, too. A metaphor for something else, perhaps, but not physical, not literal. It just didn’t make rational sense to her.
That began to change one Holy Week a couple of years later. Ann was busy. Busy at her office, and busy at the church, like many of you. She had a full work schedule, but she also enjoyed helping with the Holy Week liturgies. She was a reader, on the altar guild, helped with flowers. All of this while caring for her father in his early 90s. He lived in the same town as she did, in an apartment at a senior living community. She would go see him everyday. In Holy Week, she would pick him up and take him to each service. They were cut from the same cloth.
It was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday. The Vigil would be that night. She called her father on Saturday morning to tell him the schedule. No answer. He must be out for coffee. She called around lunch. No answer. He must be out for lunch. She called at 2:00. No answer. Worried, she called his neighbor. Yes, his car was in its usual spot. She drove over. Her father had died in his sleep the night before after the Good Friday service. They called the manager of the senior living community, who called the coroner. She and her husband called the priest. He arrived before the coroner, and they knelt by his bed to say the litany at the time of death. Last rites. She doesn’t remember the rest of the day. Losing someone at any time is hard. But losing her father at Easter, with all this talk of death, burial, and resurrection, seemed extra painful for her. Of all times, why Holy Week? Why Holy Saturday? Why Easter? She was in darkness, in the tomb. It was night for her, indeed.
Time passed on, as it always does. Grief doesn’t go away, even for a man who died at 94. But it does get easier to carry. Eventually the sting of grief was softened with gratitude, gratitude for the many years together, for the wonderful times, for the memories. Like it always does, Holy Week and Easter came around again.
The next year, she had a different experience of Holy Week and Easter. On the advice of her priest, she didn’t help with anything. No reading. No altar guild. No flowers. She just came to pray. She heard the stories from the pew. The Last Supper. The talk of Jesus’s coming death. The arrest, trial, and torture. The death on the cross. The burial. And she was like those women we find at the tomb tonight. Her grief came back. Her cheeks were stained with tears, her heart full of pain.
She visited her father’s grave on Holy Saturday. She took flowers. She prayed the prayers for Holy Saturday morning, while Christ is still in the tomb, just her and her dad. “O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life.”
To newness of life. Standing at the grave of this man she loved so much, more than life, that phrase caught in her throat. To newness of life. That’s the promise of the Resurrection of Christ: newness of life. St. Paul says it this way in our reading from Romans: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” If we have been united with Christ in baptism, resurrection awaits us.
Suddenly for Ann, this reasonable skeptic who had trouble believing in a literal, bodily resurrection–suddenly a metaphorical resurrection wasn’t enough for her. Because if Jesus were only metaphorically raised, then what did that mean for her dad? It meant that he would only be metaphorically raised, too, perhaps as a memory that would last a few decades and then pass away forever, as his name was lost to the annals of time. A metaphor wasn’t enough. No. The resurrection had to be literal, physical, bodily. Because if Jesus, the first fruits, was physically and literally and bodily resurrected, then that meant her dad would be physically, literally, bodily resurrected, too. She would see him again in glory. And he would never be lost. Not to God. Not to her. At that moment, a fire of hope was kindled in the darkness of her grief, like the first fire of the Easter Vigil. Not optimism. Not wishful thinking. But hope. A real and eternal hope you can hang your hat on.
Do we believe that in that hope? Do we trust in that promise? Do we live as if this is the defining reality of our lives?
“For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” That promise is for Ann and her dad. It’s for you and for me. It’s for all who have died with Christ in Holy Baptism. Thanks be to God, and alleluia!
Storied Grace 