This curious ancient liturgical phenomenon we gather to enact this evening has only recently been reclaimed by the Western Church. I daresay few of you grew up with it. It only appeared in any Episcopal Prayer Book at the 1979 revision, and that because of a change in the cultural circumstances. The impact of that change could be compared to the change marked by the closing the “frontier” in America which for so long defined our nation’s telos, our aim and end, to stretch from “sea to shining sea.” The great wars of the last century expanded our destiny manifestly beyond the national boundaries and the breaking of a great wave of gratitude to the Almighty of those who returned from overseas had filled a whole variety of churches representing different euro-national and linguistic expressions of worship.
What dawned on the Standing Liturgical Commission (and its like in other denominations) is that after Christendom’s high water mark (in the US about 1964) when our churches were their fullest and we were building everywhere we could, expecting growth to continue, is that the tide was receding, particularly at the edge of the continent where the frontier lasted longest, and that we would enter a time of drought. The missionary zeal and imperialistic good intentions to christianize or to democratize the world would bog down and lose momentum. What they saw dimly ahead in an era we tend to call “post-Chistendom” or just “post-christian:” a cultural hostility set in we hadn’t seen since Constantine.
Church attendance would slide over time, as members became disaffected with the stands clergy took on civil rights, women’s ordination or gay liberation. Religion, once thought to be a conservative force that could help stabilize change with eternal values, now became, on issue after issue, a leader of social action for radical ideas. The result was that churches emptied and their social prominence, power and influence diminished. The church would once again need to support courageous families and individuals in evangelism, catechesis, and discipleship in the face of soft persecution.
The reclamation of the Easter Vigil (centered around baptism or the renewal of baptism) is the Church’s response. The vigil breaks open our christendom mindset like the jar of expensive oil with which Mary anointed Jesus’s feet. And it scandalizes us by its length, by its darkness, and by its insistence upon the centrality of baptism and the baptismal covenant. Christmas, on the other hand, is the celebration par excellence of Christendom, of the cultural consensus of European global hegemony. The Pax Americana has commodified a white baby Jesus “meek and mild” surrounded by adoring magi representing the marginal races of the world. It used to be that the “belonging” bestowed by baptism into the Episcopal Church of the Christendom era was to an insider club into which one was born. Baptism was something done as a matter of course by the family of a newborn, privately, lest awkward questions of pedigree be raised.
The Easter Christ has not been as susceptible to commodification and to domestication to empire. The resurrection is an affront to empire whether Roman or American. It cannot be assimilated but remains the undoing of the culture of death and of the fear of death on which empire operates. And it is the baptismal moment that actualizes the resurrection in the life both of the candidate and the congregation. So the Vigil was restored to a post christendom church, not as an anastasi scene, with empty tomb, sleeping Roman soldiers, women gathered in terror and a white-robed seated figure calmly assuring us “fear not,” but as the real-time participation in the liturgical machinery of our cosmic redemption. Because we do not have this moment Biblically described, it is ours to enact by and becoming Christ in baptism, and in witness to this baptism, where the belonging is not to an exclusive club of winners but to the blessed band of those who find themselves present to and with the outcast victims of our world.
And the Eastern Church has imagined this anastasi iconographically as the once crucified, condemned-to-death and descended-to-hell, son now more alive than ever and liberating all those subject to death and hell. In the typical resurrection icon you can see it powerfully; Christ dynamically rises trampling on the broken gates of hades with his wounded hand grasping the wrist of Adam who represents all those who die without baptism, and sometimes reaching out both hands to bring Eve as well, along with Abel and John the Baptist redeeming them all from death and the grave. And truly resurrecting the whole creation with him. This means at least, my new sister Leila, that being joined to Christ in his death and resurrection through baptism, you will now share with us in Christ’s work of redemption. Baptism is not a one-time event, by which we can be assured a place in heaven, it is a dynamic process of awakening to the divine life by which we are made members of Christ and participants in his life as an outcast and his life of Resurrection for the sake of the healing of the world.