Easter Eve Vigil: Reflection and Poem

A Reflection for Easter Eve                                       All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC 

April 15, 2017                                                              Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Hope Always Triumphs Over Experience

What we have done tonight is to tell stories.  Easter Eve vigil is a collection of readings and songs - nine Hebrew Testament readings each followed by a Psalm, each followed by a meditation, then we have hymns, an epistle and a gospel, and a real sermon; so 21 options in all  When I was in Seminary for three years we did them all.  It was a long service which began about 3:00 in the morning by candle light, with a fog-like layer of incense, until the light of the rising sun was seen coming through the eye of the stained glass window of the chapel, and then the pots and pans would come out as we celebrated the Resurrection. We would have the Epistle and Gospel and baptisms of the babies from that year’s crop from the “fertile acres” of seminary housing and then the communion service. We would then have a round of mimosas and egg casseroles and head on to the parish churches to which we were assigned for their early services. 

After ordination, I tried to do that at my first couple parishes but met with little enthusiasm for either the full panoply of lessons or the 3:00 in the morning routine. For a couple years I did have college students who would meet at midnight but for a much-abbreviated session, ending about 1:30AM when they would start to fade. I settled for a Saturday early night compromise.

Did you ever have periods of time when everything just seemed to go wrong - when you just wanted not to look at the paper, click the radio off when the news came on, not open your email and not answer the phone because you just knew that someone was going to give you some bad news you didn’t want to hear? When you just wanted it all to go away?

I had a friend tell me a dream where she was one of the last un-infected people on earth, but surrounded by those who were infected. Some of the infected people said that that it was all right when you did not have hope and just give in to living without hope.

Robert Fulghum, a Unitarian Minister who wrote one of my favorite books, “Everything I Really Need To Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.” has a Creed:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge —
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts —
That hope always triumphs over experience —
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.

When the early Christian community experienced hard times, they gathered together and told stories. They told stories about Jesus, they shared stories from their scripture, the Hebrew Bible, and they told stories given them by other Christian communities in other places. This is what we have done tonight. The world is falling apart, we carry a lot of hurts and losses, and there is darkness all around us. We have tried parties, entertainment, distraction, and stuffing down all of our emotions and nothing seems to work; therefore we come together to tell stories and share hope. We cut the nine stories down to three with the Epistle and Gospel added as well.

The first story is about Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham is seized with a compulsion to show how much he trusts God by sacrificing his son, his only son, God’s gift to him in his old age, his whole outward and visible sign of hope, on the altar. Things look real bad for Isaac. But God stops Abraham and reminds him that Isaac is the sign of hope given to him to cherish as "myth is more potent than history.”

The second story is the Deliverance of the Hebrew Children at the Red Sea. Everything looks bad for the runaway slaves as Pharaoh’s army is gaining on them. God open the waters and they escape and their enemy is drowned in the Red Sea. They are reminded that God is with them when they face their greatest dangers, for “dreams are more powerful than facts.”

The third story is from Zephaniah. He lives in the 7^th century BC when the Scythians, a nomadic army of mounted Invaders loosely allied to the Assyrian Empire, come sweeping down from the Caucasus region of the Russian steppes and settle into raiding their neighbors with terror in the northern regions of what is now Iraq and Iran. But there are richer prizes to the south, and they mobilize on their way to despoil Egypt in the south, leaving havoc and slaughter in their wake through the borders of the Kingdom of Judah. The Egyptian Pharaoh at the time buys them off with a huge ransom, and the Scythians turn back to gather all the low lying fruit they did not fully pick on the way down with their weapons of terror. Things do not look good for Jerusalem. Zephaniah ends his book by saying that God has spared the people for “hope always triumphs over experience”

In the Epistle passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans, things do not look good for the Christian community, but Paul finds God’s message of hope of the resurrection, the joke on those who hoped that by killing Jesus, they would silence his  movement, as “laughter is the only cure for grief.”

In the Gospel from Matthew, Jesus has been slaughtered by the religious leaders and the Jesus movement is as good as dead. Things so not look good for the community, but God’s gift of the resurrection gives them new hope for “love is always stronger than death.”

This church,  this community, this state, this nation, this world has experienced many bad things, but we come together to tell stories, to laugh, and to hope and to share the love which is stronger than death.

Hope Always Triumphs Over Experience

Full moon diminishing from its width days ago

Darker than it used to be and grows more slight.

That light will die and I’ll need to use flashlight.

Makes my pre-dawn reflecting even more slow.

While I am walking my thoughts are getting darker

As I look at all news of the evil triumphs of greed

Cutting safety net budgets down to bone and bleed

Out compassion waning making poor lives harder.

Darkness is all around but call upon  “the thing with

Feathers” to sing its song so I can make uncertain echo

To stand against the new iteration of the old Pharaoh

Re-inventing new history by reliving a forgotten myth

That there was once or even more than thrice a time

When out of the pit of fear we were helped to climb.