Easter Vigil • Gen 1:1-2:4a • Isa 55:1-11 • Wis 10:15-21, 11:1-5 • Rom 6:3-11 • Lk 24:1-12 • 4/19/25
I vividly remember standing by the bonfire here at Easter Vigil a few years ago. Bright flames reached up towards a full moon as Sister Lynne spoke the resounding words: “The beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega …” Under that moon, lit by those flames, feet on the earth, I felt rooted to the center of the world, as if we stood at the earth’s unchanging axis while cosmic seasons revolved around us… rooted in timelessness at the turning of time.
Seasons depend on time, and the season of resurrection is no exception. Resurrection implies a previous death. Paul makes clear that both death and resurrection belong not to one alone but to all: “just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of God, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
What does newness of life mean to you in this moment? What kind of ending might have to come first?
Life brings seasons of loss. The season of Lent ritualizes this, inviting us to lose something on purpose, to taste sharply the vulnerability of our lives and our dependence on God. Paradoxically, by tasting our mortality and our dependence, we touch our umbilical cord to eternity.
Absence itself, emptiness itself, points to the presence meant to fill it, the presence that does fill it all unseen. Our finiteness, our limitations, our needs for help (sometimes to our chagrin) are signs that we exist as part of a greater whole. We are conjoined to and interdependent with a vast web of neighbors—human, animal, mineral, plant, Spirit—stretching across generations from the deep past into the deep future. Conjoined, even, to the Eternal, the Deep Source, the Entirety. The Alpha and Omega.
Let me tell you a story, about my first religious experience, in youth orchestra. In the wasteland of the second violins, I made clunky, repetitive background noises while the first violins or trumpet or woodwinds got all the melodies. But one day the conductor gave us an arrangement of a Bach organ fugue to play. In a fugue, the main theme is taken up by each of the different voices in turn and continues to flit back and forth among them as they dance around each other, fitting counterthemes together like puzzle pieces. That day, all the instruments and sections of the orchestra, even the second violins, had a meaningful story to tell, each serving in its turn as the narrator as the theme passed like a torch from voice to voice and back again. For the first time, I realized that the harmony or coherence of music for many voices did not require the subordination of some to others. Somehow, all these equal threads of melody twined around each other in a filigree that rose higher and higher like a vast cathedral of sound, intricate, magnificent, many-colored, with every part as indispensable as every other. For the first time, I felt like a small yet essential part of a single majestic animal, moving with coordinated grace as if that roomful of gawky teenagers shared a single consciousness, acting together of our own free will for the sake of something glorious and bigger than all of us. The very incompleteness of the part I played allowed it to twine around the others, giving and receiving, and the transporting joy I felt as one small, conscious, and active part of a vastly greater beauty far exceeded any pleasure I’d ever found in self-contained solitude.
Our very incompleteness is a sign that we are part of something larger. By tasting our interdependence and even our mortality, we touch our umbilical cord to eternity.
Psalm 104 tells the same tale in another language, passing the storyline from the heavens to the waters to ravines, mountains, and forests, each with its own creatures advancing and retreating through the cycle of hours from daylight to dusk and back again like threads woven together, now this one in front, now that, each with its own glory and place within the whole.
In yet another language, Saint Paul declares us all parts of one body. Incomplete in ourselves; each both reliant on and essential to the others and a sacred whole. In tasting our finiteness and vulnerability, we touch our umbilical cord to wholeness.
Lent is a season. For a season, we brought special awareness to our individual non-wholeness, our incompleteness. As Steve put it last week, we practiced humility, that Benedictine acknowledgement of limitations. In Thursday’s washing of the feet, we ritualized and honored our interdependence. On Friday, together with Jesus, we faced our very ending. Ashes to ashes, earth to earth. The end… and the beginning. On the cusp of Easter morning, that very mortality turns inside out, like the winter soil from which spring living green shoots.
The seasons turn, Lent gives way to Easter, and we stand at the axis, rooted to the center of the world. The language of time tells a timeless truth. We are ephemeral, fleeting, mortal beings. But we are rooted in eternity.