Help us to always hear that same old song of your
saving love, O God. Amen.
There are so many wonderful aspects of our Prayer Book tradition. Through the centuries, the Book of Common Prayer has been revised, and sometimes certain prayers don’t make it into subsequent versions. This sermon is framed by one such prayer that was composed for the first Prayer Book in 1549. And it really will function like a frame – I’m not going to spend much time talking about the frame, just as we generally focus on the painting, not the frame, in a museum. But the frame is what holds it all together. This a prayer for those being baptized:
Almighty
and everliving God, who of thy great mercy didst save Noah and his family in
the ark from perishing by water; and did also safely lead the children of
Israel through the Red Sea, figuring thereby thy holy Baptism; and by the
Baptism of thy well-beloved Son Jesus Christ in the River Jordan didst sanctify
the element of water to be the mystical washing away of sin; we beseech thee,
for thine infinite mercies that thou wilt mercifully look upon these thy
servants; wash them and sanctify them with the Holy Ghost; that they, being
delivered from thy wrath, may be received into the ark of Christ’s Church; and
being steadfast in faith, joyful in hope, and rooted in charity, may so pass
through the waves of this troublesome world, that finally they may come to the
land of everlasting life, there to reign with thee, world without end, through
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Now,
that’s a prayer. For the Easter Vigil, there are a few aspects of it that caught
my attention. The first is the steady drumbeat of God’s salvation that sounds throughout
that prayer – it’s the same beat we heard throughout the Vigil readings. And
there’s the idea of prefigurement in the prayer – the sense that God builds on
previous encounters as the idea of salvation is pushed further and further.
Lastly, there is what the prayer refers to as the “mystical” – meaning that a
thing is never just a thing. Words, images, and objects are doorways into
deeper realities. These are the realities that the Vigil orbits around – God’s faithfulness
across space and time in reliable and yet still surprising ways. The Vigil
itself helps us to hear that chorus of God’s love that echoes throughout eternity.
As the Exsultet proclaims, “This is the night” from which that sound of salvation
goes forth.
The
first reading we heard conveying these themes of salvation’s sounding is the
Creation poem of Genesis. Obviously, there are whole symphonies of God’s grace that
come from this passage. Having framed these readings with that Baptismal prayer,
certain themes are more resonant. We heard that, from the chaos, God brought
order and goodness to Creation. In the Hebrew worldview, “nothing” does not
mean nothing. The nothingness that is described as a “formless void” was not
just empty space, but rather the chaos of disorder and oblivion. This
nothingness was seen as a malevolent force and was associated with the waters
that God held at bay with the dome. Creation begins and is founded upon God’s
saving action of holding back the chaotic waters that would otherwise destroy
and undo the order of Creation.
We
then heard of God’s saving intervention at the binding of Isaac. Thousands of
essays, sermons, and books have been written trying to figure out what exactly is
going on in this encounter between God and Abraham. For us who are keeping Vigil
as we await the moment of proclaiming anew our Lord’s Resurrection, this passage
takes on special significance in our salvation history. In the Jewish tradition,
this passage is called not “the sacrifice of Isaac,” as it so often is in Christian
writing and painting. Instead, rabbis and scholars call this the Akedah,
the “binding.” What exactly this passage is supposed to help us understand
about Abraham’s faith, I’ll confess that I’m not sure.
But I know what it means
for Isaac – God provides. When we are bound by a situation that we cannot escape,
God provides. As these holy days remind us, we were bound by Sin, captive to
our inability to truly make a fresh start of things, and we are bound by the
grave whose grip is stronger than any of us. Whatever we find ourselves bound
by – an addiction, a diagnosis, a tough relationship, a seemingly lose-lose
situation – our God provides. It won’t always come as soon as we’d like, I’m
sure Isaac would have preferred to have the ram show up before the knife was at
his throat, but this instance of salvation helps us to anticipate and expect
that God will provide.
God’s provision is what
we have before us in the third lesson – the gift of knowing both God’s name and
that God hears our cries. When the people were captive in Egypt, their cries
for help did not fall on deaf ears, but roused up God’s passion. Just as surely
as a fire must burn, love must act, and act is what the God who is love does.
Whereas we are so often powerless in our pain and suffering, God always has another
move to make. Though the people had no way out of their predicament, God did. And
so God called to Moses from the fire that did not consume the bush and said,
just as God has always said, “I will provide.”
When Moses questions “What
is the name of this salvation?,” God graciously provides what is said to be God’s
name and title for all generations: I AM WHO I AM. Or something like that. It’s
impossible to capture or translate what exactly this name means. I recently
listened to a lecture about quantum physics and the nature of time, you know,
as you do. And I was struck by the explanation that from the view of physics,
we cannot say that anything truly is, only that things are happening. Take this
pulpit, for example, it is a collection of planks of wood, which are made of
what were once living cells of a tree, which are made of molecules, made of atoms,
made of sub-atomic particles. We know that these particular atoms used to be
something else and that, one day, they will disintegrate and become sawdust or something
else. What seems solid is actually an event; the momentary collection of atoms
into the arrangement we call “a pulpit.”
In other words, when we say
that something exists, what we really mean is that it is happening because it
is an event that is bound by time. What we cannot mean is that something truly
is, which would mean that it is unbound by time and that it does not depend on a
particular arrangement of matter. While I don’t think Moses knew much about
quantum physics, God does. When God’s self-revelation comes in the form of the
verb “to be,” it is a signal of our salvation. It’s why we can hear these
echoes of salvation throughout space and time – because God is, always has been,
and for ever shall be; God is not dependent on anything. It is as the Spanish
mystic and monastic, Teresa of Ávila put it, “Let nothing disturb you. All
things are passing away. God never changes. God alone suffices.”
One striking place where
we see God’s sufficiency in providing is in the Exodus, which is the pinnacle
of the Vigil’s readings. Before God opens the path of salvation, God tells the
people “you have only to keep still.” When it comes to our salvation, God takes
the initiative. God is the one who makes a way out of no way. So often, we get
into trouble when we do more than what God has told us to do. The people could
have given up and surrendered to Pharaoh. They could have tried to find a way
around the sea. They might have tried to swim across. None of which would have
brought them to the salvation that God had prepared for them. Even when we
cannot begin to imagine that there is a path forward, we keep still to see what
is doing.
In the Exodus, God saves
in a way that builds upon all of the previous ways that God has saved. God pushes
back those waters of chaos and makes a safe way through on the dry ground, just
as God did in creating the earth. God is preparing ways forward for us as well,
a way through a broken and partisan political system, through a time when the
role of the Church is changing, through personal crises of all sorts. The salvation
that God is bringing forth is individual, communal, and universal.
When the prophets pick up
these sounds of salvation, they describe it not so much in terms of “look at
this thing that God did,” but rather “notice how God always is for us.” We
heard Isaiah describe God’s faithful and fierce loving-loyalty that is even
more enduring than the mountains. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that the covenantal
relationship is being renewed – not so much that there’s new content or substance.
God remains that very same God who created all things and sounds those notes of
salvation throughout history. It’s just that the way of knowing this salvation
will no longer be the sort of thing that has to be taught or explained; it is
being internalized. God’s love is inscribed within our hearts by the Holy
Spirit.
St. Augustine famously
said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. This restlessness is
what is infecting our world in the form of division, diversion, and depression.
We are ignoring our hearts’ yearnings for communion with God and one another.
As many mystics have said, God is as near to us as our breath. But when was the
last time we slowed down enough to even hear our own breath?
One place where the absence
of such breath was clear is in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. It
is a grand and inspiring vision of the hope of a new creation, of life coming
about even from the dry and strewn about bones of the people. Just as surely as
the Spirit stirred up life at Creation, that same Spirit rattled and reanimated
those bones.
Our Vigil readings concluded
with a vision from Ezekiel that is nearly identical to the final vision found
in the book of Revelation. At the center of all things will the Temple, and
from it, life-giving will flow. Water here is not the chaotic waters of
Creation or the Flood, it is the saving streams of God’s grace, those still
waters that the Psalmist speaks about. Ezekiel tells us that this freshwater
will give life to all that it touches, even when it goes into the Arabah, that
is, the Dead Sea. Those places where it seems that life cannot survive will be
transformed into gardens as lush as those of Eden. There will be enough fruit
to feed everyone and the trees will provide leaves that heal. Just as surely as
water flows, God’s song of salvation stretches into all of eternity.
When it comes time for us
to reaffirm our Baptismal vows, we will be reminded that we have been saved by
and through these waters. God has given order and purpose to our lives instead
of the chaotic nihilism that infects our society. Just the Hebrew people have
come through the waters of the Red Sea, this is the night in which we remember
that through the Font, we too have come through these waters of salvation. When
we, like Isaac, were bound by Sin and Death, God freed us and provided for us. What
is holy about keeping Vigil is not that we are remembering some nice harmonies
of old, it is that we are hearing them sound afresh in this very moment.
This is the newness of
life that St. Paul has in mind in the reading from Romans that we will soon
hear. It is the very same newness known by those bones in Ezekiel’s valley, the
same newness known by someone who celebrates a year of sobriety or a peace
treaty after a long conflict. It is a newness that not only happened in
Scripture or is evident all around us, this newness is also our future. And, ultimately,
this is what Easter is all about.
As St. Mark records it,
Easter is about the future, the future that is secured by a God who always
provides. The angels at the tomb tell women, “Jesus is going ahead of you, just
as he promised.” Jesus has gone on ahead of us and will meet us wherever we
are. His Resurrection will meet us in our death, his mercy finds us in our
Sins, his love meets us in our doubts, his courage meets us in our mission.
Those same notes of grace that we have heard on this most sacred night will
always be with us, for Jesus has gone ahead of us through the chaotic waters of
death, and calmed them into the waters of Baptism through which we are joined
to him. As that Baptismal prayer notes, though we face the troublesome waves of
this world, Jesus has gone ahead of us and will calm those waves just as surely
as he did on the Sea of Galilee.
That prayer that I opened
with, and which will also be a part of our Baptismal renewal in just a few moments,
prays for those to be baptized, ourselves included, to be received into the ark
of the Church. That’s an image to take with you. I know that we’re still in the
dark and it might be hard to make out, but this building is shaped like a boat.
It’s why the section where you are sitting is called the “nave,” as in a naval
vessel. Through all of the stormy waters, we journey as the people of God. In
this ship, we travel with Abraham and Isaac, Miriam and Moses, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, St. Luke and St. Paul, Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther
King, and all the faithful who have come before us and who will come behind us.
As we keep Vigil, watching
and waiting, we do so as the people who belong to the God who brings order out
of chaos, who always provides, who loves us fiercely, who is always with us,
and who washes us clean. These are the notes that make up the song of God’s love
that sounds tonight and throughout eternity. As CS Lewis concludes his Narnia
series, he describes heavenly grace as going “further up and further in” to
God. This has been the trajectory from the very beginning, which we have traced
as we kept Vigil, what we are Baptized into, and what Easter opens to all of us
– going further up and further into the love of God that is making all things
well.
