Sermon: Easter Vigil 2011

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Saturday 23rd April 2011
Service:: Easter Vigil

Brian Cox, rock star, scientist, CERN expert, Fellow of the Royal Society, holder of a Chair in Particle Physics at Manchester University, YouTube phenomenon, Atheist, and, unofficially, the hottest thing on TV, appears to be having a moment of revelation. ‘The Ancient Egyptians’, he said, ‘worshipped Amun-Ra with great sophistication’. That was in the Radio Times. This is in Genesis: ‘God called the night day and the darkness he called night, and the evening and the morning were the first day’, a moment of revelation, and it began our service this evening, all that remains of the ancient Easter Vigil which once ran through the whole night and in some places still does.

Worship begins with wonder. A scientist, like Brian Cox, helps us to understand things, how things are made. A Christian begins to understand why things are made, and without light we don’t get far. We get stuck in the ancient world of myth and legend, the world where our Bible starts, as we can get stuck too in our anxieties and fears, worries and questions. How am I going to get on at school, how am I going to find a job, what job, where? Questions about how things are, the scientist deals with. Why things are - that’s a question for the Christian believer.

But both Brian Cox and the Dean need light to find the answers, which is why we all got up after listening to the readings and moved down to the back of the Cathedral, to the great west end, just in front of the Narthex, the entrance, which is what narthex means. The Narthex is a place of transition, of moving from the outside to the inside. That’s what religion does all the time. We’ve been listening to very old stories, to myths and legends in Genesis, and in Exodus, to adventures. But then we all got up and moved, we moved down to the back near the Narthex, where the Easter light was brought in. We looked at something, and looking at it, we were able to see other things by it as that light spread, passed from hand to hand through the Cathedral, so that in the end we each held our own light and could see each other properly.

A very long time after the book of Genesis and all the other books of the Hebrew Bible, we come to the New Testament and to the story of Easter, a story about light, light passed on and held by each of us. By the light of Easter we can see what God is like, that’s really even more amazing than understanding how the universe was made, because we discover that we can see God in a young man from Nazareth, a young teacher ‘who was crucified, dead and buried’, as we say in the Creed, but who, as we also say in the Creed, ‘rose again on the third day’ so that we can rise again. Out of darkness into light, out of fear and anxiety into security and happiness. God can’t really call the light day and the darkness night for, as the first of the Thirty-nine Articles at the back of the Prayer Book says, ‘There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions’. So God hasn’t got a mouth, he doesn’t need one because he speaks through the world, through a myriad universes, but, most perfectly, through a human life and death, the life and death of Jesus, the young man from Nazareth.

Tonight we began by sitting and listening. As the years go by, remember that the night on which you were confirmed, the Dean said sit and listen, make time to read and think. Read about how Genesis is ancient myth and what that means, read about particle physics and the great experiment at CERN, watch Brian Cox’s television programmes and be amazed. Then, when your head starts hurting because it’s all very complicated, light a candle and remember your Baptism and Confirmation on the night when the Easter candle filled the Cathedral with Christ’s life, struck like a flint from the hard rock of the tomb, a spark that never dies. I wonder whether you noticed just now how you could see each other’s faces by candlelight - where the light is, shadows disappear. There’s something especially tender, vulnerable and beautiful about the human face lit by candlelight, partly because we’re concentrating on what we’re doing, passing the light to each other, and we can see that concentration on each other’s faces.

So, first sit and listen as the years go by, and secondly, light a candle and see what you can see by its light. Remember the great Easter Paschal candle, the light no darkness can overcome, by which we begin to see each other as we really are. Brian Cox grew up with the moon landings and as a child remembers not being able to tell the difference between science and science fiction. ‘I was obsessed with Star Wars, I liked Star Trek and Dr Who’. In fact, these days he thinks the boundaries are even more blurred. ‘Dr Who is half right, time travel is possible as long as you want to travel into the future. It’s always about space for me’, said Brian.

Religion’s all about space for me too, space for God, space for sitting and thinking, space for Christ’s light in a dark world, giving us the courage to want to travel into the future. This Holy Saturday is only the beginning for those of you being Baptised and Confirmed. Careful finding time and space to sit and think, and having a light by which to pray, and receiving Jesus Christ himself into our hearts through his precious Body and Blood in the Holy Communion – all this is food for our spiritual journey, where, from this very evening, we travel into the future God has in store for us.