April 19, 2014

Geno Sisneros

The Great Vigil of Easter

We have gathered together tonight as have our Christian ancestors for over two millennia to wait in hopeful anticipation. Tonight we connect with the spirits of those ancestors as we remember and take part in the most ancient of Christian liturgies and sing the most ancient of Christian songs and wait the most ancient of Christian waits. We wait for resurrection.  

We occupy a very sacred space tonight, an in-between space - a liminal space, a space that exists between death and life beyond death.  

We are on the mystical threshold of the transformation of the pre-Easter Jesus to the post-Easter Jesus.

That is not to say a Jesus with dual identities like Superman - a human one and a more than human one, but a space in which the one person Jesus exists on the cusp of two realities.  

This is a space between a human Jesus, with all the fragileness and brokenness and wonderness that comes with being human, and what he became after his execution to the various communities founded in his name.  That transformation, that profound transition is what happened in the tomb.  A place we think of as inactivity and stillness is tonight more like a caterpillar’s cocoon.  There is a busy-ness, a stirring, a happening in there.

And like our own in-between spaces, it is not an easy transition, nor will it be painless, nor when it is finished will we be the same as we were when we started. That is of course the nature of transformation.  It is the nature of what happens to us in liminal spaces.

Sometimes we end up in these great in-betweens for reasons we choose but usually we are thrust into them.  The death of a loved one, a serious accident, medical illness, the loss of a job, an earthquake, a missing airliner, an overturned passenger ferry.  These are the profound events of our human experience that sneak up on us, sometimes with warning but usually without.  We are quite familiar with this space.  We spend a lot of time in this great in-between.

Tonight to understand the significance of these in-between spaces, we need to confront our own understandings of transformation, of resurrection.

In speaking of a pre-Easter Jesus and a post-Easter Jesus we need to understand what is at stake. Marcus Borg warns us that we should actively be making that distinction so as not to lose both realities of Jesus, both understandings.  

The human reality of Jesus is more often at risk of loss, often overshadowed by all the pomp and grandeur the Church bestows upon the risen Christ.  Within that royal and divine realm, we forget the pre-Easter Jesus was fully human like us, not God masquerading in human form, but really, truly, authentically human.  If it were all a masquerade, what good would this Jesus be to us?  A god only pretending to be human is just that, and not very inspiring.  A human doing remarkable works, one who allows us to see our own magnificent capacity to love is a much more powerful story.  A human undergoing the process of resurrection is much more meaningful than a man masquerading as a god performing what amounts to parlor tricks.

A literal understanding of resurrection also does the faith communities these narratives grew out of a great injustice.

The Gospel writers’ intentions were to describe their experience of what the life and death of the human Jesus came to mean to their respective communities.  

Mark, the first Gospel writer (though he falls second in the canon) ends his community’s Gospel with an empty tomb and no post-resurrection appearances except for what seems to have been added to the end of his Gospel sometime in the first century.  Mark’s Jesus is often described as a ‘primitive’ Jesus due to the lack of pomp and grandeur present in his Gospel.

But as each subsequent Gospel is written, Jesus becomes a grander and grander character.  By the time  we get to John, who wrote last, Jesus has gone from being a remarkable teacher, healer and mystic to something supernatural, something not from this world, something that has always existed, the Logos - the Word - he has become God.

We have to keep in mind that these narratives grew out of specific communities with specific concerns in different times and in different places.

It would be as If each of us were to write a Gospel today out of our own context, about our own understandings of Jesus, in our own reality, in our place and in our time.  Our Gospels would likely all look and sound very different to how the New Testament Gospels present Jesus.

These narratives were written in times of great transition and we sometimes forget, in times of great distress. Christian communities over the time the Gospels were written were undergoing profound persecution by the Roman Empire, not to mention the internal struggles that were happening among them.  

These narratives were written and shared to provide encouragement to one another, to give meaning to Jesus’ suffering, to give meaning to their own suffering, to find hope in the Jesus story.  

It was in these liminal spaces that the Gospel communities underwent transformations so profound that a supernatural language was the only language that could be used to describe their encounters with the risen Christ.  They came to believe that the human Jesus not only encompassed their hopes but pointed to a reality that could only be described as ‘divine’.  

Tonight we are in an especially good space to meditate on our own encounters with the risen Christ.  How have those experiences transformed us individually and as a community of faith?   Were each of us to write our own Gospel story, what would yours be like?  What language would you use to describe what your faith means to you in a liminal space?  

Liminality is more about the journey than the destination.  It is not about simply getting from point A to point B.  It is about how we cope with the change and challenges along the way. It is a process of dying to an old way of being in order to embrace a new one.  And once we think we have fully and finally arisen, we are once again catapulted into the in-between where we start another process.

Transformation is a constant process.  It is the human heart in seasons.  It is the reason Easter happens every year, not just once in a lifetime.  It is meant to remind us that resurrection and transformation are always happening. The journey is ongoing.

I leave you with this;

The in-between times are what happens on the road to Emmaus, they are the journey to the cross. They are the Israelites wandering in the desert. They are Moses going up the mountain; they are the space between here and there, between life and death, between death and life beyond death.  They are the places between persecution and liberation. They are the places of pain and anxiety.  They are the places of healing, the places of mourning, the places of growing and transforming.  These are the great in-betweens in our lives of what was, what is and what is to come.  This is resurrection.  AMEN