Easter Vigil April 4, 2026 with The Rev. Angela Compton-Nelson

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Easter/AEasVigil_RCL.html

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:55

He was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You may be seated now. It's a weird spot, isn't it? It feels very different. It's not often that we reach the Easter vigil and pause in the silence of Holy Saturday at this exact point. But while this service begins with new fire and the Paschkal Candle, we have not yet crossed over into Easter. As the dark falls outside and the light in this room already grows, the full brightness of resurrection life has not taken over. In this liminal space between death and life, we dwell in the bowels of death a moment longer. Not because we are interested in some macabre exercise, but because in this threshold between death and life, the sting of the grave is at its greatest, death's din at its loudest, its strength the most undeniable, real, and escapable. It is stronger than it will ever be again. It is commonplace in such moments such as this, the Easter Vigil, to explore the metaphors for life and resurrection. For good reason, we receive images from the natural world in which the cycles of death and decay and life bursting forth are at hand and observable. I have my favorites of these metaphors. Every advent I turn to the apical buds on the trees in my yard and consider the swelling tips of the branches that promise to burst forth into life as the earth warms. Every fall and winter, as I tuck sleeping bulbs into loose soil, I imagine yellow daffodils emerging as the earth turns from brown and gray to green. And let's be honest, in this region, pollen haze yellow. It's life from death. But when I reach the mysteries of Easter on this night and I hear these metaphors as descriptions of the resurrection, I find them lacking, thin in light of what I know of death. New life in a daffodil will never be as beautiful as death is terrible. Some years ago in early Advent, my community in Durham received news of a child in our circle of friends entering the hospital in critical condition. And as I stayed up each night for a week praying, the world was so bleak, silent, and worn, fading on an endless spectrum of gray. I felt all of us on the razor's edge between death and life as I prayed for this child who actually was on that very razor's edge at that very moment, only two miles from me. And I felt the despair of crying into the night and knowing it was not deep enough to share in the depth of the pain of those who knew and loved this child even more than I did. When I say it was like a cavern, a pit, the depths, I'm saying what can only be felt in the human heart. All week we waited for terrible news that did come, and sooner than we had hoped. And that year I saw images from that year's Advent Word. It's an Advent practice in which each day is given a word, taken from the lectionary for the day, and people look for something that speaks about that word to them, and then they share it. In a normal year, it's a source of delight and play and opportunity to attend to Scripture and the world and our prayers for it. But this year it felt as thin as it truly is. Its metaphor as faded and worn out as the rest of the world. Why is hope like the image of a starry sky? Every metaphor we reach for to express hope and joy feels so inadequate in the face of death. And on Holy Saturday, we are suspended in death in these moments before the resurrection. Death is at its most real and intractable. It has achieved all that it ever purported and set out to achieve, to destroy and to undo. It is the chaos of the captive people of Israel standing on the banks of the Red Sea, Pharaoh's army behind and dangerous water before. The pain and despair of generations who have lived enslaved, making bricks to build the life and economy of a nation and own none of it. The momentary taste of freedom and flatbread, and then death coming as fast as Pharaoh's chariots and armies. Death is the echo of the lonely voice from the depth of a canyon of dry bones, dust rising in billows with each step further into the dark, a stadium littered in the detritus of its own win. So long and decisive ago was its victory that even the voices of the mourners around the edges have stopped wailing through the valley. The hard work of life can always be undone, death says, but my work is final. The silence after death's win is the strongest it ever is. It is returning to a house, maybe not the first day after a loved one has died, maybe not the second, but the fifth, the twentieth, when silence has settled in, and now a companion whose presence is more felt the longer it goes on until finally it rings in the ears from its permanence. I do not need to tell you what death feels like. Many of you know it far more than I do. It has come to each door in its own particular way, and if it has not come to yours yet, it surely will. We spend our days and lives working for a world in which death is not the most winning competitor, in which God's people will not be drawn in by force to the death-dealing powers of war and violence, or the other names that we give for death, cancer, addiction, miscarriage, Alzheimer's, and the general and long pain of aging. We work for them not to have the chance to destroy life, not to be the final given and determinative realities of our lives. But in this moment, before the dawning light of the resurrection, doesn't it feel like that task and work is sometimes futile? That death's winning streak makes life look like the underdog in a final game. What chance have we against this foe? What chance amid the circumstances of the game which have made it impossible for life to win? It's common to think about the theme of waiting during Advent when the church awaits the victory of God and the incarnation of the Son, when God is joining God's self to creaturely flesh and accomplishing something of what was always intended by God from creation. But what of the waiting that follows? After the very life of God, given and lived in our midst is murdered by the power of death, this time under the name Rome and Pilate, or the mobs whose whims change with the turmoil of the city. Jesus Christ, whose flesh is the final evidence of God's victory of love, the affirmation of creaturely life, is taken away in a moment by the death-dealing powers of this world, the powers to which we all are subject. Death makes as nothing the one who created out of nothing in the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It was common in other creation stories of the ancient Near East that gods who created did so out of death. In the beginning, this God killed that dog and made the earth from their body. But that wasn't the story for the people of Israel. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and spoke life into its waters and soil, movement into its structures, good into its creatures, and breathed breath into its humans. And what of the people of Israel, standing on the shores of the Red Sea facing their death? God creates out of them a people. The waters saw and obeyed the command of the Lord in the prophet Moses, who, not knowing what would happen, opened the waters of the sea, exposing its briny ancient humus, and the people of God walked on it to an impossible life of freedom. And even in the valley of dry bones, where death long ago abandoned the field, the breath of God is called forth by the prophet, and the people are enfleshed and given breath. Something about these stories tells us why those first metaphors about growing flowers are insufficient for resurrection. They place our focus on the idea that resurrection and new life is the thing in which we can trust, but it misses the primary focus of our attention. The message from the whole of Israel's testimony about God is that God is God of the heavens and the earth, of life and of death. That God's presence and salvation are trustworthy and sure. We trust in the word and the breath of God. We do not believe in resurrection and life as things which are inevitable or somehow separate from God, but in Jesus of Nazareth, who speaks the decisive and final word. I am the resurrection and I am the life. He does so in his life and in the cross. And in this moment when all seems silent, and the but the gates of death unknown to us have been sprung. And the empty tomb is just waiting to take center stage. And in this moment, before the lights come up and we raise the paschal shout, we are on the cusp of learning that death is as powerful as it will ever be in this suspended moment between Good Friday and He has Risen. But death's strength is a fading final gasp. It is the last moment of death's chokehold before it is exposed for what it is penultimate, not ultimate. Not the last of all things, just the last thing before it is finished. Thanks be to God.