Easter Vigil Sermon - Elliott May, April 8th, 2023

Friends: alleluia, Christ is risen!

There is so much to say on this most holy night, and also, frankly, so little. Or rather, it’s truer to say that so much of what should be said this evening has already been said this evening, in our liturgy and in our Scripture readings. 

In the Genesis reading, we heard the story of God creating something out of nothing. In the Exodus reading, God delivers the people from captivity and slavery. In the Ezekiel reading, we heard the incredible promise that God will one day bring life out of death. Then finally, in the gospel reading we just heard, it happens- the disciples of Jesus go to visit his dead body and instead they meet the risen Christ. 

I always find it interesting how normal this scene feels. Mundane, almost. Picture the scene as we just heard it. It’s a quiet morning, disciples: sad and confused in the garden, not much else going on. Jesus is dead and everyone has scattered. In their minds, the story is over. 

But as we know, the best is yet to come. Now, if I had been in charge of planning Jesus’ first encounter with his disciples after the resurrection, to sort of manage or produce the experience, you know, do a little stage direction, I think I’d be inclined to sprinkle in a little more drama. Maybe a few angels with trumpets, maybe some fireworks, a big feast, that sort of thing. At the very least, get a big ‘guess who’s back’ banner strung up over the tomb. 

But that’s not how it goes, is it?

 Instead of fireworks and trumpets, the Gospel of John tells us about a quiet, intimate personal encounter between the disciples and Jesus. And we should note that this story begins with grief and confusion, which ends up being crucial to understanding what’s going on. 

See, Easter as we have come to understand it is just about the last thing that Mary and the two other disciples in the story were expecting. And even though we know the beats of this story, even though we read this and know what’s right around the corner for Mary and the other disciples, I think that Easter creeps up on us, too. 

When I say it creeps up on us, I don’t mean Easter as a date on the calendar. I mean Easter as an experience of encounter with God, Easter as the confrontation with our ideas about what God can do and does do and will do. To cut to the chase- I think that, as with Mary and the other disciples in this story, Easter is the last thing we are expecting, too. 

No matter how many times we hear this story, we need to hear it again, every year, to get it down into our bones, because it forces us to confront our ideas about Because this story has more hope than is decent, more hope than is reasonable. More hope than we can handle. 

 You can see how crazy this resurrection hope seems even within the bounds of the story. I love that John tells us that Jesus just walked right up behind Mary and she didn’t even recognize him. Who could blame her? Jesus was dead, after all, so it couldn’t be him. Dead people don’t come back to life. Except that- it was him, standing right there, representing in his own body that profound, unfathomable, just absolutely absurd hope that God really could, that God really has brought new life out of something dead. 

This is the joy and frankly, if we’re honest with ourselves, the struggle of Easter. There is just so much hope that we can hardly handle it. It runs so counter to everything we know about the world that we may often experience a deep resistance to all that hope, all that joy. 

Anybody who has hung around the church for more than 15 minutes knows that sometimes the hardest part of faith can be grasping onto this hope which the faith teaches us, holding onto it even as we look around at the state of things in the world we live in. There is so much in this world which dissuades us from believing this crazy hopefulness which we have in Jesus, this hope which shatters all of our existing categories. 

We see, in this sequence of readings we’ve experienced tonight, the whole story of our faith. This is God’s work, in the world and in each one of our lives: creating and sustaining and resurrecting, bringing new life out of death. The thread that runs through these stories, the one that lies at the very center of our faith, is that this God, the God of Israel, is alive and active in the world, and in fact, is alive and active in places and people that we assumed were beyond even God’s reach. These texts show us that God is never far away; in fact, God shows up often when you very least expect it.

As we sang earlier tonight, darkness has been vanquished by our eternal king. The joy of Easter is that we get to believe it- to return to this hope, to wrestle with it, and finally, to live in it. 

What does it mean to live in Easter hope? 

Well, I’d suggest that to live in this crazy Easter hope means to operate in the belief that God really does show up even when it looks like the story is over, it means to live believing that there really is a love and presence that never ends, to live as though God really does bring life out of death. 

May we have the grace to believe it. 

Amen.