The Hewn Stone Cracks (Great Vigil of Easter)

“The Hewn Stone Cracks”
The Great Vigil of Easter

31 March 2018 8:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation] ; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 [The Flood] ; Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea] ; Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all] ;
Ezekiel 37:1-14 [The valley of dry bones] ; Romans 6:3-11 ;   Psalm 114 ;  Mark 16:1-8

May the light of Christ, rising in glory,
banish all darkness from our hearts and minds.   Amen.

When I was a boy, I had a particularly harrowing experience that has haunted my nightmares on and off for all of my life:  near my home, there was a large natural valley that we called “the gulley.”  We would play in it in all four seasons, sledding in the winter and hiking up and down its steep slopes in the spring and fall.  In summer, we would bike along its rim, catching the breeze in the otherwise stifling heat. Once, my brother and I found a small cave.  Knowing it couldn’t be very deep, I disregarded warnings of my parents never to venture into such places alone.  It was only 3 or 4 feet deep, but I could fit in completely.  I wanted to jump up out of it to startle my brother Mel, as he walked behind me over the steep rim’s incline.  I hid, but as he came down the hill behind me, the roof collapsed.  Had I been slightly further back, I would have been entirely buried.  As it was, I was only caught by the falling earth as far as my waist and one arm.  Mel helped me struggle out.  I was shaken up, but not hurt.  Mel was sure to tell my parents all about it later, who scolded me, put the gulley off limits for a month, and regaled me with horrible and detailed descriptions of what might have happened to me had I not been so lucky.  As a result, I suffered for years of vivid nightmares of being buried alive, trapped in the dark and unable to breath or move.  To this day, I suffer from mild claustrophobia.  Medical teams usually give me sedatives if I need an MRI—I just cannot bear being locked in that small coffin-like tube with all the loud sounds of the machinery whirring about me. 

I think most of us have fears and nightmares, and sooner or later all of us suffer terrible and horrible loss. 

This holy week I have been deeply moved by the songs of suffering and abandonment that are the heart of Morning and Evening Prayer in Holy Week.   Christians from early on saw the expressions of deep grief and loss in the Lamentations and Psalms as somehow speaking the truth of Jesus’ suffering and our part in it.  The morning of Good Friday, we chanted: 

“I am one who has seen affliction
under the rod of God's wrath.”  (Lamentations 3:1)

That is certainly how it feels when we suffer—it must be punishment, and God must be angry with me.  This, despite Jesus’ assurance to us that the heart of God is love, and has always loved us as a kind parent.   But suffering still feels like rejection and abandonment, despite assurances of love and support. 

We continued chanting: 

 

“He has driven … me
into darkness without any light;
… He has made my flesh and my skin waste away,
and broken my bones.”

This, despite the Gospels’ insistence that Jesus, like the paschal lamb, never had his bones broken.  Then we continued, coming to an image that triggered my memories of the nightmare in the gulley:   

 “He has made me sit in darkness
like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape …

though I call and cry for help,
he shuts out my prayer;
he has blocked my ways with hewn stones…” 

This image of being buried alive hit me.  It is one of my greatest fears, and its stifling sense of not being able to see, breathe, or move is at the heart of any of my feelings when faced with insecurity, loss, and grief.   The image of hewn stones blocking the way is probably what caught the medieval monks attention when they sought passages about the feelings we have when we face the Passion of Christ:  the tomb was sealed by a large hewn stone.  But Jesus was dead, and not alive. 

This morning, on Holy Saturday, a world away from tonight, we chanted Psalm 88: 

"…I am full of trouble;
my life is at the brink of the grave.
I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
I have become like one who has no strength;
Lost among the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
Whom you remember no more,

for they are cut off from your hand.
You have laid me in the depths of the Pit,

in dark places, and in the abyss…  
You have put my friends far from me;
you have them abhor me;
I am in prison and cannot get free.

My sight has failed me…  
Do you work wonders for the dead?
will those who have died stand up and give you thanks?
Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave?
your faithfulness in the land of destruction?
Will your wonders be known in the dark?
or your righteousness in the country where all is forgotten?
… Ever since my youth, I have been wretched and at the point of death;
I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind.
Your blazing anger has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me;
They surround me all day long like a flood;
they encompass me on every side.
My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me,
and darkness is my only companion.”

Jesus’ suffering, death, and burial was nightmarish, but was not a dream.  It was common, everyday human suffering, suffering that makes us feel that God has abandoned us, is angry with us and is punishing us.  Suffering makes us doubt the love and support of God. It makes us wonder whether life has any meaning and sense.   This is the great truth of these poems we chant during Holy Week. 

Children die in accidents every day.  If I had died in the cave, it would have not been unusual.  As painful as it would have been to my family, it would have been par on this particular course we call human life.  As horrible as it would have been for me—worse than my nightmares—it would have simply been death suffered by us all a bit earlier and perhaps more gruesome than some.  But it would have been part of what it means to be human.

 

But life is not made up only of nightmarish bits.  Most of it is good and filled with wonderful things, happy and warm.  There is prayer and hope and gentle goodness. Jesus taught us about a loving Papa who sends the blessing and grace of rain and sunshine to all, righteous and wicked, and calls us to likewise be undiscriminating in our blessing of others.    

Jesus' death on the cross was a nightmare, and draws into question all he taught.  But Jesus, raised from the dead, changes all that.  The hewn stones cracked and rolled back change all that.  The mystery of what happened a day and a half after the crucifixion tells us that what Jesus taught about God, and love, and life is indeed true.  It is happy, but it is not a dream.  It is salvation for us all, like those stories of creation, the exodus, and the prophets’ dreams we read tonight.  Jesus coming forth from the dead is the breaking of the hewn stones that bury us, that keep us from breathing, from seeing.  It breaks the bonds that tie us down, the fears and doubts that sour our lives.  It spells the end of the power of nightmares, and drives away all our fears and suspicions. 

Christ is risen.  The Lord is risen indeed.  Amen.