RCL Easter Vigil
4 April 2015
Saint Faith’s Anglican
Church
Vancouver BC
Are We ‘There’ Yet?
Chapter 3: Fearing Fulfilled Promises
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the Easter Vigil.
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the Easter Vigil.
When I began my
doctoral studies at Notre Dame in 1984, Paula found work at a local bank in
their mortgage loan department. She had
done similar work in Denver some years before, so she quickly settled into the
job. One day she came home from the
office and said, ‘I met a family today that your father would love to
meet. Their family name is Leggett and I
bet that they could fill a number of pages in his genealogy --- they’re African
American.’ With these few words the
weight of my family’s hidden history suddenly fell upon my unsuspecting
shoulders, a hidden history my father was happy to share with me.
On my father’s side I
am a descendant of the Leggett’s from the county of Kent in England and the
Myrick’s from Bodorgan on the island of Anglesey off the northwest coast of
Wales. Members from both families
emigrated to what is now the northeastern region of the United States in the
early 1600’s. We came as farmers and as
sea-farers, eager to find a new life in the ‘promised land’ of the Americas
and, to be honest, to escape from some political entanglements in the ‘old’
country.
We prospered and by
the early 1700’s we found our way up the Hudson River to Saratoga Springs and
the surrounding communities. We survived
raids from the French and their aboriginal allies from Québec during the French
and Indian War. We survived the
Revolution, even when the Battle of Saratoga raged on our farmland and around
our farmhouses. Our story is the
quintessential American settler story including the shadow side of that story
--- we owned slaves.
African slaves arrived
in New York in 1626 with the first slave market occurring in 1655. On the 4th of July 1827 all slaves
were emancipated, but two hundred years of slavery could not be erased
overnight. From census records I know
that my family owned slaves until 1800 at least.
When the slaves were
freed, they often took the family name of their former owners, a practice
reaching back to Roman imperial times.
So here I was in 1984, face to face with the reality that in South Bend,
Indiana there was a family likely descended from slaves my family had freed
sometime between 1800 and 1827.
The ‘promised’ land of
my ancestors had not been the promised land for their ancestors. All my pride in being a Northerner with kin
who fought for the Union during the Civil War evaporated. Neither family, slave-owner or slave, had yet
achieved the fullness of the promise of the New World. Neither family were ‘there’ yet.
Promises have a way of
inspiring hope in us even when these promises are not yet fulfilled. But sometimes we become so accustomed with
‘unfulfilled-ness’ of the promise that we are surprised when the moment of
fulfillment confronts us. When a
long-hoped-for promise is finally fulfilled, we can even fear the future
because we have become so used to living in expectation of something that seems
so distant and so unlikely.
Imagine for a moment
the women who come to the tomb. They
have heard the words of Jesus and seen the deeds he has done. They have even dared to hope that the promise
of new life that Jesus has proclaimed throughout his public ministry might come
true. His death, though, has rolled a
stone and locked that promise in a tomb.
But here, in the pre-dawn darkness, it would seem that the stone cannot
lock the promise away. Thousands of pages
have been covered by litres of ink as commentators have tried to explain the
abruptness of what is the original ending of Mark’s gospel: ‘So [the women] went out and fled form the
tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to
anyone, for they were afraid.’ (Mark 16.8 NRSV)
Why are they
afraid? Isn’t the empty tomb good news
to those who fear the power of death?
Yes, it is good news, but so long as we insulate ourselves from the
power of this good news with the sweetness of chocolate, the cuteness of
ducklings and lambs and polite but trite sentiments about the joy with the
coming of spring, we do not have to confront the fearful truth: If the tomb is empty, the promise is
fulfilled and everything has changed --- for ever.
In the immediate past
this parish has supported Emilie Smith, a priest from this Diocese, who served
in Guatemala. Guatemala has a painful
and violent history of oppression and murder, especially of aboriginal
people. Even the bishop who ordained me
to the transitional diaconate and to the priesthood, Bill Frey, had been
deported from Guatemala for speaking out against the violence. But in the midst of this violence, Julia
Esquivel, a poet who endured thirty years of successive dictatorship, wrote a
powerful reflection on the good news of the empty tomb.
There is something here within us
which doesn’t let us sleep, which doesn’t let us rest,
which doesn’t stop the pounding deep inside.
It is the silent, warm weeping of women without their husbands.
It is the sad gaze of children fixed there beyond memory . . .
What keeps us from sleeping
is that they have threatened us with resurrection!
Because at each nightfall
though exhausted from the endless inventory
of killings for years,
we continue to love life,
and do not accept their death!
In this marathon of hope
there are always others to relieve us
in bearing the courage necessary . . .
Accompany us then on this vigil
and you will know what it is to dream!
You will know then how marvelous it is
to live threatened with resurrection!
To live while dying
and to already know oneself resurrected.
Translated from the Spanish by Gloria Kinsler
To believe that God has raised Jesus from the dead is to dare to
believe that anything is possible ‘in a world where carpenters are raised from
the dead’. [1] To believe that God has raised Jesus from the
dead should cause the heart to flutter for a moment and the mind to consider
how one lives into this promise. The
courage to live into this promise does not mean we have no fear; courage is not
the absence of fear but the decision to act despite one’s fears.
We know that the women
did eventually find the courage to speak.
If they had not, then you and I would not be here on this night, a night
filled with candle-light and a promise that has not yet been realized in its
fullness. Are we ‘there’ yet? Not yet but the hope of the promise fulfilled
draws us on.
No comments:
Post a Comment