Easter Vigil, April 19 2025
Penelope Bridges (preached after the Vigil readings)
This is the night … the Exsultet hymn that we heard at the beginning of tonight’s service repeats that phrase three times: this is the night. It is a declaration that we have arrived at Easter, that we are delivered from the gloom of sin and restored to grace and holiness of life. We have walked the forty days of the Lent journey; we have walked the way of the Cross through Holy week; and now we rejoice, for the new creation has come, Jesus is risen and all is well.
But is it? For one thing, we haven’t yet turned the lights and the organ on. We haven’t quite arrived at that dramatic turning point in our liturgy. We are still holding vigil, listening in the darkness to the ancient stories of creation, redemption, and restoration, that sustained and still sustain God’s people through the centuries of waiting for God’s Kingdom to be fully inaugurated. We are still in the “already but not yet” moment of trusting in the promise but not seeing its fruition.
And in this moment in our history, it is hard, for me at least, to fully embrace the joy of Easter. How can we rejoice when a Christian hospital in Gaza, the only functioning source of medical care for thousands of traumatized families, is bombed? How can we rejoice when an innocent man, Kilmer Abrego Garcia, is kidnapped, sent out of the country, and subjected to brutal imprisonment without hope of release? How can we rejoice when we see our civil liberties being stripped away, when blatant corruption is taking place at the highest levels of government, when we are living in fear of being silenced, detained, deported for no reason other than our expressed opinions? What does Easter mean in the America of 2025?
Many of us come to church seeking sanctuary from the chaos of the world around us. We seek comfort and community in a desert of loneliness. We are starving for good news. And the church is the place to hear good news, the best news of all, in fact. But it is also the place where we acknowledge the reality of death, where we must confront evil and injustice, where we call out the rampant sin of policies that seek to destabilize lives, to terrorize families, to roll back decades of painstaking progress towards equality.
This is the night. It is still dark. Easter has not yet come. Year after year we live into the tension of Holy Week, reliving, re-membering, re-enacting the compelling story of the passion and death of Jesus, so that we can emerge into the light of Easter and celebrate. But this year …. Where is the light? How can we celebrate when so many are in so much pain?
The Hebrew Scriptures that we have just heard may offer some solace. Genesis, Exodus, and Ezekiel tell us again and again: that our God is the God who created everything out of nothing. Our God can command the forces of nature to destroy and to save. Our God liberates the enslaved and sweeps away those who rule by violence. Our God promises a new heart and a new spirit to those who walk through the shadow of death. Our God breathes life into those who were dead.
This is what we celebrate tonight: the power, mercy, and love of God who calls us to stand up for the powerless, to speak for those who have been silenced, to insist that justice be done. And we can celebrate this tonight because Jesus has shown us the way. Jesus lived and died so that we would have the opportunity to have a new heart and a new spirit; so that we would find the strength and courage to crawl up out of the grave; so that we would be able to leave behind fear and exhaustion and apathy, so that we would speak truth to power and walk as people of light. Jesus shows us the way: he lived in the light of God’s love; he died for love of us; and he rose again to demonstrate that death and violence and cruelty will never have the last word.
We have been given a new heart and a new spirit to empower us to act as God’s agents. We are called to make good trouble, as blessed John Lewis used to say. We are called to draw attention to the lawlessness, the grift, the blind prejudice that seems to be spreading like a plague through our country, to speak up loudly for accountability, honor, and compassion for every one of God’s children.
We still sit in the shadows for now, but we know that the day is dawning, that the grave is yielding up its dead, that the light is coming. So hold fast to the promises that our Vigil readings have offered us, prepare for action, and know that Easter is here. Jesus is risen, and love will win the day.
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