The Right Place: Easter Vigil 2008

Easter Vigil 2008


Have you ever longed for healing, freedom, and light? Have you ever felt hopeless? Have you ever wondered if there is any way out? Have you ever felt just what a tight place is all about?

If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then you’ve come to the right place.

Or more precisely, you’ve come to the right One. You’ve come to Hope Personified, the Way through all darkness, the Open Space when the walls are closing in, the One who is healing itself.

My words fail. Stories come to mind, stories that I’ve told before. Stories like when my best grade school buddy and I locked ourselves in an abandoned car, and what it was like to have the door torn open and to breathe free air. Stories like the daylong journey into the hills in Mindanao, first on motorcycle then on foot, through ambush points and adder-infested jungle. We came over a high pass and saw a hidden valley, emerald-green with young rice plants and tropical flowers and cocoanut palms and simple lovely huts beneath the sun. A hidden treasure, which was worth every step of the way.

These are small tastes, simple signs that God can give new life in the very teeth of struggle and captivity. When have you been given signs that speak of new life?

But tonight we are given more than signs. In word and sacred story we are told of captivity and release on the shores of Egypt. No cruel Empire, with its iron laws of sacrifice and wealth and power, can win out over God’s irresistible desire to make mischief with those laws and release captives into freedom. We hear the wondrous poetry of Holy Wisdom, the living Presence of God who speaks in loving womanly tones and calls her children to new and wise life. The prophet tells us we’re given a new heart and a new spirit, no matter how bitter and worn-out our old hearts may be. And all these tales of new life and new insight and release beat a path to the rough entrance of a stone tomb, filled with death’s stillness and death’s smell. But inside we find nothing, nothing but air and abandoned grave cloth and dust dancing in the shafts of sunlight. Tombs and graves are for the dead. The One we seek is alive.

He is alive, and all our pain and struggle is transformed. He is alive, and we do not need to fear pain and death. The Beloved has been raised from death by God whose love is stronger than death. And so whatever is hopeless, whatever is trapped, whatever longs for forgiveness and new life and healing and peace in us and in our world now can be, will be, and in faith’s mystery already is a new creation through the One who passed through captivity and betrayal, pain and death. In Christ all our pain and struggle is known and loved. In Christ all our pain and struggle is raised to new life.

Another preacher once said: Let none lament their poverty, for the Universal Kingdom has been revealed! Let none mourn their transgressions, for Pardon has dawned from the tomb! Let no one fear death, for the Savior’s death has set us free!

Whatever we have longed for in the deepest and most desperate desire of our hearts, it is here and more besides. It is here, and it is not a thing but a Who, the Living One who sets us free day by day until all creation is set free for all time. Today we’re all honored guests, all hoping for welcome, all reaching out for hope, all receiving so much more than we could even imagine! All are welcome, poor and broken, wounded and sinners, and even those who do not think they are! We’re all new as the youngest infant we baptize. See what the Risen One can do for us all.