Not here!

Great Vigil 2012
Exodus 14: 10-31; Baruch 3: 9-15; Zephaniah 3: 14-20; Romans 6: 3-11; Mark 16: 1-8


The cops pulled their car over when they found a guy peering all over the ground under a street lamp.

They asked him what he was doing. The guy answered, “I’m looking for my wallet.”

“Do you think you lost it here?”

“No, I think I dropped it three blocks away.”

“Then why are you looking there?”

“The light’s better over here.’

OK, it’s an old joke. I thought of it because it’s an Easter joke, because it’s about looking in the wrong place just because it’s easier.

Here at Saints Peter and Paul we gather and celebrate Easter pretty much the same as we’ve celebrated for years. The Great Vigil liturgy is majestic and beautiful. The hymns are familiar. We’ve even been feasting for years. Easter tends to have an air of tradition and old custom. We go to church with Mom or grandma. We go back to the old church where we were raised. Our eyes, our ears, even our noses tell us that here it is Easter—organ music and candle wax and incense and lilies and even some faint mustiness all say it is another Easter and we are in church and the year has finally turned to Spring.

All that is rich and very comforting. On an average day I am very much in favor of comfort in an uncomfortable world. But here’s the joke—are we looking in the right place? Is it in our comfort and in the familiar that we find the Easter Gospel? Is that where we find the risen Jesus?

Or has Jesus left the building?

The Bible says so. The readings do not tell about coming back to the familiar. Instead they speak of walking off to someplace we do not know.

Moses and the Hebrews are right besides the sea, about to be butchered by the Egyptian army. The people shout at Moses that they were better off as slaves. At least they were alive, at least they knew who was in charge, at least they knew they would eat. But a different kind of God is at work, a God who chooses freedom and newness over order and predictability. The chariots are too much for the people to handle themselves. So God intervenes, but the people need to move. “Tell the Israelites to go forward!” They move from what they knew, where they knew who they were and how life was, through the waters to a new place. They do not know this new place, they do not even know what kind of people they themselves will be once they are there. They do not know what will happen once they arrive. I like The Simpsons version of the Exodus where Milhous as Aaron says to Lisa, who is Moses, “So everything is going to be OK, right? Smooth sailing for the Jews from now on!” Lisa laughs uncomfortably and says, “Hey look, is that manna over there?”

There must be death if there is to be new life. Christ put to death the old way of life, our old fearful and comfort-oriented and predictable way of life in his own death. Jesus was killed by people who did not want him to upset the orderly business of empire and temple, of politics and religion. “Don’t you know that when you were baptized into Christ, you were baptized into his death?” asks Paul. We were buried with him, along with our old life and the life that the world tells us to value. To be a baptized people is to live this deep reality of death and resurrection every day. To live a Baptized life, an Easter life, we must be ready to ask ourselves, “What needs to die in order for me to live a new life?”

That strange, new life is what Mark’s Easter story speaks of.

The women who went to the tomb knew what to expect. Death they could handle. Death, even violent death, was easy to come by in 1st Century Palestine and there were predictable things to do in response—bathe and anoint the body, gather the mourners, observe the rites. But the good and the customary and the proper things to do were not on the agenda that day! The women knew they could not roll away the stone, just like the Israelites knew they could not defeat the Egyptian chariots. But the stone was rolled away for them. The tomb was empty. Jesus had left the building. And that strange young man said that Jesus was not there, that he has “gone before you” to Galilee.

Easter is the message that Jesus is not here where we left him. Easter is not the story of a beloved man who has been resuscitated and been found, but a story of absence. Jesus is not where we have been accustomed to see him. He has gone on ahead. He is in our future. Some scholars say that the “young man” in the tomb is not an angel, but he is a baptized young man wrapped in a baptismal robe, representing the new community. The new community knows that Jesus has gone on before us.

Thomas Merton, in one of his last works entitled “He Is Risen”, said that the practice of our faith-tradition “can be valid only on one condition: that we are willing to move on, to follow him to where we are not yet, to seek him where he goes before us—‘to Galilee.’”

Recently a member of the congregation initiated a conversation—just what is meant when Christian people say that something—a thought, an action—is “in Christ.” On Easter, I suggest that here is something of what is meant by “in Christ”:

Something is “in Christ” if it proclaims the Easter truth—that the dynamic God of history leads us through death and the devolving, despairing fatalism of the world to new and unexpected life. Something is “in Christ” if it points to a reality greater than anything that can be encompassed by words, that through the conditional and incomplete limits of what is seen and heard there is deep, life-giving energy and dynamism bringing forth new life from hopelessness and the predictable and from death itself. When we enter this reality, when we are radically open to the pattern of death and resurrection, we experience that this energy is in fact Love Itself.

Someone is “in Christ” if they do not understand the meaning of their life in terms of success or failure, in terms of achievement and possession, but in terms of a constant, dynamic process of death and resurrection to new and unpredictable life in company with Christ. The story is never over, the ending has never been given away, the plot is never predictable. Within the life of a baptized person there is a constant roil and tumble of divine dynamism, leading always from death to life. The temptation is to duck, cover, and roll when we feel the divine flames on our skin. We are not meant to duck and cover and roll. We are meant to burn.

A church-community is in Christ if it sees the dynamic action of the risen Christ in its own dying and rising. A church-community in Christ never wants to return to its past no matter how glorious and comforting and safe some may think that to be. Jesus has already left the building. A church in love with its past is the same as disciples who would have refused to leave the cave where the dead Jesus was laid. Perhaps some did just that, and that is why the Gospel stories all insist “He is not here.” A church that is in Christ knows that in its own dying and rising, even when things seem dead-end and without apparent hope, the dynamic of Christ’s own dying and rising is at work. A church in Christ does not seek to control the dying. A church in Christ gets up and moves ahead to where the risen Christ awaits us—“in Galilee”, in the new place where strangers and outsiders will become friends.

Today, when we re-affirm our Baptismal Covenant, let’s keep in mind just what we are committing ourselves to. Do we truly wish to be “in Christ”?

Here’s a poem about being “in Christ” although the poet never uses those words…

Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision 

shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared 
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!

James Broughton “Easter Exsultet”
With thanks to the Rev. Susan Church