Easter Vigil 2025

I remember my first early morning Easter Vigil. I was in seminary, and at the parish in which I was serving, everyone serving at the Vigil was forbidden from turning on any of the overhead lights in the building. We did our best to recreate the experience of approaching the tomb in the darkness of early morning before the 5:30am start. On Good Friday, we stashed our vestments in the office we thought would get the most light from the streetlights, giving thanks for the senior associate rector’s office’s location right up next to the sidewalk. We cheated with our cell phone flashlights as little as possible; most clergy, as well as most people who wear eucharistic vestments often, can fasten them better without a mirror than with one anyway. I don’t remember seeing the fire lit, but I remember following close behind the junior associate, the paschal candle lighting the way through the crowd of worshippers, their candles slowly sharing that new flame with one another, creating light in the room. As we followed into the nave, each person planted their candle in one of two buckets of sand, creating enough light for the senior seminarian to see the music to chant the Exsultet. As the sun rose that Easter morning, as we remembered salvation history and renewed our baptismal vows before flipping on the lights and proclaiming, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”, the sun rose over a world where Jesus has been risen this whole time - we know he didn’t die all over again on Friday, all of this matters because Jesus is risen - but it still felt like something new was happening.

Because this is the night that is like no other: the dawn of not just another day, but the day of reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin. But even as we praise what is represented by the new fire used to light this candle, we know that it burns in the midst of deep darkness. For we know that, although in the joy of the resurrection we can sing, “Oh death, where is your sting? Oh grave, where is your victory?” and can look with a renewed hope to the day when “God will wipe every tear from their eye”, we don’t live in that day yet. That as we bask in the all of the light that comes from this new flame, there are those for whom this is the night where they sit vigil at a hospital bed of a loved one who will not wake up, this is the night where a state trooper has to deliver the worst news, this is the night where the American government refuses again to repatriate wrongfully deported people, this is the night where Christians in Gaza cannot safely celebrate the resurrection for fear of Israeli air attacks. Failure to acknowledge the suffering that is still in this world cheapens our experience of resurrection. There is no resurrection without death, but then, because of the joy of the resurrection, even at the grave, we make our song: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Even as we cry out in joy at the imminent dawn, we cry out in the darkness of pain and suffering. But we cry out in a pain and suffering which we have been promised, since the prologue of the Gospel of John, a pain and suffering that will not overcome Christ’s gentle but sufficient light shining in the darkness. For we each carried a bit of that new light; that light of Christ, into the nave with us this morning. And we don’t just do that for aesthetics. We do so on this night where we renew our baptismal vows for the same reason we received lit candles when we were baptized: as a symbol of the light of Christ that burns in each of us.

We like to think of lights as shining. We even say so in the children’s song, “this little light of mine / I’m gonna let it shine”. But that song also makes it clear that it’s a candle, a flame - the third verse says so: “don’t let Satan blow it out / I’m gonna let it shine”. And that reminds us that candles don't just shine, they burn. We are called to remember that we don’t shine as a light out of nothing, that we burn with a fire that was ignited at our baptisms. 

Luke reminds us of this in the way in which he describes the first messengers of the resurrection: the men with “dazzling” clothes. The word Luke uses that we translate as “dazzling” doesn’t just mean “extremely bright”, it means “to flash, to gleam” or “to shine like lightning”. The only other place this word is used in the entire New Testament is earlier in Luke, when Jesus describes his return: “as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.”

We sometimes get so caught up in being the shining light of Christ that we forget that we are also the burning light of Christ. A flash of light that cannot be ignored. A light that fills up the sky and leaves you bracing for the accompanying crash of thunder. Something not just beautiful but commanding. Unexpected, even. For even though you know that the thunder is coming, you don’t know exactly when you’ll hear it or how loud it will be - will it be a quiet rumble or a crash that shakes the windows? Will the sound roll over everything gently or will it wake the kids and set off car alarms?

I’m told my grandfather used to say that the sound of thunder was made by angels bowling in heaven - a metaphor that turns gentle rumbles into gutter balls and loud crashes into powerful strikes. What sound will the lightning of Christ usher in from you? What will it ignite in you? How will it send you into the world as the body of our risen Lord?

In the words of Dr. Lisa Kimball, “Mission is a gift of intimacy with the divine, not a strategy for it.” That is, we don’t go into the world in hopes that what we do will bring us closer to God. We do so because of the burning fire of Christ within us creating an intimacy that means we can’t not do those things which God calls us to do.

And so, as we bask in the light of the new fire that ushers in this Easter season, we ask ourselves not how can we just be a shining light, but how can we be a burning light? How can we be a flame that calls others to our warmth? How can we announce Jesus, be it with a rolling rumble or a shaking crash? How does the lightning flash from the empty tomb send us out into the new world that the resurrection has created for us?