Easter Vigil 2009 – The Story Continues

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

This is, as I’ve said many times before, my favourite service of the year, for a whole variety of reasons. And usually I don’t preach at this service, but instead leave a little time for reflection before moving right along. For your sake I’m sorry to say that tonight I am reversing that trend, also for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I’ve decided that Easter without a sermon is like a great meal without any vegetables – some of us might prefer it that way, but it’s not nearly as good for you.

Seriously though, regardless of how much I like this service or others don’t like it, the fact is that tonight’s liturgy is just as important – and historically a whole lot more important – than anything that happens in the morning. Tonight we hear again the great song of praise, offered from a grateful Church to the God who is our raison d’être, and the salvation stories of God’s interaction with humanity – both sung and proclaimed by Christians in the dead of night Easter after Easter for the past two millennia, and we see and feel and relish again the waters of baptism marking death and new life before finally joining in the joining with Christ that is our Holy Eucharist. All this we do not at dawn, but at the true beginning of the new day, following the ancient Hebrew tradition which marks the day’s start at sunset.

This is a service – a liturgy – worthy of its place at the height of the Christian festivals, and worthy at least of the energy that goes into the other Easter services, including its own sermon.

“…they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

This is the year of Mark and Mark’s take on the resurrection is very different to that of his Gospel-writing colleagues. While John, whom we hear from in the morning, and Luke and Matthew have a confident Mary Magdalene and others encountering Jesus rushing off to tell the others that he is risen, Mark, typically, says little and offers no meeting with Jesus or excited spreading of good news to the disciples, just an empty tomb, a mysterious stranger and a response of fear and silence.

Mark, like the others, was writing for a primarily Christian audience of course. He knew that those who heard his story would know that his ending was not the end, but there’s still something less than satisfying about the way it does. There’s none of the joy and brightness that we associate with Easter, not even an encounter with the risen Christ to offer some sort of happy Easter ending to the horror story of Good Friday. Just fear and silence – it’s no wonder that no one’s ever tried to make a sitcom out of Mark’s Easter story.

I’m quite a fan of sitcom’s which is OK because international research shows that by far the most watched TV programmes are situation comedies; those pithy shows about families or companies or some other group of characters - and they’re always character driven - who find themselves each week in a new and unusually funny situation – hence why we call them sicoms – that are somehow neatly and tidily dealt with by the end of the perfectly timed, 23 minute episode.

The Gospel, however, is not a sitcom, which is just as well because while I quite like sitcoms I came to the conclusion many years ago that life is also not a sitcom. Seldom do we get to tidily wrap up all our loose ends before moving on to another potentially disastrous but somehow still hilarious situation.

That, of course, is why so many of us like sitcoms, because they’re not like our lives, they’re tidy and controlled and inevitably full of laughs with a happy ending. They’re not like our lives, but they how we would like our lives to be.

All over the world fans were outraged when one of the most popular TV programmes of recent years, The Sopranos, ended with almost nothing resolved. It was unfinished, but ended just the same. But that’s real life – it inevitably ends, but seldom is it finished. That’s the Gospel of Mark, done but not really finished.

What Mark knew of course was that his story could not be finished because the real ending hasn’t been written yet. Mark knew that his characters, Mary and the disciples and all whom they met on their journeys, were just the continuation of a story that began way back in the Genesis stories we heard part of earlier, and continued through the many chapters of the story of God’s developing relationship with the nation of Israel and now, as the Mary’s and Salome flee, is about to take a new and dramatic turn as the story continues on.

One of the reasons I wanted to preach tonight was because for the first time in the five years I have been celebrating this service in this place the liturgy is complete. Traditionally everything else that we do tonight is built around the Baptism. As the catechumens entered the water and the ancient words of baptism were uttered all present were reminded that this was the continuation of that story and our baptisms are our introduction into the storyline. We and all who are baptised are the ongoing narrative to the same story that featured Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Miriam and David and Peter and Mary and Salome. We are those who take up that thread and continue to weave it into the world around us, in all its untidiness and confusion and loose ends that seem never to be resolved.

And through it all, as the story goes on, we, gathered on this night in this place at this point in the story, we are invited to hear those words, that promise from the young man, dressed in white, sitting in the empty tomb, “Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee [his home]; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

Christ is risen. We, the baptised, are risen with him. Thanks be to God.