The Great Vigil of Easter

The Great Vigil of Easter—2017 I have been haunted this week by a scene from the movie O, Brother Where art thou. If you’ve seen the movie, I feel certain you remember it. Delmer, Everett and Pete are all standing around in the woods trying to figure out their next move, and an unearthly singing breaks out in the woods around them. As they stop talking to notice, they see a multitude of people, robed in white, streaming past them, singing and heading to a muddy looking river. As I went down in the river to pray Studying about that good old way And who shall wear the starry crown Good Lord, show me the way! O sisters, let's go down, Let's go down, come on down O sisters, let's go down Down in the river to pray The other two characters seem curious, but Delmer is enthralled, and all of a sudden, he takes off running into the water to the front of the line where, after a sharing a couple of words with the preacher, he is immediately baptized. When he comes up out of the water, he says to his friends, “Well, that’s it boys! I’ve been redeemed! The preacher done washed away all my sins and transgressions. It’s the straight and narrow from here on out and heaven everlasting is my reward!” Then Everett says, “Delbert, what are you talking about? We got bigger fish to fry.” And Delbert replies, “The preacher said all my sins is washed away, including that Piggly Wiggly I knocked over in Yazoo.” Everett responds, “I though you said you was innocent of those charges.” And Delbert continues without missing a beat: “Well, I was lying, and the preacher said that sin’s been washed away too. Neither God nor man’s got nothin’ on me now. Come on in, boys, the water is fine!” Water permeates our readings for tonight and our liturgy for this triduum—these three holy days. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” The Spirit of God has always moved in and on and through water. In the reading about the Flood, God cleanses the earth of corruption through the waters of the flood while preserving creation in the ark with Noah and his family and all the animals. In the reading from Exodus, God recreates his people Israel in the parting of the waters of the Red Sea. As they pass between the two walls of water unharmed, God strips them of their identity as slaves and renews them as God’s beloved and chosen people who God is willing to fight for and care for and lead home to their promised land. And in the reading from Ezekiel, God tells God’s people, who are once again enslaved and exiled, that God will “sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” And they will once again be claimed as God’s people, marked as God’s beloved, restored in God’s heart and in their homeland. I was speaking with someone yesterday (on Good Friday) about the services so far, and she said that she had always appreciated the Triduum services, but this year, they had taken on a new significance for her. This year, she felt as if she was being washed clean. I was stunned in that moment in that seemingly casual conversation, to hear her give name to the stirrings of my own soul these last few days: the sense that we as individuals and we as a whole community are being washed clean by God’s spirit in our walking together and in our holy remembering. God’s cleansing work is about to be finished in us (at least for the time being) as we stand in a couple of moments and reaffirm our baptismal vows. In those moments I invite you to offer to God your heart of stone, so that God may sprinkle it clean and replace it with a heart of flesh that is re-energized by God’s spirit, and reconfirmed as God’s beloved, with whom God is well pleased. As I went down in the river to pray Studying about that good old way And who shall wear the starry crown Good Lord, show me the way! O sinners, let's go down Let's go down, come on down O sinners, let's go down Down in the river to pray

Lent 5A

Lent 5A April 2, 2017 This past week I read a poignant news story about UN Peacekeeper Michael Sharp whose bones were found in a shallow grave in the Democratic Republic of the Congo earlier this week. The writer of the news story reflected on a time when he had met Michael, and Michael had shared with him about the peacekeeping work that Michael and his colleagues were already doing in the Democratic Republic of Congo among the rebels there. Michael’s vocation was to engage in dialogue with the rebels—violent people who perceived the world so differently from how he did. He would sit down with them and listen to their stories, and then he would usually persuade them to surrender. And he believed that his approach could be applied to other violent groups—from ISIS to neo-Nazis—who rely on myths to recruit members and sustain themselves. In a conversation with the reporter back in 2015, Michael explained how he would approach these very violent rebels he worked with. “It starts, he said, with understanding their world view of the past as ‘the good old days and we need to go back to that. And that is the classic narrative of exile.’ The rebels, he said, were nostalgic for a mythical home and aimed to rewind history to a time that never really existed in the first place. For the Congolese rebels, their fantasy was an era when they—in their imagination—ruled neighboring Rwanda and killed their ethnic enemies with impunity.”i The article continues talking about Michael Sharp’s methodology and how he worked within the mythical narrative of the exiled rebels to provide them with reasons to surrender, which had been a very effective model. But this story struck me this week in the ways that it resonates with our reading from Ezekiel today (and even a little bit with the gospel reading). We see the prophet Ezekiel, who has been raised up by God to serve as a prophet to the Children of Israel who have been marched against their will into exile in Babylon, where they live as a conquered people among their conquers. They are longing for home, and they tell stories of the good old days, the way things used to be. Ezekiel continues this exile narrative with the vision of the valley of the dry bones. The people in exile are a people who have lost heart, who are suffering a death of the spirit, a living death in exile in a foreign land. And the explanation given at the end of the reading is that they are, in fact, the dry bones that will be reanimated and re-energized by the breath of the Lord, so that they may be placed once again on their own soil and so that they may once again know Yahweh as their Lord and God. This story of death and resurrection, wandering and displacement and return to home is a central one in the Old and New Testaments, and really, if we think about it, we can all relate at least a little bit. Each of us, if we are truthful, has our stories of exile and loss, wandering and disappointment. Each of us has our own narrative of “the good old days,” “the ways things used to be” before… Before he died. Before she got sick. Before he became addicted to drugs or alcohol. Before she lost her job. Before the divorce. Before all this change… And each of us has our dusty, frustrated hope of all that now will never be. These are our own Valleys of Dry Bones. On this Fifth Sunday of Lent, the last before we enter Holy Week with great fanfare, triumph and pageantry on Palm Sunday, we are offered the invitation to walk through a graveyard of our own lost hope and frustrated expectations. We are invited to acknowledge and recognize our own heartbreak. And we are given the gift of freedom when we stand, in the middle of our valley of dry bones, let go of the shreds of the false narratives we tell ourselves, and admit brokenly before our Creator: “This is not how I hoped things would be.” “Can these bones really live?” Because, my friends, in that admission of ours, we offer God space, an invitation—to breathe new life into those valleys of dry bones in our lives, to breath new hope and renewed purpose into our stories, and to restore us more fully in relationship with God and each other. For the breath that fills us with new life is the same breath that created us, claimed us, and marked us as God’s beloved, belonging to Christ forever. So, take a moment and reflect on these questions, and take them with you out into the world and your week beyond this place: 1. Name the valley of dry bones that you are being invited to walk around in during this season. The dry bones can be dead people, dead dreams, lost or hibernating hope, or the promises of God you have forgotten or set aside. 2. How had you hoped things would be different? Name your hurt and your disappointment to yourself and to God. 3. What can you learn about yourself and the world from this painful, difficult path that you have been called to walk? 4. Can you offer to God your valley of dry bones, and when God asks you, “Mortal, can these bones live?” can you answer with faith in the resurrecting breath of God—“O Lord God, you know.”? i. http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/03/29/521962848/remembering-michael-sharp-he-risked-his-life-to-make-peace?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20170330