From the Pulpit:

 
There is something wonderfully mystical to me about going to church at night. It feels delightfully dangerous, almost illicit. As if we come to be vulnerable to the Holy Spirit, who seems safer in the light of day. Something might happen here tonight that we have no control over.

Nothing in my very Episcopal childhood suggested that this nighttime worship might be a possibility, let alone that it would be the one service of the year I would not miss. When I was growing up church was very domesticated. It was safe, well, everything except for the general confession, which scared the living bejeesus out of me. It was Morning Prayer every Sunday -- very much like our Rite One because there was no such thing as Rite Two – and we children left for Sunday school during the sermon hymn, so I literally never heard a sermon until I was an adult. We always skipped the first Sunday of the month, which was when they celebrated Holy Communion. Church in my childhood was like an old lion with no teeth. 

And then things changed. What happened, historically, and I’ll make this as brief as I can even though it is something that really charges my battery, is that in the 1940’s a couple of phenomenal archaeological discoveries were made that opened theologians’ eyes to what was actually going on in the years immediately following Jesus’ death and resurrection, and people started asking – because all this was very Indiana Jones and very National Geographic -- they asked why they didn’t know all this stuff about their church, and suddenly rectors were being asked, “How come we don’t know anything about the Bible? How come we don’t worship the way they did back then?”

There was a big hoo-rah about switching from the 1928 prayer book to the “newfangled” one of 1979 even though it was actually a return to the older traditions, and the return of the Great Vigil of Easter was part of it. It was all about people getting excited about church, intrigued and feeling drawn into the mystery of it. It was as if we had somehow come into contact with Jesus himself and were suddenly drawn into what is known as the mysterium tremendum. 

This night is our very highest drama, and the most awesome thing is that the characters we are playing are ourselves because we are the body of Christ experiencing the miracle of the resurrection. The liturgy this evening is ancient. The Exsultet, which David chanted in the flickering candlelight, is probably from the third or fourth century. In the darkness, with the Paschal candle newly lighted from the fire outdoors we listen to haunting words that connect us with people in the far distant past, people who were much closer to Jesus than they are to us but who are present to us tonight. Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels and let your trumpets shout salvation for the victory of our mighty king. 

This is a drama in four acts, and it is a drama that engages all our senses. In the dimming daylight we smelled the newly lighted wood fire. We take in the contrast of dark and brightness. We hear mysterious and comforting words and melody and the bells, the bells and alleluias when we finally sing the Gloria after the deprivation of Lent. We taste the bread, the pungent wine. We embrace each other at the peace. It is all here. Everything we can experience.

This evening is as profoundly incarnational as our other nighttime service on Christmas Eve. That is when we celebrate the divine taking human form as the child born in a stable. Tonight we celebrate humanity taking on full divinity, the corpse rising to its new form of life in a mystery that is beyond our capacity to understand. We will never comprehend it but we don’t have to because we experience it. It confronts us with the reality of our transcendence.

Tonight we experience a dynamic  that is not depicted in any of our gospel writings. There is a gap, a lacuna in the story, and what is missing is what matters most. We watched Jesus taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb. The next scene in Luke’s gospel shows us women going to work, dragging themselves back towards the reality of death to lovingly anoint the cold body of their beloved friend with spices. The fragrance of the ointment Mary smeared on Jesus’ feet mixes with the stench of Lazarus’ rotting flesh – this is what they anticipate.

Nowhere in all our Holy Scripture are we given a descriptive scene of what the Resurrection itself looked like. Jesus and God were the only witnesses, and neither of them tells us anything.

The power of the Great Vigil of Easter lies in the word vigil itself , the articulation of the sense of absence that precedes the experience of joy. That moment of disbelief, of utter dumbfoundedness that the women felt as they found the tomb empty, as they heard the word from the two glowing young men say, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?’ That point on which the gospellers are silent, that point in which the women don’t know what to think, when the old reality was negated but the new reality had not become clear. In that point, on that hinge, lies all the power of our worship, and somehow it makes the darkness even darker and the brightness of our alleluias even brighter.

Why do we look for the living among the dead? We do, don’t we? We do because our imaginations are as limited  as the women’s as they approach with their spices. All we know to expect is what we have already experienced. That’s our frame of reference.

Tonight we are promised that we are part of something beyond our ability to anticipate, but we are called to let ourselves be drawn into that lacuna. We are called to let go of our predictions, our habit of looking back to guess at what is ahead. And the odd thing is that we do this by revisiting a story over two thousand years old.

We proclaim Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed and we are proclaiming something that, yes, it did happen then, but that’s not the point. The point is that it is happening now, within us and among us. God is giving birth tonight here in the dark womb of this church, and it is we who are being born, it is we who are being given the miracle of resurrection. We are being transformed into something that is more than our memories. More than all the stories we can tell about who we are and what has happened. More than all the stories we can tell about this hinge of time we live in, the present moment ever becoming the past quicker than we are able to grasp it.

We are being born again and again into the body of the resurrected Christ. We are becoming him and through us, through our willingness to embody his love so freely given that he lay down his life to prove it,  through our willingness to let go of our expectations which are only born of past experience, we are being born into an ever closer relationship with him and our new life, which is our truest life.

Amen.