A sermon for Easter Vigil by the Rev. Craig Lemming
Saturday, April 8th, 2023
St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church
God’s Spirit Heals Trauma Through Love and Belonging in Community
A Sermon for St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, St. Paul, MN
by The Reverend Craig Lemming, Associate Rector
The Great Vigil of Easter / Year A
Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21; Ezekiel 36:24-28; Matthew 28:1-10
In the name of God who is Love: Creator, Healer, and Sustainer. Amen.
God’s creative, healing, and sustaining love shows up in the midst of trauma. Trauma is in tonight’s biblical texts. Trauma is, to some extent, in all of our bodies. Tonight’s sermon is about how the Holy Spirit heals this trauma in community. God’s love, practiced with and for each other, is the sacred medicine of healing. Discussing the hard spiritual work of healing trauma might be overwhelming. So please care for yourself. I will not be offended if you need to take a break.
The creation story from Genesis was formulated when God’s people were in exile. Captured and enslaved by the Babylonian Empire, God’s people were traumatized. They were losing their sense of identity: who they were and whose they were. Priests recorded the sacred story of God creating everything that is – out of chaos. Out of chaos, God’s Spirit makes goodness manifest. All that God creates is good. And traumatized people sometimes forget that we are good. We are images of God. God created us in God’s image and said that we and all of creation are very good.
When empires like Babylon capture and enslave us, that coloniality traumatizes us. Both the colonizer and the colonized forget our shared God-ordained goodness. Coloniality violently crams us into ungodly categories of apartheid. Genders, races, abilities, sexualities, ages, classes, and religions become sites of violence. We wound and are wounded by unjust caste systems that harm our personhood. And we get into unhealthy coping habits to try and ease the pain of those wounds. We become captives of addiction or delusion to try and escape feeling that pain. And yet, Resmaa Menakem, in his book My Grandmother’s Hands teaches us that:
Healing trauma involves recognizing, accepting, and moving through pain – clean pain. It often means facing what you don’t want to face – what you have been reflexively avoiding or fleeing. By walking into that pain, experiencing it fully, and moving through it, you metabolize it and put an end to it. In the process, you also grow, create more room in your nervous system for flow and coherence, and build your capacity for further growth.
Experiencing that clean pain results in the people of God complaining. Even as they are being freed from slavery the people rage against Moses saying:
“What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone to be slaves for the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” But Moses says to the people, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today.”
When we walk through clean pain; into and through that sea of terrifying chaos; We need each other. We need God and community. We cannot heal by ourselves. God heals us through relationships in community. Communities just like this one.
All my life, communities like this have helped me to heal from trauma. When my heart broke because I harmed someone or someone harmed me, the Church Aunties reminded me, in Ezekiel’s words, that God gives us a new heart and puts a new spirit in us. God removes our hearts of stone and gives us hearts of flesh. Communities like this one also remind us to celebrate while we heal from trauma. Like Prophet Miriam and the women of God there are times we need to break out our tambourines and sing and dance and give thanks to God for those small moments of triumph over trauma. Tonight is one of those nights of celebration!
We gather tonight in community to celebrate God’s triumph over a traumatic death.
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb traumatized by Jesus’s death.
After seeing Jesus lynched on a cross, they lament all night in that chaos of grief.
Then they get up and decide to walk through that clean pain together. At dawn they walk to the tomb, step by faithful, painful step into the Truth: that God’s love wins. They could not do it alone. They needed each other and God. God’s love turns up. When they hear the Good News, the Gospel says the women felt fear and great joy. Fear and great joy are the emotions of Holy Baptism.
In his classic text, The Sacred and the Profane, historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, teaches that humans across cultures, over thousands of generations, even before Judaism, practiced sacred, ritual baptisms. A religious act of immersing a person in water symbolized a death by drowning an old identity so that when they come out of the water they breathe freely as a newly born creation. Like the two Marys in the Gospel we feel fear and great joy at the baptismal font. The baptismal font symbolizes both a Tomb and a Womb. Both a death and rebirth. God and Community show up for deaths and births: to grieve and to celebrate. We are midwives for each other. We attend to one another’s painful birth pangs. We witness the death of each other’s old identities and celebrate births of new life. The Holy Spirit, our mother, broods over her children and makes us sacred family. Holy Baptism makes us all Church Aunties, Uncles, Grandparents, Daughters, Sons, Niblings, Siblings, and Cousins.
As God’s chosen family we can face the chaos and trauma of life together. We can walk through clean pain into wholeness, love, and belonging together. Together we receive the power of the Holy Spirit to make all things new with her. By the power of the Holy Spirit we can put an end to the trauma of coloniality.
Yes, we are grieving the painful death of those old identities. Yes, the suffering of loss and the wounds of trauma are profound. Nevertheless: we will walk through that chaos together into God’s new creation. And we will bring our tambourines!
We will bring our songs.
We will bring our dancing.
We will bring the sacredness of all of our beautiful bodies.
We will bring this gorgeous multiplicity of divine images of God with us.
“All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” Christ is Risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
