EASTER EVE 2007

A sermon preached at the Great Vigil of Easter on Easter Eve, April 7, 2007 by the Revd Canon Daniel S. Weir

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.

How wonderful and beyond our knowing, O God, is your mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you gave a Son.

How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings peace and concord.

How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God.

At the center of our Christian life is that bold and audacious assertion that life is victorious over death, that love is stronger than hate, that good is stronger than evil, that light is more powerful than the darkness. On no other night do we make that assertion in more uncompromising terms than we do on this night as we celebrate the Great Vigil of Easter, tracing the record of “God’s saving deeds in history,” and rejoicing in the new life we share as members of an Easter people. Our Lenten pilgrimage completed, we are ready – and some of us more than ready – to enter into the celebration of this season with enthusiasm.

But as enthusiastic as we may be, it would be wise for us to pause before we launch into unbridled alleluias, to pause and remember, as Fr. Bill reminded us last night, that our Easter joy is rooted in the Cross, in that outpouring of God’s love for us in the Crucifixion. It is that love, and not some pallid imitation, whose triumph we celebrate. And it would be wise for us to remember that Easter is not a day, or a season of fifty, or even just something we celebrate Sunday by Sunday in our weekly remembrance of the resurrection. Easter is much more than that. Easter is the bedrock, the foundation upon which our life is built.

A bit of the shape of that foundation can be discerned in the readings which we just heard. Sin and death have been part of the human condition since the beginning; in a strange way sin is built into our social and cultural DNA. And it has been God’s plan from the beginning to free us from that bondage, just as God freed an enslaved people from bondage in Egypt and brought them into a promised land where they could become God’s people. And when their repeated failures to live in covenant love with God brought disaster upon them and they lost all hope and saw themselves as as good as dead, God promised to knit them together and breathe new life into them and to bring them home.

We are heirs of that history, of those promises, of those not yet fully realized hopes. In the Paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, we are given a new promise, the promise that we are not merely disciples of Christ, but his brothers and sisters, children of the Father, and that as we move on in faith, Jesus will meet us on the way and be with us forever.

That promise was claimed for us in our baptisms. In baptism we became members of Christ, children of the Father, and inheritors of the promised kingdom. In baptism we were freed from the power of sin, which, of course, does not mean that we don’t sin, but that sin does not have the final say in our lives. That final word is Christ’s word of forgiveness and Christ’s promise of power to overcome sin in our lives. In baptism we were joined to one another in a marvelous way, as members of a new community in Christ. In this new community we experience, by God’s grace, the sustaining and nurturing and challenging and transforming love of the Father through one another as brothers and sisters.

What we have boldly claimed for ourselves we must always help one another to receive. Although baptism is a sovereign act of God, dependent upon God’s grace for us in Christ Jesus, we were and continue to be called to participate in God’s action by faith. That is, we are called by God to cooperate in our own baptisms and in the baptisms of all of our brothers and sisters. We do this by seeking to live faithfully as those who follow Christ as our Savior and Lord. As we seek, in the power of the Spirit , to be faithful sons and daughters of the Father, as we seek to do God’s will and not our own, as we seek to be the servant people of our Servant Lord, we help one another by the example of our lives and by our prayers to grow into the fullness of Christ.

God, who expects a great deal from us, provides us with all that we need to accomplish what he calls us to do. God’s provision for us is most clearly seen in the Eucharist. Here at God’s Table we are with the spiritual food of Christ’s Body and Blood. Here, as we share in bread and wine, we receive the very life of our crucified and risen Savior. We are filled with Christ’s life Sunday as we share in this great sacrament. The power that raised Jesus from the grave is ours as we share in the Eucharist. The power that conquered sin and death is given to us in the Eucharist that we might each day, in Paul’s words, “walk in newness of life.”

This power, this Easter power that we celebrate and claim this night for ourselves and for all Christians, indeed, for all people, is, of course, the creative power of God’s love. This is the power that brought the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. This is the power that breathed new life into the people of Israel and that gathered the outcasts of Israel. This is the power that took the frightened and dispirited disciples of Jesus and made them his sisters and brothers and sent them out, transformed, to change the world. This is the power that is given to you and to me that we might no longer be captive to sin and selfishness, but might live the life of the sons and daughters of the living God, and by that same power, the power of Christ’s resurrection, share in the transformation of this sick and sorry world into the kingdom of his love. This is the power that Christ offers us this night, the power of the Light that shines in the darkness, the power of Christ’s victory, the power of Easter.