“Do not be afraid. He is risen from the dead as he said
…Come and see.”
My dear Elect and candidates, this is the night!
This is the night you’ve been waiting for!
Finally, it’s here!
This is the night we sing about in the exsultet.
This is the night we proclaim from the housetops.
This is the night we claim victory over death.
We do so in very dramatic fashion.
As you sit through this vigil,
we have all sorts of symbols and storytelling.
We start outside with light and fire.
The very elements that keep us going, right?
We need this light and Jesus then tells us he is the light of the world.
And we come in and we stay in light.
Then we hear these wonderful stories.
All the stories of history of the ancestors in our faith.
And we leave out none of the easy stories.
We tell all the stories of how we were created;
how the Egyptians went after the Israelites and they were saved;
and the prophets, time and time again,
came to us to try to show us the way.
Finally, we come to see Christ who comes among us,
as one of us, to show us The Way.
To show us the way.
And we will celebrate that in a few minutes with more symbols:
Water, the water of life.
We die to sin and raise up cleansed and new.
We receive the light again.
And then we are anointed with oil;
the oil of healing;
the oil of gladness;
the oil of salvation.
This is indeed the night.
All of this tells of one story, one key message:
Christ is risen from the dead.
But what is the cornerstone of this message?
The message is this: Love wins over death.
Death loses to the power of love;
love will always win every single time.
And that is what we are called to internalize.
And that is what we are called to live.
That is what we are called to testify to the whole world
that love conquers death.
Love is the victor.
Now here is the part we need to break open a little bit:
The risen Jesus is not so much a reward
for a well-lived life by Jesus
as much as he is the pioneer or the completion
of the completed life, the completed journey
Jesus is both the pledge and the guarantor of the full life.
The full life from here to all eternity.
That is the message of tonight.
That love is victor over death, over every death.
Now all that sounds like great theology
and that is what we do tonight.
It is just years, hundreds and thousands of years, of theology
that is all packed into this one evening.
What does that mean for us?
It means
that love is the answer;
love is what heals;
love is the light in the midst of darkness;
love is what will give us life
when nothing else seems to make sense.
Jesus goes ahead of us, and it is as if he comes
through the other side of death and says
“See! I told you so!
Love wins over death!
And if you ever doubt that then just look at me.
Follow my voice. Follow my commands.
And if you ever doubt the silence,
you can trust my silence because I trusted God’s silence.
And I have showed you the way.
Eternal life only comes through death.”
That is the hardest part. Right?
That Jesus goes through a bloody death on the cross;
every single one of us is going to have to go through death too!
And for some of us, it is going to be hard.
It is going to be lonely, too
and we will have the same moments of despair and darkness as Christ had
but he says God’s silence can be trusted
because the silence is not the last word.
Pain. Suffering. Hate.
These are not the last words.
God has the last word, and it is the resurrection.
And the resurrection is love.
What does that mean in practical terms?
For all of you coming into the faith for the first time
and for all of us who have celebrated every Sunday for eons,
what does it mean?
It means that every time we encounter
darkness and woundedness and brokenness inside of us
that we are living a little death
and we have to go through that in the same way,
it is a rehearsal for our final death.
And that means that our love will get us through that.
And that is what we are called to do that.
Let me give you an example for a moment:
Just think of a loved one,
a person in your life who you love today.
If they go on a trip somewhere, say the East Coast,
does your love for them diminish in any way
because they are out of your sight?
No. In fact, you might even be more conscious of that love
because of their absence from you physically.
And because of that, your love seems to actually be more forefront
and it grows. Right?
Love does not need to be physically present.
Love remains even when the person is on the other side of the country.
The same is true when the person dies and goes to the other side.
That love remains.
I would tell you that love can even grow
because now we are thinking of them more
and we can be drawn even more so to them.
We abide in that love. Why?
Because we can trust God that love wins over death.
Love reigns supreme. Love will never die.
What does that mean in our practice?
Our practices and all these little deaths that we have;
these little wounds;
these little darknesses;
these little things that happen to us
day after day in our lives,
they are little rehearsals for eternal life.
They are little rehearsals of the resurrection
so that we can live the joy of what we celebrate tonight.
That may seem great, but it is really hard work.
Why? Because we forget.
We forget that love is real.
We forget because we take people for granted
when they are here all the time.
We take their love for granted.
But when they leave us then we remember them all the more.
What are we to do tonight?
We are to testify to that love.
We believe in Jesus Christ.
We believe love wins over death;
and so, we testify by us loving others
because when we love one another,
we participate in God’s very self;
and so, love wins again now.
Here and now.
That is what we will do tonight, when we welcome
these new Elect and the candidates into full initiation;
we will celebrate with them;
that they are getting the first taste of this at the table of the Lord.
But something that they have already had a foretaste of otherwise,
they could not have made the journey.
We have all had that foretaste.
We have all had that taste of love.
We have all been loved into being by God himself
and so we recognize that tonight.
We celebrate that because indeed love wins over death.
Love wins every time.
Let us love one another.
“Do not be afraid. He is risen from the dead as he said
…Come and see.”
