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Welcome! I welcome all of you today, especially friends and family of our parishioners who are visiting this morning. Whether you are a daily Mass-goer or only occasionally go to Mass, you are Welcome here. We have good people here to pray alongside and support you, to answer any questions you may have and to help you build a more regular practice of your faith. I know that some people remember having a priest that they did not feel like they could go directly to with a question or concern or need. They felt like they had to send someone else to speak for them. They didn’t feel like they could knock on the door or call their priest. I am not that kind of priest. I have a formal way of celebrating Mass but that does not mean that my personality is always like that or that I want to be distant from you. You can always come to me directly with anything at all.
It is such a great joy for me to be celebrating with you this Easter Vigil, my first Easter Vigil as a pastor and as the main celebrant. Tonight’s celebration in which four adults, four candidates, will be Received into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church, will be a beautiful experience. After their own special profession of faith, and reception into the Church, they will be immediately confirmed. They will be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit who enhances and completes the graces they received in Baptism when they were younger. Finally, they will receive their first Holy Communion, in which Christ feeds them with his glorified Body and Blood under the appearance of bread and wine. What a miraculous night! In one continuous celebration, will be made members of the Church, soldiers for Christ, and share fully in Holy Communion!
The power of this day reaches all of our hearts wherever and whoever we are… just as it reached the hearts of St. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary at the tomb; and the hearts of St. Peter and St. John, causing them to run to announce the Resurrection to the disciples. Even Catholics who rarely attend Mass, find their way back to this Easter day. Each one of us, from the daily Mass-goer, to the Christmas-and-Easter Catholic, have carried some darkness, some obstacle that Christ today wants to illuminate with his glorious Light. Today, darkness is no more; it yields to and is conquered by, the Risen Son. No matter what it is that keeps us from a deeper, more personal friendship with Christ, today He conquers it with his healing light: whether it be a doubt about our faith, or a lack of zeal or devotion, or a memory of an offense in the past that has kept you away, or the darkness of a tragedy in the family or of frustration with yourself – no matter the darkness, the healing Light of Christ shines on it today.
Have you all ever been to Mammoth Cave in south central Kentucky? I remember going on a field trip there in high school. One of the shticks they do is to lead a group of people into the heart of the cave and then turn out all the lights. Then the tour guide asks the group to put their hands in front of their faces and try to see them. It’s no use, in the heart of that cave, there is no light to get used too. Our eyes will never adjust, he says, not matter how long we sit there. The moment you can start to feel the tension in the cave, the tour guide slowly turns the lights back on much to everyone’s great relief. We got a sense of this earlier, when all of the lights of the Church were off, representing the individual and collective darkness that mankind suffers without the Light of Christ. Soon though the Easter Candle, lit from the Easter fire, showed us the way.
The temptation for each of us, though, is to just get used to the darkness rather than let the Light of Christ illuminate it. We become acclimated to bumping around in the night – it becomes our new normal. And I’m speaking for all of us here today, myself included. We get used to the same bad habit, guilty pleasure, personality quirk, or weakness and we forget that the Light of Christ is much stronger than those things. We forget that the Light of Christ has actually already won. We tend to think of ourselves as downtrodden and hoping for victory, rather than victorious and hoping to maintain the victory
Don’t let the devil rob you of your joy. Again, everyone from the daily Mass-goer to the Christmas-and-Easter Catholic has something holding them back. Today, no matter what it is, let Christ’s Light heal and conquer it. Today is a day of joy and gladness – a joy and gladness that lasts for 50 days, and God-willing well beyond. This is the day when Christ works in our hearts with His grace, getting us more used to him, the Light of the World, than to the darkness and making new, or deepened, faithfulness to Him and to His Church our new normal. Today he leads us and he not only turns on the light, but walks us out of the cave, and he not only keeps the Easter fire burning, but leads us into the Church and into the center of the divine life of the Trinity.
In that great movie, The Mission, Mendoza, a slave hunter on the cusp of conversion, says to the Spanish Jesuit, Fr. Gabriel: “For me there is no redemption, no penance great enough.” Fr. Gabriel replies, “There is. But do you dare to try it?” That is our Lord’s challenge to you and me: Do we dare try to let His Light, His Joy, His Redemption change and transform our lives?
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