Latest Stage in the Easter Relay Race

Easter Vigil      April 8, 2023

Ex.14:10 Canticle 8, Ez 36:24-28 Psalm 42:1-7
Rom.6:3-11 Luke 24:1-12

Lectionary Link

I would like to use the metaphor of a relay race tonight with a variation.   A relay race consists of runners who run a prescribed distance and then pass off the baton to another runner until the race is complete.  But for the Easter relay race, I would propose that our history includes many prior runners who have handed the baton of the Easter tradition to us and we tonight hand the baton of tradition to the next persons to are to run the next stage.

Tonight in the Easter Vigil, we are those in the current and latest stage of the tradition of Salvation history which has been handed to us throughout the generations.

We commemorate some of the various stages of Salvation History by reading the many Scriptural lessons and Psalms, and by praying the Collects or prayers of the Easter Vigil.

These writings came from people in the ancient past, who have been given insights about the meaning of God and salvation.  They were written down to share continuously.  As inheritors of these writings, we read them again and promulgate them into the future.

These are the great stories which provide us with our salvation identity.  They beginning by positing a Divine Being who uses language to speak into creation everything that has come into being, thus bearing the insight that creation and word happen together.

Word gives identity and being to what we know to be.  The word was to inhabit our bodies as body language in how we were to conduct ourselves.

Our great salvation story lets us know about our perpetual failure to conduct ourselves in the best possible way, in the ways of love and justice.

Our great salvation story provide us with the messages of continual education and correction that have arisen to show us how to amend our lives in the direction of excellence.

The salvation story came to us through the Hebrew people and has been known through their textual tradition.  They were to understand themselves as a paradigmatic people who would live so well as an example to all people that they would by a sort of  moral osmosis influence the rest of the people of the world.  The task of their being an exemplary people was too much to require of them and among the many unfriendly nations they came to suffer many setbacks, even slavery, occupation, and exile.

And yet even with such setback, the story of deliverance and salvation was made evident even as it has always been evident that salvation is never finished, but always ongoing and progressive.

In our salvation story, it has fallen to Jesus Christ to offer a program of direct access to the love of God.  But the profound selfishness of humanity was not ready for the profound love of God which Jesus came to bring.

Jesus has brought to salvation history a universal appeal; he could not be limited to a particular time or particular people.

When Jesus loved profoundly, he threatened people who did not want love and preference to be so widely shared.  And so he was killed when people thought that profound goodness and love could be stopped or limited.

And we again embrace our leg of the relay race tonight.  We come to receive again the message of Jesus living again after his death.  We come to testify that goodness and love cannot be ended by death.

And tonight we accept our next leg of the Easter race into the future.  In hope we proclaim that love cannot die and that it will out live us in this world, and embrace us freshly when we die.

Let us with thanksgiving receive the sacred tradition of hope that has been passed on to us tonight.  Let us pass on this tradition through baptism, healing, teaching, and loving care.  Let us tonight be conduits for the Easter message being passed on into the future.

Tonight we make the hopeful shout into the never-ending future: "Alleluia, Christ is Risen!  The Lord is Risen Indeed!  Alleluia!"  Amen.