Easter Vigil: Connecting the Two Faces of Fire

Addressing the question from Psalm 137––“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” asked by a people in exile––Philip Pfatteicher uses the Lenten image of fire to claim the rites from Ash Wednesday through Pentecost as an answer to injustices of all kinds. As people of faith, we sing in the place of ashes, in the light of Christ.

Fire is lit to burn the palms of victory for ashes of death used on Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent, and fire is lit at the Vigil of Easter when it becomes the light of Christ, the new life for all.

Holy Week is built on these images of power whose paradox is the bedrock of our comprehension. Let it be so.

Lent began in the destructive fire that consumed the dried palm branches and reduced them to the ashes with which our foreheads were marked on Ash Wednesday. To the world, it is a strange ritual showing only decay, destruction, and death, a gloomy and unwelcome reminder of what lies in the future for us all. But the ashes of the first day of Lent are not just the forlorn remnants of a conflagration, the powdery ruins of what once were green and living leaves. The ashes were a sign also, most of all, of repentance, cleansing, and renewal. They are the proclamation of the total destruction of our sinful past and the promise of a shining future with God. In the ashes of Ash Wednesday we see the two faces of fire: destruction and purgation, death and renewal. 

 The Sacred Triduum [the Three Days] reaches its climax in the striking of a new fire that recalls creation and brings light into the darkness. This is no ordinary fire, and the ritual of the Easter Vigil makes that clear. The fire becomes for us “the light of Christ,” and this light, rising in brightness like the sun, unlike the sun “knows no setting.” The frail light of a spark ignites a small fire that is carried by the Paschal Candle into the darkened church as into a tomb, and it is then spread to all the other candles in the church—the candles of the ministers, the congregation, the chancel, the altar—and no matter how often it is divided, this fire is not diminished. Indeed, as it spreads, it increases in intensity until the whole church is aglow with its light, bright with the glory of the resurrection, a splendid promise of the final victory of the resurrected Christ when all the world will be bathed in pure and holy light. 

 The proclamation of the resurrection is the declaration of a reality larger than this world, larger even than God’s enemies. We learn during Lent of the fearsome cosmic battle, and in Holy Week we watch the culmination of that warfare. It comes at huge cost, the life of the Son of God, but that awful price bought life for the world.

We can sing the Lord’s resurrection in a world ravaged by war and torn by violence because it was precisely in such a world that the crucifixion and resurrection took place. It was indeed for such a world that the crucifixion and resurrection were accomplished. As at the Red Sea, so on Golgotha, and now in our time, the power of God takes the forces of destruction and turns them, even against their will, into instruments of life and wholeness. It may not be visible from our limited perspective in this time and place, but the resurrection is the declaration that our salvation has been accomplished and that God’s will of remaking the world is being carried out. That is why the crucifix is not a repulsive representation to Christians, and that is why the blood of the young warrior dying on the cross, in descriptions from Fortunatus to Watts and beyond, takes on a strange and compelling beauty.   

 At the conclusion of the Great Fifty Days of Easter, fire breaks out again. It is the fire of Pentecost, the appearance of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles. Now, at the culmination of Easter, the destructive properties of fire are gone altogether, and this fire is wholly good and pure and life-giving. The fire of the resurrected Christ descends into the hearts of Jesus’ disciples and warms them with an energy and love that cannot be contained. With gladness we pray the ancient prayer, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love.” And with the fulfillment of that prayer we, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, join the “company of the burning heart” who are suddenly aware of the power of God that has been at work in us since Ash Wednesday and that has been at work in the world since the beginning of creation. 

 

Philip H. Pfatteicher served as a Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. A widely respected liturgical historian and scholar, he is author of many books, including Commentary on the Lutheran Book of Worship (Fortress, 1991) and Commentary on the Occasional Services (Fortress, 1983).

Philip Pfatteicher, “The Two Faces of Fire,” Liturgy 18, no. 2 (2003):5-7.

Has Liturgical Participation Subverted Worship’s Goal?

The relationship between liturgy and mission is the theme of Liturgy 31, no. 4 (2016) available through subscription or ATLA. It is chock full of insights that ought to spur our thinking about exactly what it is for which the church and its liturgical practices exist. E. Byron Anderson’s essay examines the role play by increased participation of laity in worship. Has it become an end unto itself?    

There has always been a sense that reforming liturgy reforms the church—this was true in the context of the Protestant reformation, true in the context of the ecumenical liturgical reforms of the late twentieth century, and remains true today in the context of “emerging worship.” . . . Yet even among faithful Christians, this desire has been muted by expectations that worship satisfy individual psychological needs, that it be accessible to the occasional religious consumer, and, especially for Protestants, that it increase market share. Self-satisfaction, self-expression, and consumerism have displaced bearing witness to and being in service of God’s redeeming love for the world—the corporate work of the body of Christ. 

 . . . The resulting liturgical reforms — many necessary and long overdue — “reduced the dominance of clergy, musicians, and choirs in worship,” provided “for more lay participation and leadership,” and made “room for action, conversation, interaction, and involvement in the service.” But such forms of participation quickly became the primary if not the sole criteria for assessing the “effectiveness” of worship. Heightened ritual participation through leadership and creativity became the means and the end of liturgical reform. 

 What seemed to be a “democratic opening” in liturgical participation shifted away from a notion of liturgy as “public work” of witness and service through which “all members join to offer their worship to God” and turned toward a notion of liturgy as a retail commodity for spiritual seekers and the churches’ faithful who alike are invited to participate “on [their] own terms” and “without responsibility” to the community or to the world. 

 While such an emphasis on ritual participation as “liturgical enfranchisement” was a necessary first step in liturgical reform, it provided only the beginning of reform in the life of the church. It was, and is, not enough. Missing from this understanding of liturgical participation, Kevin Irwin suggests, is the sense that “through these sacred rites, symbols, and celebrations … we experience the very life of Christ, we participate and share (take part in and become part of) his paschal saving mystery,” the sense that “our insertion into this central ‘mystery of faith’ is what liturgy is all about.” (Irwin, Liturgy, Prayer, and Spirituality, p. 127) Missing is the kind of liturgical catechesis or mystagogy that leads people into prayerful engagement with the liturgy in the expectation that doing so will lead them into fuller engagement with God and with the world around them. Missing, too, is the sense that liturgical participation may critique our present experience and life (rather than reinforce entrenched notions of power and privilege), offer a vision of a world not yet realized, repattern the church and our lives in relation to the world, and provide a means through which we are not only engaged with but joined to divine life in God. 

 In order to move beyond participation as enfranchisement, beyond simple participation “in the rites themselves” or participation at “the level of ritual,” we need to attend to two additional forms of liturgical participation. . . 

This essay continues to make the case (see the blog for October 21) that the central point of worship needs to be re-set to focus on participation not simply within liturgical experience for its own sake but because God’s mission is larger: to transform us for the life of the world.  

E. Byron Anderson is Styberg Professor of Worship at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. He served as president of The Liturgical Conference from 2003–2015.

E. Byron Anderson, “Liturgical Reform: For Participation and/or Mission,” Liturgy 31, no. 4 (2016): 11-18.

Earth’s Water and Baptismal Implications

Again, as with our posting on March 3, we take from Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016) some of Peter McGrail’s essay on environmental issues related to Christian Initiation. McGrail’s essay deals with Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ on the environment. Here is his analysis of how water, jeopardized by environmental degradation, may be seen through the lens of the incarnation.

As soon as we draw on Pope Francis’ consideration of water, that element’s potential symbolic ambiguity becomes evident. His primary concern is access to fresh drinking water, which he underscores as “a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water because they are denied the right to a life consistent to their unalienable dignity” (no. 30). The use and misuse of water serves as a potent reality that points up global inequality. . . 

 This reality of exclusion contrasts with the lavish exuberance with which the gift of water is celebrated in the Easter Vigil. For example, the fifth reading opens with the cry of invitation, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Is 55:1, NRSV) and closes with the comparison of the efficaciousness of God’s life-giving word to the life-giving winter rain and snow (Is 55:10–11). Water is portrayed here as a freely given gift from the heavens that satisfies a thirsty humanity and brings fruitfulness to creation. So lavish, so fruitful is it that it serves as an image for God’s word, God’s very will. 

 In the light of Laudato Si’, we are invited to ask what it might mean to proclaim those words in a location of desertification or to hear them as a member of a community with little or no access to clean drinking water. The words may, indeed, express profound hope in such contexts, but perhaps they do so precisely because they also tie into anxieties, evoke painful memories, and reflect present realities. The ambiguities of a symbol soiled by human activity interact subversively with the liturgical proclamation of a scriptural passage such as this. And the tensions thus set up have the potential to generate dissonance on the lips of assemblies in a more affluent part of the world. . . Thus, one of the most joyous sections of the Easter Vigil can plunge us into a discomforting recognition of the meanings that our core symbol of baptism can hold in tension. 

 What, then, does this say to us of baptism itself? Surely there must be more going on here at the level of sign than just an immersion into a compromised symbol of pollution. . . . 

McGrail calls for a careful reading of the Pope’s concern for Earth’s gifts so that we appropriately locate the incarnation of Christ in the midst of both sacraments and creation. We benefit from knowing more deeply the key relationship of the paschal mystery to God-with-us in this finite world and its fulfillment eschatologically.

The renewal of humanity, and indeed the transformation of the whole of creation, is caught up in the dynamism of Christ’s own victory over death and the captivity of the material world to decay and destruction. Baptism is a plunging into Christ’s paschal mystery by which women and men “die with him, are buried with him, and rise with him” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 6). In celebrating baptism, therefore, we are indeed and necessarily acknowledging the extent to which the material world is caught up in systems of death, but are also proclaiming and celebrating union with Christ in his transforming death and resurrection.

Peter McGrail is a priest of the Liverpool Roman Catholic Archdiocese and is head of the Department of Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University, UK.

Peter McGrail, “Initiation and Ecology: Becoming a Christian in the Light of Laudato Si’,” Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016), 55-62.