Day: April 16, 2022

Sermons

Sermon for Easter Vigil

Christ is risen!

There is something quite powerful and moving about the Easter Vigil. It complements the intensity of Holy Week which has immersed us in the Passion of Christ by gathering us into its deeper meaning.

Our little country vigil simplifies the rituals of the Easter Vigil. There is the lighting of the Paschal Candle. There is the singing of the great Paschal Praeconium, the wonderful and joyous song and prayer of the Easter proclamation of Christ’s victory over sin and death. There are the readings of some of the prophecies of Scripture that belong to our thinking about the Passion and its meaning as realized in the Resurrection. There is the renewal of our baptismal vows, our dying to sin and to ourselves in order to live to God. And, finally, there is the Lauds of Easter morning. Tomorrow we will celebrate the Easter Mass.

Vigils are about our watching and waiting. The Easter vigil is our watching and waiting upon God in the work of human redemption accomplished in Christ’s Death and Resurrection. The Paschal Praeconium proclaims and teaches us the deep theological meaning of Christ’s Death and Resurrection. This is the night which illuminates our understanding about God as essential life. “The night is come” in which Christ triumphs over the darkness of our world of sin and death. “The night is come” in which we are “delivered from the shadow of death” and are “renewed and made partakers of eternal life.” All that stands between God and the world, between God and man is overcome in Christ who reconciles all things to God.

Our watching and our waiting in the great Vigil of Easter is the highest activity of our humanity. We can only watch and wait upon God but in so doing we learn who we are as God’s children. That is the great blessing because it counters all of the false notions about what it means to be ourselves in our contemporary culture. We are not cosmic orphans cast adrift in an indifferent and unfeeling universe, cast out into a hostile world. We are not abstract autonomous individuals isolated and alone, trapped in ourselves. Nor are we merely bots, cogs in the machine of our technocratic culture. We are recalled to God’s creation and to our life with God, a life which connects us with the world and one another. We are quite literally freed to God and so to a free relation with one another in loving care and compassion. We discover the truth of ourselves in the body of Christ.

The joy of the Vigil is our rejoicing not in ourselves but in Christ. Christ is our life. “Rise heart; Thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delayes,” as George Herbert’s poem, Easter, puts it. Sing his praise always.

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2022

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Sermons

Sermon for Holy Saturday

“Thou art the man”

Nathan’s word convicts David of his sin. It leads to his confession. “I have sinned against the Lord.” Sin is death in contradiction to life. But life is greater than death. This is something which the quiet of Holy Saturday reveals as we gather at the tomb. The full meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross begins to be explored through our quiet watching at the tomb in the readings for this day. What we contemplate is Christ’s death as the means of God’s overcoming of all that separates us from God and from one another. Holy Saturday points to the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation. Such is the meaning of the creedal teaching known as the “descent into Hell.”

We are meant to see ourselves in our sins in Christ. As 1 Peter 3 puts it, “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.” The fuller extent of that mystery is that this is, in principle, universal, for all, because “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” the prison of death, picking up on the imagery of Zechariah at Matins. “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit” (Zech. 9.11). The Epistle points to this as a “figure” symbolising baptism. It is the transition from death to life “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” which we await.

The Gospel reading continues the Holy Week theme of persecution, namely of us as the persecutors of God in Christ. It is the attempt to seal the tomb against the thought – the conspiracy theory of us as persecutors – that ‘they’, the disciples, might come to steal the body and then say, “He is risen from the dead.” Such is the extent of the violence of persecution even in the vain attempt to kill the idea already present that there is something different, something unique, something compelling and transformative in Christ’s crucifixion and death, something greater than death.

Such is the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. As the second lesson, again from 1 Peter puts it, Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.” In going and preaching unto the spirits in prison, we have the idea of being gathered by God’s Word who is light and life. God, as Thomas Aquinas, puts it, is “the beginning and end of all creatures but especially rational creatures.” Such is the deeper meaning of Holy Week. Only God makes a way for us to him through death. But it means confronting ourselves as dead in our sins that we might become alive in Christ.

We watch and wait both now and at the vigil. We watch and wait expectantly upon God, the principle of all light and life. Our watching is our waiting upon that perfect union of God and man in Christ which makes us one with God and which is greater than sin and death.

“Thou art the man”

Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2022

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Prayers and liturgy

Easter Even

The collect for today, Easter Even, or Holy Saturday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that, through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:17-22
The Gospel: St. Matthew 27:57-66

Fra Angelico, Deposition of ChristArtwork: Fra Angelico, Deposition of Christ, c. 1432-34. Tempera on panel, Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence.

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