Fasten Your Seatbelts, Christ is Risen from the Dead!

Sermon for the Easter Vigil

April 8, 2023 

Romans 6: 3-11

Matthew 28: 1-10

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia. 

As you may know, every year, on a three-year cycle, we get to hear a different version of the passion and resurrection stories from one of the synoptic Gospels—that is, Mark, Matthew and Luke. It’s a wonderful gift to get so many different perspectives on the event that we celebrate together tonight. Last year, you might remember, we heard Luke’s account. That’s the one where all of the male apostles famously dismiss the women who come to them proclaiming the resurrection. “There go those women again, with one of their idle tales,” they say. Next year, we’ll hear Mark’s version, with its jarring, eerie, unresolved ending, and the same women fleeing the empty tomb in terror and amazement. 

This year, though, we get Matthew’s take on the passion and resurrection, and it is a very different take indeed. Matthew’s version of this story is by far the most theatrical. I once had a seminary professor who called Matthew’s passion and resurrection story the “Steven Spielberg” version. And indeed, it feels as though the whole story was written for a Hollywood production!

This past Sunday, Palm Sunday, you’ll remember, unlike other Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death, Jesus’ death in in Matthew’s Gospel is a seismic event. The curtain of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shakes, and the rocks are split. The tombs are opened, and the bodies of the saints who had died wake up, start walking around Jerusalem, and appear to many!

The drama continues in our Easter Gospel story from Matthew, the story we hear tonight.  In it, as we just heard, when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to the tomb in the early hours of Easter morning, they experience the good news of Jesus’ resurrection in the most dramatic way possible. To begin, there is an earthquake! Then an angel of the Lord descends from heaven, rolls back the stone covering the tomb in their presence, and sits on it! His appearance, Matthew says, is like lightning, and his clothing is a white as snow, and the guards—the guards Pilate had ordered to keep watch at the tomb, for fear that Jesus’ disciples would come and steal his body and say he had been raised—are so afraid of the angel, that they shake and become like dead men!

Then—after the angel tells the women that Jesus is not there, that he has been raised from the dead and is going on ahead of them to Galilee, and they are to go and tell his disciples—Jesus himself appears to them! “Greetings!” he says. “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” 

There is nothing understated or subtle about Matthew’s version of the resurrection story. Indeed, there is no version of this story that is as large-scale, as extra-ordinary, and as fit for the big screen as this one. For those of us who come to the resurrection story in a nonchalant way, thinking, “we’ve heard that one before, and we know how it goes,” or others of us who perhaps can’t quite bring ourselves to believe it, Matthew’s Easter Gospel is meant to seismically shake us, as if by an earthquake, out of any complacency or doubt we might have about the empty tomb. Matthew wants to make sure that we know that in the death and resurrection of Jesus, something BIG has happened. Something truly amazing. Something that has never happened before. Something that changes everything—including us. Something that reshapes the whole creation. 

How easy it is, especially for we churchy people, to forget the power and truth of this story! How casually we can treat it. like it’s just another interesting story in our newsfeed, one that may or may not be true. How numb we can become to its radical power! I’m reminded of some words by the American writer Annie Dillard, in her book Holy the Firm. She writes this about churchgoers, 

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should buckle us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday… [and] the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

Theologians sometimes talk about the resurrection as a transhistorical eschatological event. My preaching professors warned us never to drop phrases like that in a sermon, but tonight, I just can’t help myself! It’s Easter, for crying out loud, and the resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate transhistorical eschatological event. I won’t get into all of the details of what it means, but for tonight, let’s just say it’s a fancy, theological way of saying the resurrection is really a BIG deal. And it’s not just something that happened in history, 2,000 years ago. Something that we read about in the Bible or history books. Something that took place, as things do in linear time, and was over. Something that has nothing to do with us. Something that we sit back and watch passively, like a movie on the big screen. 

The truth is, the resurrection transcends history. It transcends all time. It reaches back to the beginning of the world, it holds in its’ embrace the present moment, and it stretches all the way to the end of time. For, as I said when I blessed the Paschal candle at the very beginning of tonight’s liturgy, “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him and all the ages.” Jesus’ resurrection isn’t just an historical event, one that is now finished. It also has to do me you, and with me—with us—and with our present world today, in 2023. 

I think this is what the apostle Paul is getting at in our reading tonight from his letter to the Christian community in Rome. Paul is trying to wrap his heart and mind around the meaning of the resurrection—not just around what actually happened when Jesus rose from the dead, but what it means for us as human beings, especially for those of us who dare to call ourselves followers of Jesus. The Roman Christians had never even met Jesus, yet, Paul was convinced, his life, death and resurrection had everything to do with them. 

Do you not know that those of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead… so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

The death that Jesus died, and the new life that he came to know in the resurrection, weren’t just private experiences that he kept for himself. They were a gift that he gave to his followers in every age, including us. All of us who have been baptized have died and been buried with him, will also be raised with him in his resurrection. We get to experience this for ourselves, in our own baptisms, and also, any time we stand around the baptismal font and baptize a new Christian, as we did this evening with Michael.

When the earliest Christians were baptized, usually at the Easter Vigil like tonight, there was a real sense in which, when they went down into the dark, cold waters of Baptism, they drowned. All that they had been before, including their sins and shortcomings, died. As they renounced the power that Satan and evil had held over them, and turned to Jesus Christ as their Savior, and emerged from the waters, and faced the rising sun in the east, and they took on a new identity. One that had nothing to do with their past or their social status or title or family name, or how much or little wealth they had, or how much or little power or influence, or how smart or successful they were. From now on, all of that was now subsumed under their identity as children of God, and members of Christ’s risen Body. That was their new identity. 

And tonight, and every time we have the joy and privilege of witnessing someone go down into the waters of baptism as we have tonight with Michael, and emerge a new person in Christ, we are reminded of this truth about ourselves too. That the most important identity we have—that we can ever have—is the one we received on the day of our own baptisms. The day when we died, and were reborn. The day when we were reminded, as Jesus himself was at his own baptism, that we are beloved children of God, and that nothing we can do will ever change that. 

Michael, as you begin your new life as a Baptized member of the Household of God I wish I could promise you a life free from hardship and heartbreak, or that from now on, you won’t ever know suffering. I wish baptism was magic, and could take away sickness and pain and make you happy for the rest of your life. But of course, I can’t promise this, nor is baptism like waving a magic wand, and making everything better. What baptism gives us—gives you—is something else. Not a magic wand to fix things, or an easy life, but a promise, God’s promise. That no matter what happens, you will never, ever be alone. For you have walking alongside you now a God who will never let you go. A God who knows suffering and hardship. A God who has experienced sickness and pain, and yes, even death, and yet who promises us—promises you—in the resurrection that these will not have the last word. 

You also have something else, a new community, a new family, in addition to your blood family who loves you: the family of God. It’s the family gathered here for you tonight. In fact, I ask you to stand, and turn around, and take a look at this family. This is a family who loves you fiercely! A family who will never let you go. A family you can trust, and on whom you can depend. A family in whom the risen Christ dwells, and through whom he will be walking close beside you in all that is to come. 

Our sleeping God has indeed awoken, and is drawing us out of the night, into the bright morning light of the resurrection! So, to paraphrase Margot Channing as played by Bette Davis in All About Eve, fasten your seatbelts, hold on to your pews, don your crash helmets, put on your life preservers, and send up your flares, it’s going to be a bumpy night, for Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and granting those in the tomb life! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Amen.

—The Reverend Edmund Harris