Download Sermon TextEaster Vigil April 4 2026 “A People of Movement, A People of Rising”
Easter Vigil April 4 2026 “A People of Movement, A People of Rising”
Easter Vigil Homily: “A People of Movement, A People of Rising”
April 4, 2026
Rex McKee
We begin in darkness.
We yearn to remember the darkness once again. We imagine, if only for a moment, within creations big bang, before the first word, before the first light, before anything was certain.
The Origin stories we heard are not about the past.
They bind us together in the here and now….
Our origin stories be they called ceremony or ritual are not neutral they carry instructions, guidance for living.
They answer:
How do we treat one another?
What is justice?
What is the path of a spiritual life?
they form a moral imagination rooted in story.
They remind us that we were not created to dominate but to belong.
Not to isolate but to live in relationship.
Not to survive alone but to become a people together.
And when we are lost and blind in the profane world, origin stories guide us to remember our way back to sacred space.
And we listen as we have often before:
“In the beginning…”
Why do we share this story and so many others every year?
Because we forget.
Because empire distorts our stories.
We forget that creation is not finished.
We forget that we are still being made.
We forget that resurrection is real.
We forget to practice resurrection.
Genesis does not describe a static world. It describes a Creator who calls Creation into motion.
Light moves out of darkness.
Waters are separated and gathered.
The earth brings forth life that multiplies, spreads, migrates.
From the very beginning, life is not static
Creation itself is an act of liberation:
from chaos into possibility
from confinement into becoming
from silence into voice
Creation is movement beauty and terror, unfolding together. Nothing final. Everything becoming.
God’s creation is not completed; God is creating a world capable of transformation.
And we are placed within it not as owners, or bystanders, but as participants.
We become a people Scattered,
Exile is not reduced to ancient history it is our present reality.
People driven from their homes.
Families separated.
Communities made precarious by policies that treat human beings as disposable.
Here in Minnesota, we know this to be true,
Here in Minnesota, we have seen fear, displacement, and systems that diminish dignity.
We have seen neighbors living in fear.
We have seen systems that criminalize migration instead of honoring dignity.
We have seen how empire operates, through detention, through the violence of exclusion.
We have also experienced something else.
We became a People Gathered once again.
We experienced Minnesota rise
neighbors accompanying neighbors,
communities refusing to abandon one another.
And into that reality, Ezekiel speaks:
“I will take you from the nations…
I will gather you…
I will give you a new heart.”
God does not abandon scattered people.
Etty Hillesum holocaust victim, spiritual writer, wrote just prior to being sent to Auschwitz to her death:
“There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God.”
“The only thing we can save… is a small piece of you, God, in ourselves.”
Even in the most brutal systems of empire when everything external is stripped away God remains deep within us and cannot be destroyed.
What empire attempts to scatter is not just community but hope itself.
Ezekiel is taken to a valley of dry bones.
Disconnected.
Breathless.
Without future.
And the people say:
“Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.”
This is what empire does to us.
It fragments.
It dehumanizes.
It convinces us that death is normal.
There is a deeper truth for us tonight:
The work of discipleship is always a confrontation with the forces of empire.
In the Gospel of Mark, Chad Myers speaks of Jesus’ mission as “unbinding the strong man” disarming the powers that hold people captive and then unbinding those who have been tied up by those same powers.
We are not only called to unbind others.
We are called to unbind ourselves from the atrocities of empire
Resurrection begins with reconnection:
Bone to bone.
Flesh returning.
Breath entering.
Resurrection is not magic. It is communal restoration.
It is the slow, sacred work of being brought back into relationship with God, with one another, with the breath that sustains us all.
And so, as the catechumenates on this first vigil night we too renew yet again our Baptism:
When Paul writes to the Romans they have died with Christ, he is not speaking metaphorically in the polite sense meaning, you have died to certain bad habits, you have had a spiritual transformation, you feel very renewed.
Paul asserts that the values that killed Jesus, the militarism, the hierarchy, the judgment that some bodies matter less than the orderliness of empire.
Those values are what you have died to; and as it was to the Romans, so it is with us.
“We have been buried with Christ… so that we might walk in newness of life.”
Baptism is the rhythm of dying and rising, again and again.
Each act of dignity.
Each act of resistance.
Each act of love.
Why do we yearn for Sacred Time?
In We Survived the End of the World, Bishop Charleston teaches us how Indigenous communities through ceremony and ritual survive:
return to origin stories in times of crisis
reinterpret them for new realities
draw from them visions of rebirth and resistance
Origin stories are not relics they are tools for navigating apocalypse.
Ritual interrupts profane time
Ritual, ceremony, creates a threshold a crossing from everyday life into something deeper.
In ritual, we do not merely remember an event; we participate in it again.
The past becomes present.
Through repeated practices (Baptism, Eucharist, Vigil, liturgical seasons), we return again and again to foundational events: creation, liberation, death, resurrection.
We enter sacred space with reverence acknowledging Creator, Creation, ancestors, remembering we are bound together: Mitakuye Oyasin, all my relations.
Sacred time is not escape from the world it is the moment when the world is seen as it truly is, when memory becomes presence, and when the community steps into the ongoing work of God.
And then we arrive with Mary at the tomb.
The women come expecting death.
But the earth shakes.
The stone is rolled away.
“He is not here.”
And then: “Do not be afraid.”
And then:
“Go.”
Tell
Resurrection is not something we hold onto.
Resurrection sends us. Back into the world.
Back into the work we have been given to do
Tonight, we are reminded of a primordial covenant,
we re-locate ourselves inside this story.
To remember who we are….
We are a people created in movement.
A people gathered in mercy.
A people raised from dry bones.
A people baptized into ongoing transformation.
A People of Movement, A People of Rising in Resurrection
in the courage of neighbors who stand with migrants,
in communities that refuse to cooperate with cruelty,
in the quiet, persistent work of accompaniment
we once were blind and now we see
we are demonstrating resurrection.
We experience what it looks like to unbind ourselves from the cruelties of a broken empire.
And to live another way.
Not someday, but now, today.
Baruch speaks with a quiet but urgent call: “Learn where there is wisdom, where there is strength, where there is understanding.” Not as abstract knowledge, but as a path a way of life that leads toward life itself. Wisdom is not possessed; it is walked.
It is not found in the systems of empire, but in turning again toward the source of life, in choosing the way that leads to justice, to mercy, to belonging.
“Return, O Jacob, and take hold of it.” Return not backward, but inward and forward at once into the living presence of God that orders our steps and lights our way.
For this is our calling: not simply to know the way of life, but to walk it together, as a people being led out of confusion and into clarity, out of fragmentation and into wholeness, out of death and into life.
To follow Jesus is what the early church might have called a turning metanoia a shift in perception, a healing of sight. A transformative change of heart.
I am going to share with you an assertion and follow up question often asked confirmands by Bishop Sandy Hampton: (Aaron and Jennifer 1987)
Remember your Baptism!
Was becoming a Christian a shock to your system?
To be baptized into Christ is to begin seeing differently.
When we begin to see differently, our lives begin to turn outward.
This is the movement of the Way of Love. Not an inward reduction, but an outward expansion.
A faith that is not contained within our private soul, but one that breaks out and becomes visible embodied in how we move through the world.
In what we bless. In what we resist.
The light of Christ does not remain abstract. It draws us toward the places where the light is most needed.
We notice the neighbor who has been rendered invisible.
We notice the destruction of our island home
We notice the systems that depend on our silence.
We notice that we are taught to accept suffering as the inevitable consequences of Empire
Following Jesus means we speak truth to power.
The truth about who we are: beloved, claimed, part of a body that stretches beyond borders and walls.
The truth about what we love: dignity, mercy, justice, belonging.
We can no longer silently accept cruelty masquerading as policy, exclusion disguised as order, fear dressed up as a nationalized faith.
The Spirit calls each of us differently.
Some to speak, some to organize, some to accompany, some to create some to heal, some to disrupt.
Resurrection is more than a singular event that we remember. It is a transformation that we practice.
It is what happens when a life once curved inward begins to bend outward in love.
It is what happens when fear loosens its grip and compassion takes root.
It is what happens when we refuse to accept death as the final word.
Where is your life being turned outward now?
Where is the light calling you?
Where is the Spirit inviting you to speak truth to power with all that you have?
As TS Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
So hear the good news my brothers and sisters…
Now is the acceptable time for salvation!
Let us follow Jesus and become visible in love….
We are not a people of the tomb.
We are not a people of scattered bones.
We are not a people defined by empire.
We are not a people defined by fear or death.
We are a people of movement.
A people of breath.
A people of rising.
We are of the Spirit that hovered over the waters,
the same breath that filled the dry bones,
the same power that raises Jesus from the grave
God, always present in a deep well within us.
Calling us to unbind.
Calling us to rise.
Calling us to live in love.
Again and again and again, Amen
