Easter Vigil Manifesto

Easter Vigil Reflection: March 30, 2013

Genesis 1

The creation story we just heard lasted a few minutes, but creation’s true unfolding took over ten billion years. Light emerged from nothingness, and six billion years later the planet we call home took shape. During the first three billion years on earth, rock and water and fire collided, giving rise to land and sea. And God’s breath blew over this soupy mess and created life in it- bacteria and algae and fungi and eventually more complex creatures like fish and insects, amphibians who emerged from the sea and plants who sprung forth from the soil and birds who flew over the earth,   and God continually created more and more creatures in ever increasing diversity, and eventually, human beings. The Bible got it right about the order of creation’s unfolding, because in terms of evolution, humans are newcomers. If earth’s evolutionary history were a giant encyclopedia, divided into 10 volumes, 500 pages each, each page representing one million years, humans wouldn’t show up until page 499 of the last volume, and all of human civilization would be the final two words on the last page. But we have forgotten that we come from this big story of creation: human pride has obscured our place in the world. In the last fifty years, humans have destroyed the habitat of creatures who have been around for tens of millions of years in order to build highways and parking lots and shopping malls. Our voracious appetite for stuff that’s made in factories that poison the earth has resulted in a mass extinction of species that hasn’t been seen since the dinosaurs. The juices that fuel the machine, fossil fuels, are disturbing the climate’s trusted weather patterns that have sustained life for all of human history. We stand at the edge of an era- not just a human era, but a geological era. The next pages of the book of creation will be written in this “anthropocene” age, one that humans have set into motion, but are no longer able to control. Life on earth is being un-created in the blink of God’s eye.

It is at this moment that we become a people who lean on the wisdom of the church and trust deeply in God’s ability to bring life out of death. We are invited to find faith in the Holy Spirit, who dwells in each one of us and in all of creation, and continues to create and resist and give life. We pray for the entire world’s continued resilience, that the great beauty of life would not be lost to the forces of death and destruction, but rise to new life as Christ did. In this night, we celebrate and long for the mystery of Christ’s resurrection in all of creation. Amen.