March 22, 2008
Vigil
Our family tradition as the children of Abraham is told through stories. All these stories, however old they are, however embroidered they are, are our stories.
The Easter Vigil liturgy gathers these stories of our heritage, our genealogy, together in one celebration that consecrates our beginning into that heritage through our baptism and again renews it through our family reunion in thanksgiving around the Holy Table.
Over and over, we come together to tell these stories. Some actually happened at a place in time. Some probably did not. All of them may not be factual, but all of them are true. For myths and stories and family remembrances and no telling how much of our anecdotage are always true. We cannot live well without them. We dare never to try.
These stories are true because they seek meaning rather than fact. These stories are true because they seek understanding rather than explanation. And these stories are true because they, like the carillons in bell towers, ring changes on the three great themes of our biblical tradition.
We are created in God’s image, we are as God imagines us to be. God’s gracious love for us is completely, totally unconditional. Our lives in faith have no other purpose save simply to be all that we can be.
The humorist Erma Bombeck had a most appropriate word for us in this season. She said, “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I have not a single bit of talent left and can say, ‘I used everything You gave me.’”
Jesus offered his life like that all the way from the Wilderness to the Garden to the Cross and said, “It is finished.” He had used it all. He had made Good Friday good.
That we can strive through faith and God’s grace in our own lives in our own ways in our own stories is enabled in the Easter Eucharist and in this community together with all the others who have gone before. This is where we consume such love that we may in turn be consumed by it.
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