The Easter Vigil is one of my favorite services of the year. We light a fire outside, and light the Paschal candle. We hear the story of the faith through a series of readings. Moses parts the Red Sea and God’s people are delivered through water. Finally something happened on Easter day and nothing has ever been the same. Jesus rose from the dead.
I’ll invite you to think of watershed events. These are things that happen and nothing is the same afterwards. For my father, I know that there were elements of his military service in WWII that qualified. Paul had an experience on the road to Damascus, and things were different. We are told that something like scales fell from his eyes when he was baptized, and he saw things differently.
In today’s Gospel we get the Resurrection, and this event was a watershed event for certain in the lives of the disciples. This day was a day that transformed a lot of lives. We are told that the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee were met by two men in dazzling clothes. They left with the Good News.
Some of you may have seen a news article that came out this last week. There was a crew of men working an oil drilling platform 135 miles off the coast of Thailand. The weather was turning bad. One of the workers sees something in the water. It was a dog. They manage to rescue the dog and pull it to safety.
So how did the dog get there? It is a mystery. There is speculation that it may have fallen off a fishing boat, but we will probably never know. There are things we will never understand.
In many ways we are that dog. We are lost and without hope. We are delivered through water and saved. This dog got a fresh lease on life, and so do we.
Now I want us to think of our baptism. We have new a life in Christ and have been delivered through water.
So here we are pondering our own baptisms. We are changed in ways we can’t quantify or measure every well, and we are different people.
One of the hazards of life is that we are witnesses to things, and we don’t know what we have seen. You may have heard about the concert violinist Joshua Bell, who played his Stradivarius at the subway stop in 2007 as part of a social experiment by the Washington Post. This was a big “whatever” moment for commuters as they went by. A few stopped to listen for a few minutes. A few dropped some quarters in his violin case. No one knew what they had seen.
How are we like those people on the subway? How many times have we been faced with God’s grace and responded by saying “whatever”? My first challenge to you today is to be open to God’s hand in our lives. How do we know what we have heard? How do we distinguish God’s voice from all the other voices we hear?
One year I went to just a portion of the “Three-Hour” Good Friday service at St. Paul’s. There were maybe 30 people there when I came in. I came in quietly and sat in the back. I stayed for about 45 minutes and then went home to work on a sermon.
When Susan got home, I asked if she had seen me. She was busy officiating. She never caught my eye or anything. It turns out Susan was able to tell me when I had come in because she said she could hear my voice saying “Amen” at the end of the prayer before meditation four. Now I was not that loud, and I said “Amen” with everyone else.
Susan heard my voice and recognized it even with thirty or so people in the room because she knew my voice. She was able to pick it out from all the voices there. She has heard my voice more than a few times over the years.
So I come back to my question. How do we distinguish God’s voice from all the other voices we hear? We get better at shooting free throws by practicing from the free throw line. We get better at being in relationship with God by practicing the faith.
We are witnesses. We have work to do. We have to figure out what that work is, and we need to listen. We have to be able to distinguish God’s voice from all the other noise.
As you renew your baptismal promises today, I would like you to remember how you were transformed and are a child of God. You are God’s people and have been delivered through water. I am going to ask you to listen for God’s voice.
I have said these words in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Sermon preached by Fr. Tom at St. Thomas, Plymouth
April 20, 2019, Easter Vigil
Romans 6:3-11
Psalm 114
Luke 24:1-12