easter-vigil-april-3-2010-mp3 (Click here for an audio version of this sermon.)

Tonight, the night we call Easter Eve, is the one night of the year when Christians experience what it means to be the church. In the early church, this was the most important time of the year…the time when Christians came to the great cathedral churches in the middle of the night…to celebrate baptisms and to renew their covenant with God.

 

Unlike Easter morning with its bright lights and joyful music, tonight we begin in the darkness. This darkness is the darkness of Good Friday. On Friday, Jesus died and, with his death, everything ended. Jesus and his cause – his message, his purpose, his reason for being – were all completely refuted.

 

Everything Jesus accomplished ….everything he stood for appeared to be defeated. In his humiliating and godless death, Jesus had been exposed as a lawbreaker and a blasphemer – a dangerous seducer of the people. The law had won. The establishment had triumphed. So, before it became a sign of victory, the Cross represented the complete refutation of everything the disciples had given their lives to.

 

So tonight we begin in darkness to experience what Jesus’ disciples experienced – the world as they knew it had ended. We begin in darkness…the darkness of a tomb, the darkness of a place of death and decay and destruction.

Then, in the middle of this darkness, we do what our Jewish brothers and sisters did this past week on the night of the Passover. We tell stories from the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, while we wait in the darkness…the story of creation, the story of our deliverance at the Red Sea, the story about a field of dry bones being breathed back into life.

This kind of story telling - telling stories that remind us of all the things that God had done in history to save God’s people  - is one of the things that we have largely forgotten how to do in the church today. Did any of you go to summer camp or were any of you involved in cub scouts or girl scouts? Do you remember how excited you were to sit around the campfire at night and tell ghost stories? I had a camp counselor who could scare us half-to-death.

 

Of course, because he was a wise person, he knew that the purpose of telling these stories wasn’t really to scare us, but to remind us that, now matter how scary life gets, we will always find support and strength in our parents, friends and adult mentors. This is why we tell these stories. They are stories of faith that lift us out of despair. They are stories of hope that enable us to walk into the darkness and not be overwhelmed by it.

 

Then, after we have heard these stories of salvation, we celebrate baptism. Why do we do this…and why did the early Christians celebrate baptism in the dark instead of in the light? We do it because we know that Christian faith begins not when the lights come on, but here in the middle of the darkness. Our faith begins in a tomb where nothing is alive…except the grace and love of our God who can bring life out of death and hope out of fear.

 

And this is the great mystery that we celebrate tonight…and that Christians have witnessed to for centuries. It is the mystery of the resurrection – the mysterious fact that God’s love works in and through the empty, fearful and painful places of our lives. One of the reasons that this night is so powerful is that we often try to forget that God can enter into the darkness of our lives and save us when our world comes to an end.

 

But celebrating baptism in the darkness is a powerful reminder that we can let go and surrender all of our painful memories, all of our guilt and shame for things we have done in the past…tonight, in the dark, we can offer it all up to a God who, in Jesus Christ, has entered into our pain and suffering and redeemed it. 

 

But what happens to us when we leave tonight? What happens when this service is over and when we go back to our homes….back to our jobs….back into the world…a world that has such a hard time believing that darkness can be a powerful sign of God’s love and forgiveness?

 

For one thing, our service doesn’t end in baptism. It concludes with Holy Communion. Our celebration of baptism concludes with a feast of bread and wine in which we receive the promise of being in fellowship with Jesus Christ…the promise of being bound together with him in his life …the promise of being active members of Christ’s body in the world.

 

The promise of Easter is the promise of continuing to live out our faith in the world… our faith in the resurrection…the faith that we have experienced in the dark of the night is a faith that continues to guide and strengthen us during the day.

 

Many of us have been blessed to know – either first hand or at a distance – people who live out their faith in the resurrection, sometimes in the face of tremendous obstacles. One such person is Paul Rusesabagina. He is the man portrayed in the film, Hotel Ruwanda. During the 100 days of the Ruwandan genocide, from April 6, 1994 through mid-July, Paul sheltered 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees in the Hotel des Mille Collines in the city of Kigali, where he was the general manager. Like many people who practice resurrection, Paul lived through some very dark times and experienced some terrible things.

 

On April 6, when the genocide began, he was at the hotel with his wife’s brother, Thomas, and his sister-in-law, Phyllis, celebrating a new job. Paul’s wife had not been able to join them and was at home. Suddenly she heard missiles overhead, a sound she’d never heard before. She rushed to call Paul and urge him to come home.  Like many others, Paul believed in the United Nations and felt safe going back home. So he told his relatives that he would see them the next day. But they never saw Thomas or Phyllis again because they were both killed.

 

Since that terrible time, Paul has created a foundation, the Hotel Rwanda Foundation, which is working to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the Great Lakes region of Africa, as well as trying to heal the long-term effects of the Rwandan genocide.

 

Tonight, we bring Sky, Evan and Andrew to this baptismal font to immerse them in the mysterious compassion of God, to join them forever to the life of the One who died and rose again. And then we will invite them to begin the lifelong journey of being nourished in the sacrificial love and life of Jesus Christ by receiving the bread and wine of this Eucharistic meal.

 

I can’t tell you exactly what the resurrection means. Resurrection is a mystery that has to be experienced. We have to enter into the darkness of this night….we have to learn to tell our stories of faith in the dark in order to truly understand the miracle of this new resurrection life.

 

But I can describe this life because I have seen it in the lives of other people….I have seen it in the lives of people like Paul Rusesabagina. I have seen it in church communities, like Good Shepherd, that have faced dark and difficult times in the past.

 

Tonight we invite Sky, Evan and Andrew to join this compassionate community that strives to practice resurrection. And our hope is that as they continue to grow into the full stature of Christ, they will become witnesses to others of the mystery of this new kind of life that we call resurrection life. Amen.