EASTER VIGIL 2025

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

So much of what we do this morning is familiar. We get up very early, gather in
the pre-dawn light, make a fire, and chant our way into our usual gathering place. We
hear familiar, even comfortable stories. We might try to imagine ourselves in those
stories—creation, the flood, leaving what felt like home even in its oppression. We
might even allow our minds to wander into a cemetery and imagine a few bones
starting to rattle, then seeing all those buried there standing up, ready to live again.
If you were too young to remember, the words we speak, the water we feel
might remind us that we were once baptized. Notice that I said that in past tense. We
were baptized.

In all this familiarity, and with several years of Easter stories in our personal
histories, perhaps there’s still something that needs to change. After all, neither our
clocks nor our calendars operate in reverse mode, as if we’re destined to relive all our
yesterdays. If you try that, you could be the very definition of job security to any
number of therapists.

Paul doesn’t speak in past tense. “Do you not know that you are baptized into
Christ’s death?” he asks. Are, not were. Baptism is not an event we mark each year, like
a birthday or anniversary. I doubt that most of us would remember the exact date if we
are called upon to reveal it. I would have to go search for the certificate, even though it
happened when I was a teenager. I remember the place very well. It’s the date that
eludes me.

Maybe that’s appropriate. Because our baptism isn’t a one-time thing. It’s for
life, it’s about life, it is our way of life. It’s not about getting branded in some spiritual
or mystical way so that when the time comes we get a free pass into heaven, and even
get to use the priority boarding line.

We are baptized into Jesus’ death and raised from the waters of baptism to live
new lives, not just in the hereafter, but in the here and now. That means that our lives,
our resources, and God’s desire for the flourishing of life for everyone are all
interconnected, with our focus on how God equips us for ministry to those whom Jesus
invited into his own life—the poor, the outcast, and, yes, those called “sinners.” That
identity was for those who lived outside the fellowship of God’s people, and whose
lives serve as indicators, symptoms, if you will, of that separation from the creator and
giver of life.

When he reminds the church in Rome that they are baptized, Paul calls them
back to their true selves, to live as the light of Christ in a world that celebrates darkness
and ungodliness. It’s not just about those things we might expect as symptoms. It’s
about the willful neglect of the needy, the poor, the outcast, the prisoner (most likely in
a debtor’s prison. Rome had more immediate ways to deal with lawlessness, as we
know.)

Baptism invites everyone into this new way of life, a way we celebrate this
morning, but often miss its real intention. Our own baptism is the opening of our
invitation to this new life, a life which in its many and various ways is also the
invitation we extend to others to baptism. It is our invitation to discover again what
really matters, and set aside those things that are destined to die, even if we say they
add meaning and purpose to our lives.
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“Do you not know that you are baptized into Christ’s death?” Our answer is
found in how we live the life of resurrection that claims us when we answer, “yes.”