pre easter vigil musing

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I want to share this moment. Right now, I am sitting at my desk in what was once a storage space, but before that was a former vicar's wood-working shop. The wind is blowing through the window, wafting incense around my lap-top. I'm sitting where I've most recently been painting scenes from Holy Week, and today, I was scrambling to put together a simple hand-out for tonight's service.

Tonight is the Great Easter Vigil. The first service of Easter, "to take place between sunset and sunrise of Easter morning." Two years ago we had a wonderful Vigil that started in the chapel in the dunes (Trinity's first services were held there around 1960), where we lit the new fire and lit candles. We carried out candles from there to the church, and as people's candles blew out, we had to share our little lights; so the community brought back the light together. A beautiful metaphor for a church community.

This year our vigil will take place down on the beach. The beach is the primary reason people live in Port Aransas, so it makes good sense to gather there as often as possible to share our sacramental life in such a beautiful place. Tonight, two people will be baptized in the gulf. We will light the new fire, baptize those three (and run back to the fire for warmth!), then share communion. The first communion of Easter, probably with a little sand in our teeth.

The altar will be a surfboard made by the youngest person getting baptized tonight. He and his dad made it. He went back and forth on whether he really wanted to get baptized. He surfs all the time. Almost every time I go out, I see him out there. The other is an adult who decided she wanted to be baptized, and had not yet. The conversations I've had with them have been rich. Both are beach people...water people. They wanted to be baptized in the gulf. And as we say, "This is the night."


As I was finishing up the hand out, and relishing how rich this experience is going to be (for me, for one) a few notes of "Morning has broken" floated in on the breeze. Laura is upstairs on the porch practicing that music to play tomorrow morning; our ukulele band will be playing during communion at the Easter morning service, as will several other local musicians. Experienced and beginners all working together to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Any fatigue I may have been feeling from Holy Week and Lent in general have subsided into a submission to the bigger picture here. We are celebrating what Christ has done not a long time ago, but what Christ is doing right here in this Holy Week-Easter, in the midst of our lives. The foot washing, the cross, the death; his work in the underworld, and now his resurrection. The preparation is complete, and it's time to celebrate. Thanks be to God.

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