“This Great Vigil of Easter removes Empire’s fears, erasures, and stone-cold-heartedness and replaces God’s holy, loving, and liberating spirit within our hearts of flesh. Christ’s love fills us so fully that we too come out of Empire’s tombs.”
Rejoice, Mother Church: and come together all of you that love her: sing with joy, you that have been in sorrow: that you may exult, and be filled from the breasts of God’s consolation. Amen.
Tho…
I don’t know what you did to cope, but I retreated into old school love songs to survive last week. Many of us feel betrayed. Betrayed across lines of gender, race, and class. Betrayal hurts both the victims and the perpetrators. I cope with this pain of betrayal by overindulging in old school love songs.
The waters of baptism and fire of the Holy Spirit frighten us because they are the birth pangs of new life. New life in kinship with the very people we have comfortably curated our lives to ignore, to forget, and to betray. Renewing our Baptismal Covenant reminds us that baptism into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus requires us to keep our word. To keep our promises to love God and to love all our neighbors as ourselves, in thought, word, and deed.
Do you find yourself in that land of deep darkness? Do you know someone working, watching, or weeping through grief, betrayal, or terror? Tonight, God’s Word and Sacrament remind us, that God became as human as you and me. So that in sanctifying our humanity we can shine God’s light into one another’s lives. Your presence in another person’s life is sacred. You are enough. You are loved.
“We feel ashamed to tell the truth about the lowest nadirs in life when we are overwhelmed, exhausted, and depressed. Yet, telling the truth – the good, the bad, and the ugly – sets us all free.”
“Getting out of our own ego’s way, to graciously receive a prophet’s truthful and disruptive word from God, takes courage. Courage to surrender to God’s will. Herod was incapable of surrendering to God’s will to love. The courage it takes to listen, accept, and surrender to a prophet’s divine words is sorely lacking today. Herods are everywhere.”
“Thankfully, we are slowly turning back to seeing existence as an ecosystem in which diverse organisms and species cooperate so that everything in creation can both survive and thrive together. Instead of a competitive mindset of extraction from the natural world, Biomimicry shows us how we can cooperate with and learn from creation. I would argue, based on this morning’s scriptures, that Ezekiel and Jesus are proponents of a biomimetic theology.”
“In her book, Tarry Awhile: Wisdom from Black Spirituality for People of Faith, African Caribbean Theologian Dr. Selina Stone explains that Tarrying ‘is a collective time of waiting on God… It is a time of surrender to God, in the hope of personal and communal transformation. It is also a moment for intercession, for bringing our spiritual needs to God as well as our loving concern for our neighbors and the world.’ I think we can agree that to face this world’s overwhelming destruction of human lives and of creation, tarrying together as a spiritual practice in community is an absolute necessity.”
“Every Easter, we hear those sublime words: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.” The Roman Empire had tried to crucify and kill the love of God incarnate, and they failed. Empire tried to contain, control, and seal up that incarnate love of God in a tomb, and they failed. Empires still try to control, crucify, and kill the most vulnerable of God’s beloved creatures. Jesus Christ, the love of God made flesh, crucified and risen, triumphs over all empires eternally. God’s liberating love always bursts free from cages, enclosures, and tombs of empire.”
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