Preaching the Easter Vigil
Cold tomb, warm furnace
While the Easter Vigil is my favorite worship experience of the whole year, I haven’t done much preaching at it that I remember (though I have always managed to keep it brief). Here are a couple of sermons that stayed with me. Hopefully they will be of some use to some of you. A blessed Holy Week to all who observe it.
Empty Tomb (2019)
(I don’t remember what, if anything, I had prepared for this year before a tragedy struck our northern Illinois town on Good Friday, but whatever it was had to be thrown out. I would be grateful if you would remember the boy’s family in your prayers.)
As soon as the story was told, it was disbelieved. The women came to the tomb early that devastated morning to anoint the body of the Lord and teacher they loved. The men were hiding, no doubt saving themselves for some more critical task, as men have been known to do. So the women come to discharge this last office of love, scorning the risk to their own lives, staring down the disappointment and horror of the moment. And when they do, they encounter something totally unexpected: an empty tomb, and divine messengers telling them that Jesus is not there, that he was been raised.
As the messenger of God came first to Mary to say that the Savior would take flesh within her, and no one knew and no one could understand except her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, so the messengers come to the women at the tomb and no one understands them, no one believes them. The men don’t believe them. Yet the tomb is indeed empty. And Jesus is indeed going to meet them—on the road, by the lake, and on the mountain.
For almost two thousand years, humans have heard this story and for almost two thousand years we have been coming up with reasons not to believe it. Perhaps Jesus’ body was stolen, it is argued, and the appearances to his disciples were the work of an imposter. Perhaps the appearances were a mass hallucination by the disciples, unresolved grief expressing itself as a sort of denial that he was even dead. Maybe the empty tomb is a later addition to this story. Maybe the whole thing is a metaphor for the power of Jesus’ teaching. Maybe it is an echo of the stories of the pagan gods of the ancient near east, who go to the underworld for a season and then come back, bringing spring with them. The sun will come up tomorrow and life will renew itself.
These arguments are, briefly, all balderdash. Yes, the stories are strange and filled with mystery. No, they do not create one consistent picture of that morning and the days that follow. But the doubt and confusion are written into the story from the start. This is not a confidence game or a fraud or a metaphor. The stories would look totally different if they were. The people who were there believed this had happened. What and how, exactly, they couldn’t say. But it was unbearably, unbelievably real to them.
And from the start people have evaded the story in part, I think, because the hope and the joy it offers are almost too much. Really, an empty tomb. Really, the defeat of death. It can feel like a cop-out, an undignified temptation to wishful thinking when what we need is to face facts. And the first fact that we need to face is that death is real and final and takes away everything. It can feel indecent to talk about an empty tomb in the middle of so much random suffering and tragedy. Anyone daydreaming about women at a tomb talking to angels and the dead not staying dead needs to grow up. This is wisdom. This is truth.
Yet there it was, and there it is: a tomb with no corpse. A door opening to a possibility we may not even want to entertain. That there is something beyond the grave—not in our warm, rose-tinged memories, not in some distant shore where the souls of the righteous congregate, not in the recurring cycle of nature, spring following winter and day following night, not in our plucky human desire to go on living despite it all—but in the love shown to a broken body as it is knitted back together. In the care shown to a dead body as it is revived to life. In the promise of salvation and in-gathering of all the peoples that is initiated by this one lonely empty tomb. In a new age that begins now, in the devil being cast out from this one cranny of earth, hell being crushed under this one foot, death being deprived of its spoils in this one corpse.
And indeed this is not a balm to every hurt or an answer to every tragedy. We gather tonight as Christians always have, in the midst of terrible mourning and the questions of why the innocent suffer, how can God allow this to happen—questions that it is indecent to attempt to answer. We weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice every day until the end. We pray that a miracle may happen. We pray that the mourners may be comforted. We give thanks when life goes on.
We do our best. When the news came about the nine-year-old boy missing in the lake last night, I would have hoped for anything, for any miracle. A child hidden safe in the rushes. Taken captive by mermen. Replaced by a changeling. Anything at all. Today when the people of Transfiguration Parish opened their church for a prayer service for G————, whose body was recovered from the lake at noon today, we all did our best. We read Scripture and prayed and shared the best words we could come up with. A few of us stood at the chancel and offered prayer to anyone who wanted it. He was supposed to have a birthday party today. All the boys who were invited were there at the church, together.
After a while, the people all left, and then the family arrived. The boy’s mother was trembling with shock. Father J., Pastor C. and I did our best to be helpful and comforting. But there’s no help and there’s no comfort. It would have been indecent to offer answers where there are no answers or vague assurances for such a loss. We prayed. We blessed them.
There’s no comfort and no answer. But once upon a time there was an empty tomb. There was an empty tomb, and God’s Son had lain in it dead. He had loved his friends and taught the people and healed the sick and fed the hungry and comforted the afflicted and even raised the dead, and the world turned him into a corpse. But when his friends came to show him the love they could show him, there was an empty tomb.
We are not gathered by a mere miracle, or a comfort, or the endurance of life. We are gathered by a new thing. We are not gathered at the dawn that rises each day, conquering each day’s night. We are gathered at the dawn of the age of the Messiah. We may still be closer to the dawn of that age than to its noon. We are gathered at the mouth of the tomb whose bonds were burst asunder, at the gate of hell that could not hold forth, at the brink of our own hearts and our own lives that need—desperately need—more than we can believe, more than we can swallow, more than we can hope. I can’t explain it. I can’t understand it. But I believe it, because they believed it. They believed it and passed it on, and dared us to believe it in our turn.
Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Amen.
Sad Kings and Furnace-Dwellers (2013)
It took eight consecutive years of hearing the story on this sacred night for it to happen, but it has happened: I have developed a great affection for King Nebuchadnezzar. I know he’s the villain and all—a cruel tyrant and a vain monster. But I love him.
This is one reason the ancient fathers and mothers of the Church urged us to read the Bible over and over again. What first seems just like brutish oppression can seem, after many repetitions, rather different. The secret is here. He summons the satraps, the prefects, the governors, the counsellors, the treasurers, the justices, the magistrates, and all the officials, and they all say to him, “O king! Live forever!” It is so sad and wonderful. It’s as if I could convince the whole world to tell me, “O Pastor Ben, may you be eight feet tall!” It’s impossible, it’s absurd, and the king knows it. He knows that he will die, just like everyone else. But the king alone among all people will be indulged when he pretends that he won’t.
And pretend he does. He builds a great golden statue, not so much because he’s religious but so that he can display his power over people. He can summon all those satraps, prefects, governors, counsellors, treasurers, justices, magistrates, and all the officials, he can boss them around. And they in turn can tell all the peoples of the empire that when they hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, drum, and entire musical ensemble, they must fall down and worship his idol. When three Jews refuse, he not only demands that they be killed, his anger is so great that he has the furnace stoked up so intensely that it kills the guards responsible for the execution.
Anyway, I’ve come to love King Nebuchadnezzar because this whole story tells me that he was just as scared of death as anyone, and he threw himself into erasing that fear by trying to become a little god. I suppose most everyone does the same thing in our own little ways. He just had an immense amount of power to do it with, and he used it, which is kind of awesome and kind of pathetic at the same time. “O king! Live forever!”
It doesn’t work. It can’t work. And it’s all fun and games until he decides to make an example of the stiff-necked Jewish men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Everyone is entitled to a little denial when it comes to death, I think. But the moral of the story is, be careful whom you throw into the furnace when you want to feel immortal.
Because, of course, our story tonight does not end with one power-mad, death-haunted king and his would-be victims. It ends with another furnace-dweller. Another stiff-necked Jewish man who didn’t bend to a death-dealing, death-denying world and who was marched by a new empire right into a fresh tomb. It is a last little delight of tonight’s story that our Jesus does not storm out of that tomb, in the company of satraps, prefects, governors, counsellors, treasurers, magistrates, and officials. Instead he walks alone. He rises not arrayed like a vengeful King Nebuchadnezzar, but rather he is mistaken for the gardener. He does not announce his triumph with trumpet blasts, horns, pipes, lyres, trigons, drums, or musical ensembles. He speaks the name of his friend: Mary. And she answers: Teacher.
So it happens that the smallness of God overwhelms the great men of the world. So it happens that the weakness of God overpowers human strength. So it happens that the execution of God boomerangs back on the world, bearing life in its flight. So it happens that the most invisible, ineffable thing in the world—the breath of the touch of the Spirit of God—steals over the body of Jesus, dead and gone, and coaxes him back into life, life for ever, life for us all.