Sermon on April 19, 2025
“Longing and Love”: A Sermon for Easter Vigil
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
This Lent we have been singing a hymn every week with the lovely, haunting refrain, “There is a longing in our hearts, O Lord, for you to reveal yourself to us.” The song goes on to acknowledge our need for God when our lives are plunged in sorrow or fear and suggests that it is in our prayers for justice, mercy, wisdom, and courage that God draws near. And over and over we sing the refrain—there is a longing in our hearts, a longing for love, a longing for God.
Those words have stayed with me all throughout these 40 days, as we’ve walked with Jesus toward Jerusalem. That longing is real, especially in a world that too often seems so overwhelmed by the forces of evil and the shadow of death. We long for things to be different, for there to be more goodness and love in the world, and that longing too is from God. Why else would we undertake this journey at all, if not for our longing, and for a quiet hope that walking the road together will bring us closer to one another and to God.
What the Scriptures we have heard tonight also suggest is that God is with us in our longing and, in fact, longs for us, too. God is there from the beginning of Creation, or even before the beginning, and God calls everything good. God rests in that goodness, we imagine, with feelings of satisfaction and delight. God is there when Moses and his people cry out for freedom, bringing them out of slavery and into safety on the other side. God is there when the people rejoice and exult, renewing his covenantal love for them and promising to save the lame and gather the outcast.
God is there, where we least expect the divine presence, among those who seem most at risk, most marginal, most easily forgotten, because God longs to be in a loving relationship with us and with all creation and God’s heart breaks open at every instance of suffering and injustice, in a grief so enormous we cannot begin to imagine it, until we have felt that heartbreak ourselves.
Somehow, God is there no less in this story of absence that we call the empty tomb. The whole story of Jesus tells us that God’s longing to be at one with humanity reached such an extreme that God chose to be with us even in the experience of death, and yet ultimately death and the tomb could not hold God. Later, the Gospel will show us what Jesus is like after the Resurrection, when he walks along a dusty road, eats fish on the beach, breaks bread with his friends. But right now, on this very first Easter, there is only the promise, the words spoken by angels, and the memory of what Jesus had said and done.
Years and years ago I read a novel that was completely forgettable except for a simple exchange between two characters, which has stayed with me ever since. One character asks his friend, who happens to be a priest, how he’s doing. The priest replies, “Alright, I suppose, under the circumstances.” To which his friend replies, “What’s a Christian doing ‘under the circumstances’?”
Every time I remember that exchange, I laugh. Now I know full well that if I was in pain and a friend said to me, “What’s a Christian doing UNDER the circumstances?” I would probably not laugh. I’d be hurt, offended, even angry. At least at first. But I hope that after I calmed down I’d have the wisdom to see that there’s truth in that question, and even grace.
We who hold onto the promise of resurrection are never fully at the mercy of our circumstances, or not for long. Don’t get me wrong. God never, ever asks us to deny how fully human we are and how much tragedy and grief the world holds. We are allowed all the feelings, even the dark and petty ones. We don’t have to think that everything happens for a reason or turn a blind eye to all the suffering that we are helpless to undo. In fact, it is our vocation, our calling, to see the world as it really is, in all its complexity, its beauty and its ugliness, the inexplicable and the mundane. We just don’t stop there. Rather, we look reality in the face and then seek that good that it is ours alone to enact.
Mary Magdalene. Joanna. Mary, the mother of James. These and other women had walked with Jesus all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem and had stayed close enough to see the terrible events that unfolded at Golgotha, the place of the Skull. These women faced reality at its worst., when the violent forces of empire and oppression seemed to have fully triumphed. They were grieving and in pain. So why did they go to the tomb?
They were driven by loyalty and love, a stubborn faithfulness, and longing. The same longing that is in all our hearts, too. The longing that God has for us, that they had seen in their friend Jesus, kept their own tiny spark of hope alive. They were “under” the circumstances, perhaps, but they were not defeated by them.
If you’re still feeling “under the circumstances,” if you’re not sure that Easter is going to feel very Easter-y this year, because of something very personal going on in your life or because of all the terrible things happening in the world, that’s okay. I’m sure even after the women heard directly from the angels that Jesus was alive, risen from the dead, they might have wanted more—more clarity, more certainty, something more concrete to hold onto. And it would have been awfully nice if the men they told had had the decency to believe them.
So even that first Easter was complicated, but it was enough. Enough to start a revolution of love that is still going on more than 2,000 years later. Don’t worry if this Easter, or any day, is complicated for you, too. God can handle our longing, our fear, our anger, and our joy, and so very much more.
I’ll leave you with the words of Rosemerry Wahtola Trummer, from her wonderful poem, “If They Ask.”
If They Ask
I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
more than that: a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once.
The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time, […]
The heart understands swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly
into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.
Alleluia! Amen!