The following is a sermon I gave at the Easter Vigil, a joint service for St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, St John on the Mountain Episcopal Church in Bernardsville, & St Bernards Episcopal Church in Bernards, NJ. It was held in the barn at The Ross Farm in Basking Ridge. This sermon was almost exactly one liturgical year in the making.

Allelulia! He Is Risen! And we are here to celebrate.

Easter is my favorite day of year. Resurrection. Life. Light. Flowers blooming. Miracles. Hope that wasn’t in vain. The knowledge that no matter how badly you’ve screwed up or deeply you’ve grieved, Jesus is RISEN, and promises us that in our baptism we’ll be risen too.  We are a resurrection people. After all of the grief of Good Friday. The weeping. The tears of mourning have been shed and the font is about to be filled with the same waters from which God called forth swarms of living creatures. We are a resurrection people.

And as Episcopalians, we are also a liturgical people. We divide the many lessons our Bible teaches us into a calendar we repeat year after year. To get to Easter – the beautiful 50 days of love and light and hope come to fruition in the miracle of the resurrection – to get here – takes 40 days of Lent, culminating in this journey through Holy Week that our communities have shared together.

Still in seminary, my liturgical formation – a vast amount of which I attribute to my liturgics professor blessed Fr. Pat Malloy, who has become the voice of my inner, liturgical, Jiminy Cricket – My liturgical formation has made me more deeply aware of the richness of our liturgical calendar than I had been before I started this journey. One particularly poignant learning moment occurred just one liturgical year ago.

Last Easter, I experienced the miracle of the resurrection with the church I was interning at in Brooklyn, and since I was not able to make it home across the Hudson to my family afterwards, that evening, I broke bread at Easter supper with friends who had become family near my home at my seminary in Manhattan. Love. Life, Joy, Resurrection. Easter blooming new life.

But my joy at this moment in our liturgical year was harder to carry forward into those 50 days than it had been in the past. Easter Monday should have been a mixture of riding the wave of the momentum of Easter joy and a respite from a whirlwind of liturgical adventures. When I woke up Easter morning, slow to rise on my much-earned day off, I picked up my phone before I could even pick up my head and the first thing I saw was a message about my friend Ty, a young woman I shared a house with during my year in South Africa, a country where two oceans meet, our shared home nurtured a friendship that deeply intertwined a handful of those of us living there into a family.  At 23, on Easter Monday, Ty had died. She had joined in the resurrection I had just experienced the day before, but I was not in Easter with Ty, I suddenly found myself back in the midst of the grief of Good Friday. Couldn’t I carry the miracle of the resurrection out into the world for one whole day? We just retold the story of the Lord dividing the Red Sea to guide the Israelites to safety, but suddenly my grief made me feel as if I was drowning with the Egyptians who dared pursue them. Walls of water tumbling down around me, too.

Today’s gospel passage brings us to dawn on the first day of the week after the nightmare of Good Friday. The women who watched the crucifixion of their lord and Savior have learned enough about breathing again to go to the tomb of the savior with the spices they had prepared for the ritual that follows death to prepare to say goodbye to the body of their savior. Their companion of the journey who had taught them so much. Someone who they loved. On this lonely morning after the climax of their grief they found themselves at the tomb, only the stone was rolled away and now instead of facing the cold body they’d been preparing themselves to see all that was there was an empty tomb. Suddenly darker than they’d imagine. And The weight of the unknown had multiplied.  They were in the space between Good Friday and the miracle of the resurrection we celebrate this night.

Lent. Good Friday. Easter Sunday.  On our liturgical calendar we quantify and measure when these days will come each year. We can control them in our measure of time, in a way we can’t in our day-to-day lives: the soul-filling joys and ecstasies of grief we cannot predict or that fall outside of our liturgical schedule. The Easter of the birth of a new life – or miracle that one was able to preserved against all odds – and the Good Fridays that catch us off guard – the valleys of nothing but dry bones that we somehow stumble through, struggling to find our way. Fighting to see through bleary tear-filled eyes.

Lent is NOT a season where we endure giving up chocolate chip cookies for 40 days out of our calendar year. Lent is the wilderness we get lost in when we least expect it.  The storm that unexpectedly rolls our way in the midst of relatively smooth sailing. The darkness that encroaches on what we thought was a well lite path. The telephone call at an unexpected hour to let us know that the rules we’ve been playing by this whole time no longer apply and that leaves us wondering if we’ll ever be back in the game again. During moments like these, the Good Fridays of our own lives can take much longer than one calendar day – much like we often speculate the creation narrative to in the face of modern science.

And even when our eyes clear of the tears that cloud our vision and our legs learn to stand, there’s still a space between standing and being able to move forward into Easter morning.

The women in today’s Gospel reading are in that space between.  Waiting in that tomb, fighting the fear and the grief they’ve been fighting since the crucifixion that they’ve had to fight every step –  every breath – of the way to  even  this far. Wanting so deeply to move forward in their grief but not knowing what to do yet. No light to guide their way.

The space between.

In the beginning, the earth was dark and formless too, but then a wind from God swept over the face of the water and from the dark, empty space and deep, surging seas, God said, “Let there be light” and so began the seven days of creation that filled the space with life that God called good.

While the lamentations of the prophets and the power of the passion we heard last night and last Sunday retell the story of my grief in the Biblical stories of our salvation, there is one more non-canonical text that has been a supplementary map to the many unscheduled Lents that I’ve encountered in the past seven-and-a-half years: it’s the Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love. In the midst of many beautiful moments about navigating Lent in our lives outside of worship, there’s one moment that I carry around more than most of the others that resonates with today’s gospel passage. At this particular moment, Gilbert is grieving her divorce and her great lost love at an ashram in India. She is longing for God but her worship is impaired by the immensity of the grief that weighs upon her over the end of her marriage. At this particular moment she is conversing with a dear friend who she refers to as “Richard from Texas” and as Gilbert conveys her struggle to move forward after all of this time, Richard says to her:

“[You say you miss him?] So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him and then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of him because then you’ll really be alone, and you’re scared to death of what will happen if you’re really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, if you clear out all this space in your mind that you’re using right now … you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And what the universe will do with that doorway: It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop [blocking] that door.”

When the women arrived at the tomb on Easter morning, the stone was gone, rolled away, no longer blocking the entrance to the tomb, and when they walked in, the tomb was empty, and for all the grief and fear and confusion they could fill it with in the space between when they saw where the body was no longer laid and when the angels spoke, the angels did appear, dazzling, next to them to tell them “He is not here! He is RISEN!”

This is the miracle we celebrate now at Easter., Easter is the season in our liturgical year that we celebrate the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and eternal life and a great, beautiful moment of joy but it’s joy is greater than its annual place in our liturgical calendar. For me, the joy in this day is that it is bigger than this day. This moment represents the timeless the triumph of eternal life of Christ’s resurrection, the promises made for us in our baptism. And there’s more. Easter is a reaffirmation of surviving all the Lents and Good Fridays that happen in our lives outside the liturgical calendar –that are measured in late night phone calls and moments when the water rose too fast and too quickly. Easter isn’t just about the glory of the past 40 days of adorning our altar in purple and not saying Allelulia  – Easter is the resurrection we’ve shared with Christ every time we overcame the heaviness of our broken hearts and kept moving forward. Easter is being able to get up Sunday morning after very nearly wishing we’d died too on those Good Fridays that dragged on and on beyond the safe confines of the few hours allocated on our liturgical calendar. The joy of Easter is what happens what the waters of grief recede and the spirit of God rushes across the receding waters to fill the weeping shores with the love and light and the miracles of the resurrection. The rebirth we experience in the waters of baptism – enduring heartbreak we thought might drown us to be cleansed and called forth from the waters into new life as we read about in Genesis.  This is why we have water to be thankful for in Easter.

Allelulia. He is risen. And we are here to celebrate.

***The Easter Vigil at Ross Farm***