David McKee’s Homily from Easter Vigil, April 8, 2023

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EASTER VIGIL

April 8, 2023

So, my friends, here we are at last…and here we are again.  At last we have come to the end of our 40-day journey through the desert of Lent; through the spiritual agony of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane; through the physical agony of his torture, crucifixion, and death; through the silence of the last 24 hours, waiting, not knowing.  And now, at last, we are here.  We are here, singing “Alleluia!”…the word that we gave up for Lent.  We are here, at last, rejoicing in the New Light, the New Life that is given us in the risen Christ.  The long, 7-week wedding feast of Easter has begun…at last.

And, at last, we are here again.   We are here again, lighting the new fire.  Here again, from that new fire, we light the new Easter candle that will burn through our next Year of Grace.  Again, we listen to the scripture texts that recount the story of our creation and our salvation.  Again, we sing the Exultet.  Again, we will process to the baptismal font and bless the water, and renew the vows and the promise of our baptism.  We are doing all this again, like we did last year, like we will do again next year. 

Thus we are here, living our lives in two dimensions:  our lives as they unfold in time from past to present to future, and our lives as they move through the annual cycle of repeating seasons, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries.  For those of us who have chosen to ground our lives in Christian ritual and sacrament, there is also the cycle of the liturgical year; a cycle marked by the significant events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth:  the man whose life and teachings give special meaning to our lives.  In this way, we participate in the additional dimension of sacred time.  In sacred time, we know where we are tonight.  For liturgy geeks like me, we know that we have arrived at the first Saturday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.  That’s how the date of Easter is calculated every year in the western church.  We also know that tonight we are at that point in sacred time when we share the story of Jesus’ passion, crucifixion, and resurrection.  In our particular time and place, together with our particular tribe we call “Christians,” we celebrate in our own local way the great cosmic mystery of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.  This is the mystery that is true for all of what we call creation:  for all we humans; for all living things; for all mountains and rivers; even for all stars and galaxies.  From the great flow of divine creation, every thing arises, comes into form, persists for its time, dies, and returns to the flow, to be reborn in a new form.  In every moment of our lives, we are being formed anew, dying to that form, and being reformed again.  From the cosmic scale to the personal scale, incarnation, death, and resurrection is the ever present pattern. In the great flow, everything that is now has always been and will always be.  Nothing is added and nothing is lost. 

From one point of view, what I’m trying to do here is to edge us toward a broader, and I hope deeper, perspective on the mystery we are ritualizing tonight in our liturgy.  I’m saying that the Divine Mystery we call God is bigger than the events that took place near Jerusalem 2000 years ago.  The eternally loving and creative pouring forth of incarnation, death, and resurrection that IS our God is the source of all our lives and of all things, from the beginning.  That’s the big picture.  But that said, I need to caution myself with the voice that says, “David, this is not supposed to be a theology lecture!”  The prancing horse of theological speculation is a tempting ride, but you will be spared that tonight thanks to the wonderful homily that Wayne Sigelkow gave us 2 weeks ago.  Wayne’s gospel text was the story of the raising of Lazarus and he reflected deeply on the mystery of death and grief.  He said something very simple and profound that has stayed with me in the ensuing days.  He reminded us that the call of our Christian life is not to understand the mystery but to enter into it.  Let me say that again:  the call of our Christian life is not to understand the mystery but to enter into it.  Our call, in our life as we are living it, is not to make the mystery an object of our understanding.  Rather, our call is to transform ourselves into the subject of the mystery; to make the mystery our own, in the depths of our hearts and in our daily actions.  Tonight, and through the great three days of our sacred Triduum, we are entering into the mystery of incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection through the consent of our hearts and through our actions.  We have rekindled the primal fire of creation, and each of us has carried it in our own hands, spreading the new light of the world from one to another.  We will soon be joining that fire of heaven with the bottomless watery womb of earthly birth when we bless the water in our baptismal font, reenacting and renewing our own baptisms.  We will be embracing one another in an offering of peace and reconciliation.  And finally, and most importantly, we will be sharing the Body of Christ with one another; the body which is our body, emptied and broken and reborn in each of us and in our life together.

My friends, this is not a discussion. Our time together tonight is not a seminar on the topic of resurrection, interesting and engaging as that might be.  We are not here to arrive at a clear, logical, definitive proof that Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from the dead…as if such a mystery could have a definitive explanation.  We are not even here to profess our belief in that proposition.  Rather, we are here to give ourselves, in our hearts and in our actions, to the great sacrament we are sharing tonight…that through these shared actions, we might enter completely into the great mystery of suffering, death, and rebirth; the mystery that animates our lives in every moment.  As Paul tells us tonight, we are here to give up, to crucify our old self–the self that is bound by the fetters of greed, hatred and ignorance–that we may live the New Life of our Christhood–the life that is always shining through us.  Like the full moon that shone forth on Wednesday and has been emptying Herself each day since, we are here to empty ourselves.  Following the dictates of the two great commandments, we are here to pour ourselves out, into God and into one another.  We are here to turn to our God and to one another, empty, poured out, that we may be filled–filled with the realization that here and always, in ourselves and as a community, we are the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected Body of Christ.

In gratitude for that, I say Alleluia!

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