A Homily For Easter Eve All Saints’ Church,
Southern Shores, NC April 19, 2014 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Exodus
14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea] Ezekiel
36:24-28 [A new heart and a new spirit] Zephaniah
3:14-20 [The gathering of God's people] Romans
6:3-11 Matthew
28:1-10
Paul in the Epistle reading from Romans for today
tells us that “we have been baptized into Christ’s death”. That is heavy stuff.
In the early church Baptism was a time when the person being held under to
water tasted death. They changed their name to a name by which they would be
known in this underground organization dedicated to following a ruler other than
Caesar in their life. To be a Christian meant to die to the world and enter a
new kind of reality. Later on, the church no longer continued as a criminal
enterprise but became part of the prevailing culture. The institution gained a
great deal of prestige in this world, but it was at a cost of, at times, losing
it soul.
The central message of the Gospel is that we have to
go through death - not around it, not over it, but through the void. Jesus did
not want to die; he spent hours praying, sweating blood, to hold on to life
because it is precious. There are so many things that are lovely that we want
to hold on to, to cling to. Who would we be if we are dead? What would we have
if we lose everything that defines us?
Thirty two years ago I did my chaplaincy training at
the University Hospital at Chapel Hill, and I was assigned to a floor in which
patients were dying on a regular basis. I had given up smoking my pipe when I
went to seminary the year before because I would not be able to afford the kind
of pipe tobacco I enjoyed. In the meantime I smoked other people’s cigarettes,
and so it seemed a cruel joke to have me on this wing, thinking that at times I
was dying for a smoke, and I might indeed have set myself up for dying because
of my smoking, Since I was going to be around people who were dying, one of the
first assignments given to me by my mentors was to write a reflection on my own
death; to enter into a prayerful meditation on what it would be like to die. Most
of us want to continue the denial of our own death. We want to be fat, dumb,
and happy until our last thought, which would be, “Hey, what was that?” In his
book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says: "... the idea of
death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a
mainspring of human activity--activity designed largely to avoid the fatality
of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny
for man."
At the end of that summer, I stopped smoking for
good but I continued to work on meditating about my death. I find I have to
keep doing it in order to grow deeper in my faith, to die to myself. To steal
and paraphrase from the opening paragraph of Melville’s Moby Dick:
It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation (of my soul). Whenever I
find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly
November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin
warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially
whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral
principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and
methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to
sea (into the depths of my soul) as soon as I can. This is my substitute for
pistol and ball.
The death of self is the only way we can come to the
true self, the deeper self, the connection with the divine, without the
constant ego thought “What is in it for me?” Kathleen Dowling Singh, in an
article “Living in the Light of Death” and
quoted by Richard Rohr in his mediation
for Maundy Thursday, said: “Surrendering the exclusivity of self-reference—in
love, for love, arms wide open on the cross—he (Jesus) emerged into Christ
consciousness, transcending the smallness of self, obliterating the separation self
imposes.”
But we want to hold on so that we don’t have to face
the void. In the lessons for the Easter Eve Vigil, the theme of entering into
the unknown keeps coming up. The Hebrew children have to walk into the Valley
of Death as the waters of the sea form a wall on the right and the left. In the
Ezekiel passage the people of the exile have to give up the old heart and
spirit of self , to die to the old self in order to receive the new heart and
spirit, to be born into a new life of being fully connected to God. In the Gospel
Lesson from Matthew the women want to hold onto the feet of the Risen Lord and
worship him. They want to hold on to that moment, to say Jesus’ death was just
a blip on their radar, but he seems to be back like the good old days. It is the idea of petrifying that moment,
making sure it does not change. But Jesus is not a resuscitation – he did not
go up to the gate and came back - but a resurrection.
He went through death and came out the
other side. He tells these women whom he loves that they have to let him go and
to be open to the unknown future., as they have to be open to the new future.
They have to die to the past, however good is was, however strong the nostalgia
is, die to the past in order to be alive to the real present, and to the future,
of new life.
That is the struggle of the church, for we want to
hold on, to safely and permanently set in stone, to petrify, to set in amber
forever, but it is only when we are able to let go, when we are open to the
places we cannot control, and go into the void of the unknown, the mystery of
the unknowable, that we are able to live into eternal and abundant life.
On this Easter Eve, we gather in the dark, entering
again into the death of Christ in order to trust in a new light. We go through the valley of the shadow of
death, rising with Christ, saying: “Hallelujah, Christ is Risen! The Lord is
Risen Indeed, Hallelujah!”
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