[Propertalk] Great Vigil Homily

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Tenebrae under our belt, Thursday coming up fast, dark humour building 
up! Must be Holy Week 8 - )


This hasn't been touched for about a week. Now for editing ...

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY  			THE GREAT VIGIL OF EASTER 
- A
READINGS AND PSALMS OF THE OLD COVENANT				      23rd APRIL, 2011
ROMANS 6:3-11
MATTHEW 28:1-10

Lord,
it is night.
The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
what has not been done has not been done;
let it be.

The night is dark;
Let our fears of the darkness of the world and our own lives rest in 
you.
The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
all dear to us,
and all who have no peace.

The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
new joys,
new possibilities.

In your name we pray.
Amen.  1

This is a favourite prayer of thousands of people around the world. It’s 
part of the office called “Night Prayer”, contained in “A New Zealand 
Prayer Book”. 2 The way the lines seem to hang in the air, the care 
taken over the scansion, the word-painting – everything about it talks 
of the work an exquisite linguist who spent hours working to craft just 
the right expression.

But that’s NOT how it came to be. The story is almost as famous as the 
prayer itself.

A liturgical committee of The Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand 
and Polynesia in the South Pacific had been charged with producing a new 
Prayer Book which would reflect both the Anglican heritage which was 
theirs and the culture and flavour of these island peoples. Like all 
such committees, there was a tremendous amount of hard work to be done. 
And there was an incredible amount of tension. At the end of one 
particularly contentious and long day, people decided to call an end to 
that session and take up again in the morning, when emotions might be 
less frayed and a calmer mood might prevail. One of the committee 
members had been doodling on his note pad, as had several others. As 
they all got up to leave, he tore that top sheet off his pad, balled it 
up and dropped it in the waste basket, not without some show of 
exasperation!

A colleague, walking behind him, stooped down and surreptitiously picked 
up that crushed page, put it in his pocket and set off for his hotel 
room.

There, in the surroundings of a typical guest room, he smoothed out the 
page and discovered the prayer I just read.

Such calmness; such trust; such hopefulness – all expressed in words 
that convey a mood of generosity of spirit and love and joy; all written 
as if the author had hardly a care in the world.

That room – the work session room – must have felt like an oppressive 
cave by the evening hours. But the faith of the prayer spoke of Light, 
of confidence; of trust.

And that’s what we do here, gathering albeit it in some degree of 
brightness – which will, this year, still be there as we leave this 
building in about another forty-five minutes or so, leaving with joy 
that the meanness, and vindictiveness, and desperation of the past few 
days have been overcome. Not eradicated – that never happens, in this 
life, anyway – but overcome, with firm acknowledgement that nothing is 
so dark that God will not help us to overcome it.

We’ve listened to readings talking about the promise of creation, then 
the way in which we’ve “violated it, abused one another, and rejected 
God’s love.” 3

  We’ve heard prophets warn of poor behaviour and how that hurts all 
humanity, but the prophets have also spoken of hope and of the love of 
God.

We’ve lived through the retelling of the worst that humans can do to one 
another, as if it were a news programme
on TV, bringing the horrors of repression, and revolution, and genocide 
right into our living rooms. We saw Jesus depicted once again as being 
crucified – tortured mercilessly for the sake of making a point about 
rocking the establishment rule.

We went home on Friday night, and possibly came in this morning, to hear 
of Jesus’ beaten, bloody body placed in the stone cold tomb. Our world 
felt as if it ended in nothingness.

It’s not hard to put ourselves in the place of the disciples, and to 
despair of Love, of Justice, of Mercy, of Truth ever being the only 
guides by which government throughout the world shall be administered. 
Even those with a little faith admit that we’re made to despair as we 
see Rome’s viciousness repeated again and again.

Time and again, even at this stage of human life and faith, we’re 
tempted to feel as if darkness once again covered the face of the earth.

Until we come to the beginning of a new day – the third day, which 
arrives, officially, at sundown. On this Third Day we see where that 
tired writer found the hope to continue with his work. When the Third 
Day’s Light was enough by which to navigate narrow streets, Mary of 
Magdala found that the stone had been wrenched away from that cave and 
Light had flooded in to conquer darkness for all time.

Mary, in her great pain and despair, sought out that dark spot so that 
she could rest her head against the place where Jesus lay trapped – only 
to discover that God NEVER allows Light to be trapped.

That was the power of God – to respond to Jesus and to affirm that His 
Life would neither have an end nor be in vain.

Can we say HOW it happened? No. Faith takes a stab at an explanation, 
but we become poets in the process. We can’t even say WHEN it happened – 
simply sometime in the darkness. And maybe that’s where the key lies. 
When no one can see a way out of being crushed, when everything appears 
taken away from us, that’s when God acts to bring such energy and 
renewal that our breath is taken away and we can scarcely believe our 
eyes.

When we feel we’ve come to an impossible end, that things can never 
improve, we can never find anything which will make us laugh except out 
of fear and despair – when we think that pain, and loneliness, and 
lovelessness are all that is left to us – THAT’S when God speaks to us 
in such a gentle way that we become convinced that we too will be 
raised. No matter how long the night is, how much doubt and sorrow we 
may have, we’re shown that the dark night of the soul and mind leads to 
the dawn of the Third Day.

Inexorably, in the vision and design of God:

	The night heralds the dawn.

	Let us look expectantly to a new day,
	new joys,
	new possibilities.

	Amen.


NOTES:
1 	“A New Zealand Prayer Book”, page 184.
2	 A New Zealand Prayer Book/He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa, authorized 
by General Synod on 26 May 1988
3	 “Eucharistic Prayer 1: Enriching our Worship 1”. © Church Publishing 
Incorporated. January 2000.
	


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)