PODCAST - Press sideways triangle below to listen
The Vigil of Easter, Cycle C
Sisters of St. Joseph Mother House
Genesis 1:1-2:2 / Exodus 14:15-15-1 / Isaiah 54:5-14 / Romans 6:3-11 / Luke 24:1-12
April 20, 2019
God’s Story Is Our Story
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato
The Power of Story
Social scientists have found that telling stories is the best way to teach, persuade, and even understand ourselves.
The power to teach and persuade we know well, but the power of a story to better understand myself, that can be fascinating and transformative!
This is the perfect night for a story, our story as a people: How we came to be; where we’ve been; where we find ourselves; and where we could be headed.
It’s a Story of Goodness … of Liberation … of Promise … of Deliverance … of First Fruits.
… of Goodness
The Book of Genesis begins with the story with the words, “In the beginning, when God creates the heavens and the earth.”
And as each part of creation is brought into being, we keep hearing: “God saw how good it was.” “God saw how good it was.” “God saw how good it was.”
The repetition of those words certainly gets your attention, as they are meant to do. They call us to approach all aspects of creation positively, to see the goodness that is here, the goodness God saw in creating.
Just recall the pride, delight, or thrill you feel over something you’ve created, be it a meal, an event, a child, a garden, a quilt.
Wherever there is human flourishing, be it in technology, in art, in health care, in food distribution, in the provision of potable water, there is the story of goodness come alive.
… of Liberation
The Exodus reading wakes us up to reality, for in the midst of goodness and human flourishing we can see people right in our midst hurting and oppressed.
Like the oppressed Israelites building the pyramids of pharaoh, we too live amidst glaring examples of systemic evil. So as God once tamed the waters of creation, so here in Exodus God tames the waters of the Red Sea and allows his people to pass through safely.
But this liberation is not only about the Israelites being freed from their Egyptian masters, it’s about our being liberators of those oppressed by racism, classism, poverty, gender preference, and religious intolerance.
In our active participation in changing perceptions and attitudes, we enter the story of liberation.
… of Promise
As if goodness and liberation were not enough, God’s story now speaks a promise to our hearts in the 3rdreading taken from Isaiah the prophet.
In the intimate language between a lover and his beloved, God speaks to us with similar words of tenderness, “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you” and again, “Though the mountains fall away and the hills be shaken, my love shall never fall away from you.”
What words of promise to us, as we stand disillusioned in our political system, or in acts of terrorism, or in how our Church has handled the sexual abuse crisis.
… of Deliverance
And now the story takes a sudden turn in reminding us of the deliverance by water. Not the water of Genesis; not the water of the Exodus, but the saving waters of Baptism in which we were all reborn.
Paul in his Letter to the Romans declares, “Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.”
Yes, a likeness to death will reap a likeness in resurrection. All this pain and sorrow of ours and of the world, all this disillusionment, all this hopelessness is going somewhere.
And the story of our baptismal water and of this Easter water we will bless and be sprinkled with becomes the means of deliverance, a deliverance of which we are very much part.
The delivery seems assured as Paul testifies, “If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more; death no longer has power over him.”
… of First Fruits
And the story does not simply end on Paul’s assurance, but on the very raising of Jesus from the dead.
Luke records, “On the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.They found the stone rolled away from the tomb,but when they went in, they did not find the body.”
Again, just as we saw the connection between water, we now see the connection between “on the first day of the week” and the first day of creation in Genesis. Clearly, there is a new creation taking place at this empty tomb.
Something really new is happening, more dramatic than the day of the creation of the universe. And it isn’t just that women and not men discover the tomb and it isn’t that women and not men who are told by the risen Jesus to go into Galilee and tell the disciples the good news!
To the contrary, it is for all, the greatest to the least, that are missioned by the risen Lord.
Conclusion
To conclude, the story proclaimed to us as we wait in vigil may sound like God’s story, but it is really our story with God.
And because of the power a story has, it has drawn us deeply into goodness, liberation, promise, deliverance, and a celebration of Jesus victory, which now becomes our story.
No comments:
Post a Comment