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Dear faithful people of Christ the King Evangelical Lutheran Church:

They are all about baptism: its gift, remembrance, and renewal; and the life baptism promises and gives. “They” in that sentence are the Sundays in Lent and the Easter Vigil, arguably the single most important liturgy – and among the most ancient – in the Christian Church. 

Our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection and the new way of living it gives is at the core of every Sunday in Lent. That is never more true than it’s been this past Lent. After the First Sunday in Lent, every Sunday’s Gospel has been from the Gospel according to John. Those texts call us to see ourselves as inquiring Nicodemus; accepted and renewed as the Samaritan woman at the well; “blind but now we see” as the blind man healed by Jesus; and raised from death to life as Lazarus, the friend whom Jesus raised. Put simply (and a bit corny), Nicodemus, the woman, the blind man, and Lazarus are us! Even as Lent concludes, there’s still an opportunity for each of us to read those Gospels and find ourselves in them.

Baptism and the life baptism promises and gives is the radiating core of the Easter Vigil. In the early Christian community, already by the mid-300s, this exact liturgy flowed from the lighting of the “new fire” and Paschal Candle, through the readings from the Hebrew scriptures (each prefiguring  baptism) and gushed into the baptism of new Christians and from there flowed smoothly into the first of several gifts of baptism, participation by the newly baptized into the community meal, their first taste of the Body and Blood of Christ with their fellow Christians. 

This liturgy is common to both eastern Orthodox and western Christian communions but was lost in the West for several hundred years. It was restored to most “catholic” church bodies beginning in the 1950s and became an official part of American Lutheran worship with the publication of the green Lutheran Book of Worship in 1978, using the same ancient order of service I’ve stated above, flowing to and from baptism (or affirmation of baptism when no one is available to be baptized) and flowing from baptism into the first communion of Easter was what we celebrated and used.

We are restoring that order to our Easter Vigil this year.  You see, for the last several years, memorialized in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, that order with baptism at its core, was altered and that baptismal emphasis was, in my opinion, diluted. That change began as the Roman Catholic communion altered the liturgical order to be more like a typical Saturday vigil mass. Lutherans and a few others followed suit. I’m not really sure why. In my opinion, that adjusted order put more emphasis on each part and made the baptismal core more difficult to discern and experience.

Lent and the Easter Vigil, you see, is all about all of us as the risen Body of Christ and not, strictly speaking, about one truly human being, Jesus Christ – Passion (Palm) Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are for the most part solely about Christ; almost a re-enacting of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. We all should participate in these as we remember what God in Christ has done for us.

But the Lent we are now concluding, the Vigil we will shortly do together, and the Sundays  of Easter to Pentecost are all about us, our life and our future. That’s the purpose of this article because that’s the purpose of these days.  So come, beloved of God in Christ, celebrate the risen Christ and remember also to celebrate us! Because God for us is precisely what these days are all about and the chief reason for bringing our “alleluias” back! 

Amandus J. Derr, Interim Senior Pastor