Scripture readings: Genesis 22:1-18; Exodus 14:10-15:1; Daniel 3:1-28; Jonah 1:1-2:1, 10; Jeremiah 31:7-13, 31-34; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Ezekiel 47:1-12; Romans 6:3-11; Matthew 28:1-10
In the name of the One whose love is making all things well – Jesus Christ. Amen.
“This is the night.” We heard that refrain in the Exsultet, one of most ancient prayers of the Church that has been chanted at Easter Vigils around the globe for the past 1,500 years. We heard – this is the night that the children of Israel were led out of bondage in Egypt through the Red Sea; this is the night when death was defeated and Christ rose victorious from the grave; this is the night when earth and heaven are joined. Don’t look at your watch – it is wrong, for this is the night that exists in the fullness of eternity.
Over the course of the Triduum – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday – the sermons have been grounded in a verse from Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” On this most holy of all nights, we see how love believes all things, as we see the full tapestry of God’s love.
Biblically-speaking, the word “believe” doesn’t quite mean what we think it does. In our modern world, a belief is an idea or opinion. The word that Saint Paul uses though has a richer and deeper set of associations. To believe, in the sense that he uses that word, is to have trust or confidence in someone. Belief is about loyalty, engagement, and commitment – not merely a thought. When this word was translated from Greek to Latin, Saint Jerome chose the word “credo,” which means “I give my heart to.” And that’s precisely what belief in Jesus is all about – our hearts and our lives; the things we hold dear and value. Centuries later, as the King James Bible was being translated, they went with the word “believe,” which, at the time, still retained that heart-oriented posture; as “believe” is derived from the same root as “belove.”
So when we say that “love believes all things” it’s not about “think this” but rather “trust and follow this One.” And this is why the disciples can struggle so much with understanding, explaining, and rationalizing all the things they’ve seen, and yet remain incredibly faithful – because belief isn’t a matter of the head, it’s a matter of the will. We can be uncertain and still follow; we can be confused and still trust; we can have doubts and still believe. Tonight, we’ve heard stories that, to our modern ears, seem to be beyond belief. But this is a not a night for explanations or proofs of things that defy such categories. Instead, this is a night for reverence, awe, and wonder. Which is to say, if you have doubts and questions, no worries – that doesn’t prevent you from believing the beauty and truth of Easter.
The main point of this evening though is not our belief, but rather that “Love believes all things.” Another way of putting it is that God is committed to all things, that the love of Jesus is trustworthy in all things. In all of life, in all of history, God’s love is the source and ending. And on a night such as this one, we see that thread of love as it woven throughout history. I pray that the image of God as a weaver might be one that resonates with you given this great tapestry of salvation that is on display tonight.
Saint Julian of Norwich wrote in the 1400s, “I saw that God is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wraps us, clasps us, and all encloses us for tender love, that he may never leave us; being to us all-things that is good.” Indeed, God has been weaving the fabric of love throughout Creation from the very first words of “Let there be” and as we’ve kept Vigil, we’ve seen these threads of our salvation.
The first reading was one of the most challenging in all of sacred Scripture – the Akedah as our Jewish siblings refer to it. Abraham binds his son Isaac, the very fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, and prepares to sacrifice him on God’s command. It is a troubling and even infuriating story.
Corrie ten Boom is remembered for her courage in hiding Jews in her home during World War II and survived interment in a concentration camp after being arrested. She wrote a poem called, “The Weaving,” which, in part, says:
My life is but a weavingBetween my God and me.I cannot choose the colorsHe weaveth steadily.Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;And I in foolish prideForgot He sees the upperAnd I the underside…The dark threads are as needfulIn the weaver’s skill handAs the threads of gold and silverIn the pattern He has planned.He knows, He loves, He cares;Nothing this truth can dim.He gives the very best to thoseWho leave the choice to Him.
To be sure, this story includes some dark threads, but they are also threads of grace. God is a faithful weaver in whom we can believe, who we can trust, because the promise is secured not by our efforts, not by what we can produce, but by God’s steadfastness to the promise. As I was writing this sermon on Monday, I was called to give Last Rites to someone on their death bed. Their spouse asked me, “Why does God allow this to happen?” There is no sufficient to the question of why. Even without such an answer though, we trust that God is weaving that thread of love and will do even more than can ask for or imagine. Our understanding is not a perquisite for grace to lead us home.
Next, we heard the foundational story of the Old Testament – the Exodus. One theologian has defined God as “whoever raised Jesus from the dead after having first raised Israel out of Egypt.” Even when we are only hanging on by a thread, God is the weaver who takes that thread and brings us to salvation, no matter how bad the odds, no matter how large the army behind us, or how chaotic the waves in front of us.
Then in Daniel, we saw something like the backside of the tapestry that God is weaving. Art historians sometimes note that while the front of a tapestry is elegant, the reverse can often seem like a tangled web. Seen from the backside, a tapestry has threads that run from one corner to another, binding things together in a way that is invisible from the front. Well, in Daniel we see one of these threads that runs throughout our sacred story – the truth of Emmanuel; of God-with-us.
When King Nebuchadnezzar had ordered the furnace be fired up and three young men thrown into it, he saw a fourth figure in the fire who saved them. Jesus is with us in whatever fires we find ourselves in and that is a consistent thread not only in Scripture, but in our lives as well – God is with us and God is for us in all things.
It’s a truth that Jonah experienced as well, even if his faithfulness was more like cowardice when compared to those three young men in Daniel. There is a prayer in Prayer Book that we pray later in the year that says, “Almighty God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve.” It’s a thread of grace that Jonah found. When we turn away from God and flee, God’s grace pursues us and never abandons us. And don’t be surprised if God sends something as preposterous as a big fish to be what saves you.
The prophet Jeremiah reminds us of the character of this saving God – God is a lover who consoles, gathers, and restores us. The word “god” of course is not the proper name for Father of Jesus Christ. A god can be capricious, vindictive, and harsh like the gods of Olympus. And, sadly, sometimes the god the Church has talked about has had more in common with Zeus than Jesus. But those are threads that we’ve inserted into the tapestry, not the ones that God the weaver uses. Jeremiah points us towards the true nature of God – as one who deeply loves us.
Ezekiel shows us that the theme of this tapestry is one of impossible possibilities unfolding before our very eyes. Because the love of God believes all things, there is no brokenness so deep that there can be no wholeness; no injustice so insidious that there can be no reconciliation; no sin so bad that there can be no forgiveness; no death so final that there can be no Resurrection. The thread with which God weaves can hold all things together and make all things new, which means we can be audacious in our hopes and prayers.
The final Vigil reading, also from Ezekiel, reveals where all these threads are heading: the healing of all Creation. If we were to read ahead to the final chapter of Revelation, we would read this same vision: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
The waters of life are the very waters of Baptism, in which we are joined to Christ’s Death and Resurrection, the very waters that our Catechumens, Mason and Colson, have been preparing to enter throughout this season of Lent. We’ll hear Saint Paul pull on that thread when we hear the reading from Romans in a bit.
In one of our recent preparation sessions for Baptism, they asked me about my vision for the ministry of this parish and what the Church’s role in furthering the social Gospel is. My response was to mention the wording on our reredos, which I realize you might not yet be able to read in the darkness. It reads “In this place I will give peace.” One recent author has said that the Church should be known as a dispensary of relief. We are to be a place where a weary, searching, and confused world can come and find relief, a place to lay down our burdens, a place to find a holy alternative to the chaos of the world in the peace of God which passes all understanding.
We’ve all heard the adage that “hurt people hurt people.” Which is true. But I trust that the opposite is also true: healed people heal people. The waters of Baptism wash and heal us that we become witnesses and ambassadors of the most excellent way of love which believes all things.
The knot that holds all these threads together is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ – which is what we have gathered to celebrate and await on this most holy of all nights. On Good Friday, we heard the Seven Last Words of Jesus on the Cross. We would do well to also pay attention to the First Word of the New Creation. Listen for it when the Easter Gospel is proclaimed. The first word that the Risen Jesus speaks is “Greetings,” which might also be translated as “Rejoice” and is essentially the word Grace turned into greeting, something like “Grace to you!”
Grace is the culmination of this thread we’ve been following, as well as the spool it was drawn from. Grace means that this story is yours even if you’re not sure how you fit into it, even if you have questions about it, even if you don’t think you deserve to be a part of it. The love that made all things and that is making all things new is for you. The joy of Easter is for you. The love that believes all things embraces and welcomes you into the only thing that truly matters – the gracious and eternal love of God that raises even the dead, no matter what deadness you are dealing with.
This Grace what we will receive in the Holy Eucharist. Paraphrasing Saint Augustine, in the Eucharist we “behold what we are and become what we receive.” In the Eucharist, all these threads converge as the fullness of our salvation from Creation, through Exodus and Resurrection, are made present to us – for this is the night. And as we behold this love that believes all things; in receiving this gift, we become a part of this story. We are woven into the Resurrection by Jesus Christ whose “bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and believes all things.” Amen.
