Sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter, March 30, 2024

Romans 6:3-11+Psalm 114+Mark 16:1-8

Every year at this service we read the story of the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves as they escaped from Pharoah through the waters of the Red Sea. It was, and is, the story of liberation for the people of Israel, and it was and is the story of liberation for those people enslaved on the shores of these United States of America. Whenever all seemed lost and the chance of success looked bleak, God made a way out of no way.

It is no surprise then that the songs of liberation sung by enslaved people throughout the South included water imagery, whether the Red Sea where the people were saved by passing through until their feet were on dry ground or the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized by John. In the traditional religions of the countries from which many people were kidnapped and brought in chains through the Middle Passage, water was where the spirits lived. And God was going to trouble those waters until all God's people were free.

Aiden Grey has just passed through those waters of baptism, too. The spirit that hovers over these waters is the same spirit that hovered over the waters of creation, that separated the sea from dry ground in the Exodus, the same that descended on Jesus and called him beloved at the Jordan River. It is the spirit that sealed Aiden in Holy Baptism and marked him as beloved, as Christ’s own forever.

There is another reason we read the stories of liberation on this night.

When Jesus Christ burst forth from the tomb, he, too "passed over" from death into life, making a way out of no way for all of us who call him Lord. We are no longer bound by sin. We need not live in fear. If Christ, dead three days, can return to life, then there is nothing we can ever do that is beyond God's power to heal and make whole again. There is "nothing in all creation that will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus" is the way the Apostle Paul puts it (Romans 8:39).

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:3-4).

This is why baptism on this liturgy, this Easter Vigil, has been the time set aside for baptism since the earliest days of the Church.  "But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him" (Romans 6:8). We die with Christ in the waters of baptism so that we may live with Christ forever. Signed, sealed, delivered.

It is not generally our custom to do altar calls in the Episcopal tradition, although I have enough Baptist blood in me to appreciate the value of making such a public affirmation of faith. There are those who claim that coming forward each week to receive communion is our version of an altar call. But tonight, because tonight is the night when Christ broke the bonds of death, when heaven and earth are joined and humankind is reconciled to God, because this is the night when the Word made flesh blazed a pathway for us back to God, I hope and pray that as you reaffirmed your own baptism, you made for yourself an intention to go into the world as a baptized and beloved child of God. This is why I flung water over all of you (there's actually an official name for that, but flinging water is what it means.) I invite you to renew your commitment to living out that Baptismal Covenant in your daily life and work, because this is the night when to be baptized into the household of God is to join with Christ in claiming our birthright as beloved of God.

This is the night.

Thanks be to God.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!