Welcome to the new school year!

                                                                        Easter Vigil      

                                                                        St. Stephen's

                                                                       10 April 2009

Every year, we have a household debate about the Easter Vigil.  One of us is here only because of a sense of responsibility that is barely able to override her conviction that this is not Easter, thank you very much, and will not be Easter until the sun comes up tomorrow.  The other one of us is convinced that this is, or can be, the most powerful and meaningful occasion in the church year.

 But only if we take it very, very seriously.  And why would we do that?  Why is tonight unlike all other nights? 

Because tonight we open a window, a portal, into another world.  Tonight, we balance, precariously, on the knife edge of a great and terrible mystery.  We poise between night and day, between death and life, between despair and hope.  We hold our collective breath on the threshold between this and not-this, between now and not-now, between existence and non-existence.  On that threshold, that limen (in Latin), in this liminal moment, we are neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight, neither rich nor poor—we just are.  We are  in a dangerous, no-holds-barred, unprotected moment when anything can happen, where our destiny can go either or any way, where we are vulnerable to forces we can’t comprehend, naked and awaiting transformation.

On that threshold, we hover between the “dark folk” and the “flaming multitude” of William Butler Yeats:

. . . we bent down above the fading coals

And talked of the dark folk who live in souls

Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;

And of the wayward twilight companies

Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content,

Because their blossoming dreams have never bent

Under the fruit of evil and of good:

And of the embattled flaming multitude

Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame,

And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name,

And with the clashing of their sword-blades make

A rapturous music, till the morning break

And the white hush end all but the loud beat

Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.

On that threshold, if we watch and listen very carefully, we may hear the Ineffable Name.  On that threshold, we may feel the tremor of the Easter earthquake.  On that threshold, we may glimpse the rending in twain of the veil in the Temple sanctuary, and, grasping its edge, dare to peer behind it.  On that threshold, we are joined by the women who watched and waited in vigil with their dead teacher, hastened to the tomb, the first witnesses, with us, of a shift, a rip, a tear not just in the fabric of the Temple veil but in the fabric of the universe.  We are the watchers, the holy ones. It is a terrifying and awesome privilege to watch here tonight. 

Over that threshold, tomorrow morning, the disciples will finally show up, awakened by the women, rubbing sleep from their eyes.  Christendom will show up to sing celebration on a full night’s rest and plenty of coffee.  The sun will burst forth on the rebirth of righteousness and of spring.

But we, the watchers, the witnesses, will have seen the crack through which the light will dawn, the opening in the tomb of time, the midnight moment of mystery that has fueled two thousand years of faith.  We will hear the inbreaking breath of the Kingdom, sweeping into human consciousness.

Ah, well, you say, all that sounds dramatic and poetic, but it’s all smoke and mirrors, what do all those metaphors really mean? 

We do not today feel very comfortable with the idiom of mystery.  But the people of Jesus’ day did.  As the antic gods of the Greeks and Romans became less and less meaningful and the straightforward law of the Torah seemingly failed the Jews, people turned increasingly to the mystery religions that offered ultimate understanding of the transcendent reality.  Early Christians understood the power and depth of the mystery they encountered; understood that it could not be named, only experienced; understood that it was far beyond their limited powers of description.  When the time came that description was needed, anyway, the Christians of the 3rd and 4^th centuries turned to Greek philosophical language to create creeds and doctrines.  We don’t use Greek philosophical language anymore.  Those definitions are obscure and opaque to us.  We are not required to accept and struggle with them.  We can, in a new age—good grief, it’s been 1700 years ! – forge a new way of describing our experience of the risen Jesus.  And we can, perhaps must, use the language of mystery.

I can only answer that at the heart of the Resurrection is mystery, not history.  The mystery is opened by metaphor, but not solved by it.  We don’t solve the mystery—we become a part of it.  If, as Bishop Spong says, Jesus was raised into the meaning of God, then we are raised with him into the heart of the mystery.  The metaphors, the poetry, the story, the smoke and mirrors, are the whirlwind we ride to reach toward that mystery.  They are all we can know. 

So as we teeter on the edge of this great instant of Revelation, I ask if you are ready to enter into the mystery.  Are you brave enough to be a watcher and a witness?  Can you summon the courage to face the unknowability of this flash of brilliance, this lightning bolt of God’s penetration of the world of time and space?  Are you willing to participate in the wonder of the discovery?  Can you live and keep faith with complexity? 

Another poem, then.  This one by the greatest mystic of the Muslim world, Rumi. 

I died out of minerality and became vegetable;

And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.

I died from animality and became man.

Then why fear disappearance through death?

Next time I shall die

Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;

After that, soaring higher than the angels—

What you cannot imagine,

I shall be that.

These could be the words of Jesus, sung softly to his watchers and holy ones at the stroke of midnight.  What he is, what he has become, what reality has become because of him, we cannot speak.  But we, too, die with him to the life forms of the world around us and become that which is beyond imagination—not only later, after being laid in our tombs, but with every celebration of the Paschal mystery, 52 times a year and with every movement we make toward helping the Kingdom of God break into this fragile and needy world. 

Here, tonight, now, we do not simply note the anniversary of a perhaps historical event some two thousand years ago.  Nor do we merely lift our voices to sing the core of our Christian creed.  Rather, we grasp the chance to, if only for a moment, become transparent to transcendence.  We watch.  We witness.  We approach the mystery of the Lord of Life as we re-create his Body here and now.  We dare to imagine the unimaginable. We dare to enter into it.

Watch.  Feel.  Hear the rushing of the wings of deepest mystery.  Be present for the dawn of the Kingdom.  Be one with the Risen Lord.