Last Saturday night also the Kritische Gemeente IJmond gathered to celebrate the Easter Vigil. We filled the time of waiting together with Biblical passages, as well as with poetry and hymns, with whose help we tried to give our own reaction to the great questions of the history of God and his people.
And that is the sermon I preached.
Easter Vigil 2011
In the Polish language, Easter is called Wielkanoc
(literally: Great Night). Actually quite peculiar a name for the greatest and most joyful festival of Christianity, given the various, and not always positive associations which the word “night” evokes. Night means darkness, and darkness fills us with fear. In the dark you see things which don’t exist, at night you dream bad dreams. Jesus was captured at night too, and he said then to those who came to arrest him: “… this is your hour, the hour of the powers of darkness.” And, if you read the story of Passion carefully, you will notice that it is quite literally a dark story: most of the things happen at night, and in the end, when Jesus dies, complete darkness falls even in the middle of the day. The night as a symbol of evil, as the domain of the evil spirits and life-threatening powers… The day comes only with the resurrection…
Yet one of the most basic things which we can learn from the Bible, is that actually nothing is evil in itself. Everything comes from the Living One and is “tov” (“good” in Hebrew), the night too. So everything depends on what people will make of it. And the darkness confronts the human being with himself. It makes the boundaries between the outer and the inner world fade. That is why the night is also the time of dreamers and visionaries. Do you remember? Pilat’s wife had the following message delivered to her husband when he was already sitting on his judges seat: “Don’t have anything to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.” Feminine intuition, which opposes her husband’s intellect driven by power and the fear of losing it… While he asks, “what is the ‘truth’?”, she knows it: Jesus is the Righteous One. It is inner knowledge, which can’t be supported by any other argument than: I had a dream, I had a (pre-)sentiment, it was simply what I felt…
The great night of Easter is the night of such a (pre-)sentiment, such intuition. The darkness rules everywhere. Jesus is dead. The time of dreams and visions, which he embodied, seems to have passed. We wait at the tomb. And, while waiting, we recapitulate the whole story once more. Once there was a garden, an oasis in the desert, a livable place, among the deadly chaos. It was where the Great Creator, the Living One, has placed the human being: his human being, his beloved masterpiece… In order for him to live, in order for her to live… And in order for the project “earth” to be continued by him and by her together. Yet suddenly we hear that short, piercing sentence, which hurts: “The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time…” It comes from the story of the flood, but it often seems to be the most logical conclusion we can draw from the way things are nowadays in our world. Yesterday 88 people were killed in Syria, according to Amnesty International. But well, in this case you can still say that it was a work of an evil dictator, someone whom we, as the “international community”, may simply take care of, can’t we? And we do it, all the more eagerly if he controls big oil resources, as Mr. Qaddafi does. After all we are the “good ones”, and we have good cars which need good gas. Only Syria has no oil resources. So will we soon hear the well known phrase: “But we can’t intervene everywhere, can we?” It is true: not everywhere, but where we can gain something… Economy. In the past, we called by that name the art of sharing what there was. Sometimes we still remember it. Especially when we want to accentuate the fact that there is not much to share in times of crisis. “Let the Poles pick their own strawberries!”, ours are for our own long-term unemployed to finally become “productive”… Do people always have to be “productive”? And does the economy always have to expand, grow? Do we have to posses more, buy more, produce and consume more? Have you ever asked yourself what vision of the human being lies behind the liberal economy? What does Mr. Rutte (the prime minister of Holland) really think about the human being? He wouldn’t certainly admit it, but the economic policy of his government speaks for itself: people want to posses more and more, also at the cost of others, and only then they feel good and safe. Is he right? That is the question: are we such egoistic, greedy, calculating creatures? During our Easter Vigil something very strange happens. Already during the preparation we stopped at that and asked ourselves the question what it is actually all about. The Creator comes to the conclusion that there is nothing good about his creature. And what does the congregation do? The congregation says: IT’S NOT TRUE! Because: “sometimes the light breaks through in people…”, “from time to time I met them on my way: people who surround me with their warmth”, people who are human in such a catchy manner! Look, if you ask yourself the question why and what for “we still exist” as a critical congregation, that is why and what for. Because there has to be someone who cries out: IT’S NOT TRUE! But if we want to be plausible, we can’t only cry! Our crying is important, but it may not turn out to be crying alone. Yesterday I was working with my friend Lukasz on our blog. We posted there a quote from an American preacher and Professor of Christian Morals, who died a few weeks ago, Peter J. Gomes: “the greatest argument for the validity of the Christian life is the life of a Christian: we are the arguments for the resurrection; we are the living roots for the existence of God.” The day won’t come by itself alone! It depends on us, on the attitude we have in life, on our being human. I would like to repeat what I said during our anniversary, and I think that it should be repeated, especially a few days after we made the decision about the “new way of sharing with one another”: We want, together with other people and groups, to be an oasis in a society which is structurally devastated: by extreme egoism, by the attitude “if I’m fine, the rest may go to hell…”, as well as by the simple fact that we need to spend more and more time on earning money in order to live in the present economic and social situation. No, we don’t feel better than others. And we know very well that our oasis is not heaven on earth. It really isn’t! But we know something more: “Your word wants to turn the world upside down….” And we want to be a congregation that takes that word as serious as possible, practices it and by that remains critical: toward the society, but also itself. Because it’s not nothing to say: I will be there for you, it’s not nothing to promise each other that we will, if necessary, carry and tolerate each other. It’s not nothing, and certainly it’s not a sign of weakness of a small group that started to think only about what is good for itself. It is our action, perhaps the most difficult one of all the actions in the history of KGIJ, even if there is so little spectacularity about it.
And, I add tonight, it is our way to keep alive the memory of that Righteous One from 2000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth, and continue his life work, for him to live: among us, among the people: here and now. For his light and his warmth have to become flesh and blood over and over again: among the creatures of him whom he called his Father: for them to live!
It is night – a dark time. But we were waiting in a small light, which grew and became stronger and stronger. And each of us received seeds and bulbs as a small, inconspicuous symbol of new life, a new beginning. It is night – not only a dark time, but also the time of dreamers and visionaries who dare to trust: their intuition that says: “Seven times, seven times born anew, humiliated, cast out, must be the human being to become human.” It is still night, but:
“It will be very early
Like then.
The stone was removed.
I rose from the ground.
My eyes got used to light.
I walk and I don’t stumble.
I speak and I understand myself.
People come out to meet me –
we have become friends…”It is still night, but it is the GREAT NIGHT. The Lord is risen! Yes, he is risen indeed. Now it’s our turn…
The hymn “Within Our Darkest Night” we sung as we carried the light in at the beginning of the vigil.
Within our darkest night, You kindle the fire that never dies away, That never dies away. Within our darkest night, You kindle the fire that never dies away, That never dies away.
