Retelling the Story

In the recent life of the church, there has been a renewed interest in one of the most ancient services/rituals of the church: the great Vigil of Easter. People gather — as they have done for millennia — around the lighting of a fire to tell stories. At the Easter Vigil, the stories we share are the stories of God’s saving acts of love, from the beginning of creation to the death and resurrection of Christ.

If you’ve ever attended a candlelight Christmas Eve service, there’s a lot about the Easter Vigil that may feel familiar. Held on the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday (since, biblically, the new day begins at sunset), the Vigil certainly has some similarities, a kind of “Easter Eve” service, if you will — though practices like remembering and creatively retelling parts of the story of Christ’s life, and even the lighting of small, handheld candles, actually originated with the Vigil of Easter.

There are a whopping fourteen readings appointed for the Easter Vigil service: twelve readings from the Hebrew scriptures, or Old Testament, a reading from Paul’s letters, and a gospel reading. At St. John’s, we usually do no more than six or seven of the readings total, which means a lot of really great stories get left out.

In my ruminations on how we could find some way to work these stories into our shared life of faith, I was blessed with one of those wild ideas the Spirit loves to come up with, and this is the result: a two week daily video series in which I read one of these stories each day, praying an accompanying prayer. The Spirit also gave me the goofy idea to do these videos in different places in and around the Schuyler community that are meant to somehow connect thematically to the text.

I’ll keep updating this list as I do more videos, but I wanted to extend the invitation to join me on this journey through the story — as together we make our way once again to Jerusalem, through the waving of palm branches, through the shadow of the cross, to the joyous news of the empty tomb.