Easter Vigil 2006

[Grant M Gallup <grant73@turbonett.com.ni>]

                                       H O M I L Y     G R I T S
                                            Easter:  the Great Vigil
                                                   April 15 2006
Genesis 1:1-2:2 -  The story of Creation
Genesis 7:1-5,11-18; 8:6-18; 9:8-13 - The Flood                     
Genesis 22:1-18 Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac
Exodus 14:10-15:1 Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea
Isaiah 4:2-6 God's presence in a renewed Israel
Isaiah 55:1-11 Salvation offered freely to all
Ezekiel 36:24-28 A new heart and a new spirit
Ezekiel 37:1-14 The valley of dry bones
Zephaniah 3:12-20 The gathering of God's people

The Early Service:
Romans 6:3-11 - baptized into his death
Psalm 114 In exitu Israel
Matthew 28:1-10 - At the dawn of a new age
                
Of the nine readings appointed for the Vigil, we rarely get to hear
them all.  But Nine is a mystical number--a trinity of trinities;
there were nine muses, there are nine points of the law, a novena has
nine prayers, gestation takes nine months, and there are nine orders
of angels, nine times out of ten.  There used to be more--in the
church's adolescence, she stayed out all night listening to long,
long readings from Scripture. The faithful came to pray at sunset on
Saturday, the end of the Sabbath, and as it began to dawn towards the
first day of the week, the readers ran out of breath. They had begun
the vigil when the janitor arrived at dusk to light the great beeswax
tower, or the oily lamp, and they stayed until the janitor turned
into a deacon singing the Exsultet. "May Christ, the Morning Star who
knows no setting, find you ever burning" he poignantly, cheerily
serenaded the candle. Only when the sun rose would the Alleluias be
sung and the eucharist shared in its first creeping light.

Easter is the Christian Pasch, but is also the whole world's festival
of liberation and restoration.  The nine lessons that have been
chosen are liberation theology all the way, so they can be your
textbook in these Easter weeks, if we don't read them all tonight.
But get a good contemporary translation of the Bible and sometime
during the Great Fifty Days, immerse yourself in this Bible bath,
with its intermittent psalmody, as indicated in the Book of Common
Prayer,or your equivalent liturgy. Pray over them alone or in groups,
and think about them in terms of your own lives.  Bring your lives to
these lessons and listen to the questions your life asks of them,
what the Scriptures answer back, and what they ask of you.  Bring
your heartfelt thoughts and remembered failures, your imagination of
wholeness and your hope for glory.  These nine pericopes are the
Easter eggs you need to crack open one by one, whispering "Christ is
Risen", and responding "Indeed!"  some time during the Great Fifty
Days. Here are some hints about each of them.  They are nine tailors,
to weave your Easter finery.

The first reading tells of the first days of Creation, of God's
blessing of it all, and how good God saw it to be.  This at once
flies in the face of creation-negative religion, which looks at the
universe and clucks its tongue and says "Behold, it is very bad." The
material world--contrary to poor, neurasthenic Mary Baker Glover
Patterson Eddy, to give her all her husbands' names, is not error,
nor is it fatally flawed with malicious animal magnetism. She tried
to cure us all by denying we were sick. The heresy is older than her 
redaction of it.  But most of us are cured of it in the twinkling of
an eye, when "our change comes."    

The sea, the air, everything in them, all is given to us all, and not
to an oligarchy to own and to exploit.   We all share in humankind's
common  title to it still, for the title of what has been stolen and
sold to private investors has not passed to them:  Ttle never passes
in a theft. "Thou shalt not steal" is the rule for their heavy
thumbs. God says, "behold I have given everything," and so property
right in the planets, the spheres, the seas, belongs to all of us as
gift, as well as the sources of produce and the means of production. 
Think about that when you see the evening news and learn that a few
greedy guts are carving up creation, even patenting life forms. In
Nicaragua, businessmen are buying up the water sources.   Making
everything a commodity.  Clean air is now available only to a few.

Now God gives at the end of the chapter the gift of Sabbath  Number
One, you will notice it is not Sunday.  Number Two, you will see it
is not for the purpose of going to church, nor is church attendance
required by it.  The Sabbath was the first labor legislation, the
declaration that the surplus labor of the human race--more work than
is needed to sustain life--does not belong to venture capitalists. 
All the work that's done by working people is all the wealth there
is, and most of it is stolen from them by those who claim the planet
and its life as theirs alone.  All the people have a right to work, a
right to rest from work, and God's own rest upon the Sabbath is the
ikon of rest, joy, wealth and ease for the human community, indeed
for our animal dependents, too.   The Sabbath is not a kind of
religious unemployment, but the reward of a society fully employed,
fully sharing the creation's blessings.  God's last act of Creation
is to institute the weekly festival of liberation of human beings
> from exploitative labor.  The 7th Day Adventists are right--Saturday
is still the Sabbath.
Our Prayer Book recognizes that in the collect for Saturday Morning
at page 99. 
I won't get through the lessons at this rate.  Next comes Noah and
the Ark, and think of the liberation there-- the old Ark's a moverin'
and it moves with its own liberation:  that of the human community
> from disaster, from catastrophe.  And how?  By enlightened
technology!  The Ark is the first work of human skill and science to
deliver the planet's communal, ecological life, from disaster.   How
we need a theology of the Ark now! The World Council of Churches has
taken this beutiful ikon for its own symbol of a Church that can
embrace all earthly life.  All our technology, all our genius, is not
to be used for Star Wars or defoliation of jungles, that we may wage
racist war, but is for our work in a Rainbow Coalition, to deliver
our planet (and our neighboring planets?) from destruction, from
extinction in our time.   Tomas Borge, the old Sandinista mentor in
Nicaragua, spoke of the Somocistas' "Covenant with Death" and their
kind continues in league with everything destructive to all life. 
Their dead hand is on every flower, their stink on every sunrise. The
theology of Coalition forces in Iraq is itself a Coalition with
death.  Resistance to them must come from the theology of Life.   We
cannot use the means of terror to defeat terrorists. But we must see
that yellow-haired and blue eyes kids from the rural midlands of
America have been willingly enlisted in the horrorist war on the
middle East peoples.   

In the third  reading, we are delivered from the religion and
theology of death, when the angel stays the hand of Abraham from
bloodthirsty religion, and declares the slaughter of our youth on our
altars (Military intervention, capitalist punishment) to be ended. 
God will provide for the Lamb.  And we have come to see that this did
not mean immature mutton, but God's own Life, laid down to shield us
all.  God does not want human blood and patriotic gore, nor does God
giggle at the slaughter of animals, we have come to see-- and God
liberates us from such religion here today. Isaac the Jew should be
one of  the patrons of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, and old
Abraham and Sarah  honorary members.

The fourth reading, from Exodus, shows us the exit from the house of
bondage.  We are liberated (as liberated as John Brown) from the idea
that the lives of some human beings can belong to others, as
property--or that some nations of human beings have the right to
direct the lives and destinies of others as their slaves.  Dr. Fidel
Castro Ruz didn't think this idea up over rum and coke (Cuba Libre!)
in La Habana.  Nobody lives in somebody else's back yard.  There's
nothing here in the way of an exception for Manifest Destiny or the
Monroe Doctrine.  Those who pick your breakfast bananas should decide
who is to be Top Banana in the banana republics, and Big Enchilada
Bush should roll his own tortilla all the way back to Crawford,
Texas. The Two Thirds world has been  faithfully singing for
centuries a song it learned from God: " Tell old Pharaoah, Let my
people go."        

The fifth reading is a prophet's vision of the liberated human
community:  "In that day the branch of the Lord shall be beautiful
and glorious-- everyone who has been recorded for life in the
resurrected city, when the filth of prostituted politics and the
blood of military murder are washed away."  God will be present in
the renewed and restored people of the land.  Isaiah saw it coming. 
Will we be able to see it in some places, touching down in our time?

The sixth reading sees that liberation is to be offered to everyone,
and there isn't a price tag on it, as the televangelists tell you.
"Ho, everyone who thirsts, come and drink this water.  You skid row
bums, come with no money, buy and drink wine or milk, no money
needed, no price attached."  The liberated community is for all
religions, all nations:  "Behold, you shall call nations that you
know not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you.  Seek YHWH
while YHWH is available to you!  Nothing can come up short or return
to this God empty.   And the liberating God will reach out to all
peoples, and God will prosper it all.
 
The seventh reading from Ezekiel reinforces that promise of a
gathered people of God from all lands, all religions, all
ethnicities:  "A new heart and a new spirit for all--you shall all be
my people and I will be your God." Liberation includes escape from
our nationalisms, our hearts of stone, our racisms, our privatized
faiths. The human heart is to be free to be one flesh again.  We are
one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord.

Then Ezekiel sees the valley full of dry bones, the graves of the
past.  The whole house of human history, its bones dried up, its hope
lost--how are the dead, the defeated, to take part in the new
community, the restored human race?  Resurrection in the Bible is
always restoration to a community, not the flight of the alone to the
alone.  "When I open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my
people, I will put my Spirit within you and you shall live, and I
will place you in your own land."  Liberation is never to individual
survival, but to community restoration.

And finally, the prophet Zephaniah sees that God means to deal with
our oppressors, and rebuild the broken creation.  Clean out and fix
up.   God will deal with the enemies of the people, and remove them. 
"I will deal with your oppressors, I will save the lame, gather the
outcast, change their shame into praise and renown. At that time I
will bring you home and I will gather you together." To heal the
lame, gather the exiled, change a people's shame into joy, this is
the way to defeat our oppressors. 
So all nine of these lessons are articles in our charter of
liberation, chapters in our own story of life and resurrection. As
the lessons began with the story of the first Sabbath rest, of God
resting at the end of creation,  so the lessons end with the gospel
story of the great Sabbath's ending, in Matthew 28.  After the
Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, we will meet in
the gospel our beloved familiar friend Jesus, who still meets us and
says in this fresh Spring morning, "Greeting!" As we run to him and
take hold of his feet, and hold him, we hear him say "Do not be
afraid, go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee:  there
they will see me." 

To Galilee, to the historical Jesus of that Third World backwater, we
will go with all our friends, with Mary Magdalene and the other
Mary,  to see him. Our theology of Jesus must be Galilean, familiar,
down-home, rising from popular religion,  and not a theology of
Empire and of Conquest, of Rome away from Home.    Felices Pascuas! 
Our Liberator is up and about!  Do not be afraid.

The poet Les Murray wrote, in "Easter 1984" these lines, which we
might read now as we turn from the pornographic terror of Abu Gahrib
and Guantanamo Bay.   

"Ever afterwards, the accumulation
of freedom would end in this man

whipped,  bloodied, getting the treatment.
It would look like man himself getting it.

He was freeing us, painfully, from freedom,
justice, dignity--he was discharging them

of their deadly ambiguous deposit,
remaking out of them the primal day

In which he was free not to have borne it
and we were free not to have done it,

free never to torture man again,
free to believe him risen." 

GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
Aptdo RP-10
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 505-266-2165
grant73@turbonett.com.ni
GRITS 4th series now on-line:  
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
 ©Copyright 2001, 2005 by Grant M. Gallup