April 3, 2021. The Easter Vigil. A short spoken meditation based on Genesis 2.4b-9, Isaiah 12.2-6, Luke 24.1-12. I’m exploring the ways Easter comes toward us to bring the justice that always seems to miss us, the sacred justice that will enlist us if we will follow where Easter leads us—into the new humanity God desires for us—so that we can be a blessing to all that dwells on and in the Earth, our common home.
Easter always follows what gives it meaning—the agony of Friday’s crucifixion and the anxiety of Saturday’s painful waiting. Those two days frame our lives. They are symbols of the reality of our humanity; they show us how to live humanly and humanely.
We know the reality of pain and death. We know what it means to wait and wonder if good will ever come out of what is bad.
Without Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the agony and anxiety, Easter Sunday as ecstasy can be merely a form of spiritual bypassing—going on simplistically to the happy-slappy, “Christ is risen” of a pious Christian triumphalism that ignores the very real injuries and indignities, injustices and inequalities that plague us. Easter comes not just to ease our anxieties about death and what may or may not exist beyond it; Easter comes to remake us now and reshape our way in the world according to God’s design and desire for the planet as a whole.
The creation story we’ve just heard reminds us that we are planted in the earth as part of the garden of God; we are to tend it, work for all that’s good and beautiful and just, and always remain humble, cooperative, and purposeful agents serving God’s dream for the wellbeing of all things, people included.
Isaiah’s prophetic poetry urges us to recognize the presence and power of the God who nourishes us, to remember the stories throughout the Bible and in history when God showed up to break into desperate situations urging us to open up to new life, beauty, and goodness. God is the one we must trust ultimately to help us, guide us, and transform us. Without God we are nothing. Without God there is nothing.
And the reading from the Gospel of Luke, one of the Bible’s Easter stories, describes the dramatic way in which God came to those who were frightened, tyrannized, and feeling powerless against political, social, and environmental forces that felt like colossal threats to their existence.
This year we know these threats acutely: the infections that have plagued us, the indignities we and people around us have endured, the injustices so many people have suffered, the inequalities that rob people of their dignity, the inevitabilities we can’t seem to thwart or overturn, and our inabilities to find a collective way forward that works for all.
Tonight, Easter comes toward us to do for us and among us what we cannot do alone.
Tonight, Easter comes to raise us from the injustices and inequalities and inabilities that seem hold us in their deadly grip.
Tonight, Easter comes toward us to bring the justice that seems to miss us, a sacred justice that will enlist us, if we will follow where Easter leads us, into the new humanity God desires for us so that we can be a blessing to all that dwells on and in the Earth, our common home.