March 30, 2023 after 8 p.m.
The Vigil of Easter
This is the night when first you saved our forebears:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.
This is the night when Christians everywhere,
clean of sin and freed from all desecration,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.
This is the night when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.
Friends,
Please be seated.
Those sentences stand at the heart of the Easter Proclamation sung by Pastor Chaplain Michael Hackbusch upon the lighting of the Paschal Candle. (It’s called the Exsultet, from the first word of the ancient Latin text. Exsúltet iam angélica turba cælórum. Rejoice heavenly choirs of angels.) The version in the BAS is a condensed version and we had an equally short metrical version in the Lutheran Book of Worship that I used when I first began to organize Easter Vigils in the late 1970’s. That version made it into this book as Rejoice, Angelic Choirs, Rejoice, number 218, MIT FREUDEN ZART.
What I love about “This is the night…” is the extraordinary immediacy of each of the declarations. This whole liturgical event is about now. This moment –reckoned as the beginning of Easter as the ancients reckoned the new day from sundown to sundown. We tend to think sunrise to sunrise. Not so our forebears. This is the night, the beginning of a new day. Lighting of a new fire. Now.
In tonight’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Christians at Rome, we initially hear the words “just as Christ was raised from the dead … so we too might walk in newness of life.” Might walk. Subjunctive mood. Might. When? When might we walk in newness of life?” The subjunctive mood never tells you. But there it is. Might walk in newness of life. But then Paul goes on and he addresses his own lack of clarity with a resounding present tense “now”. You who “might walk in newness of life” … “consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” It’s a striking, unequivocal, present tense affirmation. It’s about now!
I like it in the hymn. I like it in Paul’s ancient letter to the Church at Rome and I like it in the church I serve with God’s people at St. John’s. “Consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Now. After 40 days of Lent, I get being “dead to sin”. I want to be dead to sin, and the drear of Lent, just as much as the next person, to sin boldly, as Luther put it, confident of the forgiveness wrought these last few days on the cross, the axis on which the world has turned from night to day.
But wait, there’s more: This business of being “alive to God in Christ Jesus.” What does it mean “to be alive to God”? Did you catch it? Not alive in God … alive for God … with God … but to God. One aspect of our Easter journey is to try to figure that out. What does it mean to be alive to God … here, and around here, and now?
Well, for the answer, we must seek among God’s kin. “Alive to God” in unlikely people. People we don’t care for. That cousin you can’t stand. Or alive to God in the joys of our neighbours, not in our joys only, but theirs. Or alive to God when life is a mess. In the mess. Or alive to God in the well of despair, in our very despair. Kindly and kin-ly together. What does it mean to be alive to God … now?
It’s an expression of grace-filled, kind-ly solidary, kinship with God and with one another in the business we call “life”. Alive to God in the locus of grace –kindness and kinship working themselves out—in the business we call life. Precisely because that’s where God resides with God’s people and, together, we do the work of kindness and kinship, neighbour to neighbour, with God, in God’s eternal “Now!”
Christ is risen. Christ is risen, indeed.
Alleluia. Alleluia.
André Lavergne CWA (Pastor)
Honourary Assistant,
Church of St. John the Evangelist, Kitchener