The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec
Easter Vigil
Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 136:1-9,23-26; Genesis 22:1-18; Psalm 16; Exodus 14:10-end,15:20-21; Exodus 15; Isaiah 54:5-14; Psalm 30; Romans 6:3–11; Psalm 118:1-2,16-17,22-23; Matthew 28:1-10
Beloved in Christ,
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.
We began tonight in darkness. The fire was kindled outside, and from a single flame, light spread from candle to candle through this congregation. It was a tide of small lights filling the dark. This is theology at its best, and not just a theatre and choreography, or creativity of a new Vicar. This is the shape of what God has always been doing in the world.
We have listened tonight to a great sweep of the story: how the Spirit was brooding over formless waters, how a father was raising his knife over a beloved son, how enslaved people walked through a parted sea on dry ground and in the gospel we are found in a garden, with a a rolled-away stone, an empty grave, and a young man in white who says, ‘He is not here. He has been raised’.
These are not separate stories, because they are one story, told in many voices, all of them pointing here, to this night, to this water, to this moment.
In the beginning, God called light out of darkness and called it good. The act of creation was, from the very first breath, an act of love. God did not need the world; God wanted it. And into that beloved world God placed the image of God: us, made for communion and for life.
Then came Abraham on the mountain. We should not rush past this story. A father, a son, three days of walking, and a question that hangs in the air: “Where is the lamb?” Isaac asks. Abraham answers with one of the most quietly profound sentences in all of Scripture: “God will provide.” He did not know how. He trusted anyway. And at the last moment, the ram was found, the son was spared, and the place was named: “The Lord will see.” The Lord will provide.
St Paul continues in his letter to the Romans, what we just heard: God did not spare his own Son, but decided to unite for ever, in Jesus, with humanity. Abraham’s story was a rehearsal, rather, it was a promise made in the flesh of a father and son on a mountain, and tonight we discover what that promise meant.
The Exodus is the central memory of Israel: we were slaves, and God set us free. The waters opened, the people walked through, and the army of Pharaoh was no more. Water that threatened became the path of liberation. Every year at Passover, Jewish families say: ‘We were slaves in Egypt’. Not they, but we. Because the story belongs to all who carry it. And so, it belongs to us, too.
And this is why we gather at this font tonight.
These waters are not decorative. Baptism, as Paul tells us, is a real dying and a real rising. ‘Do you not know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? We were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life’.
St Cyril of Jerusalem (313 – 386, Palestine), preaching to the newly baptised, put it with a vividness that still startles:
‘You were led to the holy pool of divine Baptism, as Christ was carried from the Cross to the Sepulchre which is before our eyes. And each of you was asked, whether you believed in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and you made that saving confession… In the same moment you were dying and being born; and that water of salvation was at once your grave and your mother’ (St Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catechesis II, c. 350 AD).
Your grave and your mother. That is what this font is. It receives you as you are: mortal, incomplete, carrying everything you have been, and it gives you back as someone who belongs to the resurrection.
In a few minutes, Leo, Andrew and Stacey will step to this font and be baptised. You have been preparing for this for months. You have asked questions, sat with doubt, felt the pull of something you could not quite name, and kept showing up. That persistence is itself a kind of faith.
I want you to hear this clearly: what is about to happen to you is not a graduation, not a reward for getting the answers right. It is a death and a resurrection. You are about to be joined to the one who walked into the darkness of the tomb and came out the other side. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is what you are being plunged into; not metaphorically, but really, sacramentally, bodily.
The contemporary Anglican theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (b. 1950, Wales) writes:
‘Baptism is not the beginning of a new project of self-improvement. It is the death of the old self and the emergence of a life that is not finally your own possession – a life hidden with Christ in God’ (Rowan Williams, Being Christian (2014)).
Your life will not suddenly become easy. The world will still be the world. You will still be you, with your history, your struggles, your questions. But you will be you in Christ, which means you will never be alone in any of it. And you will carry, from tonight, a permanent fact about yourself: you have passed through the waters. You are Easter people.
For those of us who were baptised long ago, perhaps as infants, and unable to remember it, this night is our annual remembering. We will renew our baptismal vows in a few moments. Our words are the shape of the life we are called to live: turning from evil, turning toward Christ, trusting the Spirit, serving the world.
The Easter Vigil does not let us be spectators. We are participants. We hold our candles. We say our “I do.” We welcome these newly baptised into the body. We are the body into which they are being welcomed.
The angel at the tomb said two things. First: ‘He is not here.’ Second: ‘He has been raised.’
He is not contained. Not by death, not by a stone, not by our small categories for what is possible. The one through whom all things were made, the one who provided the lamb, the one who led his people through the sea is the one present in the world. And the sign of his presence is a community of people who have died with him in the water and risen to new life, who love one another, who break bread together, who refuse to let death have the last word.
That is us. That is what we are becoming.
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.