By Bill Wylie-Kellermann, an Easter vigil homily from Detroit

So good to be in this service, in this hour and house – thanks to all who have returned or stepped up to make it happen. I speak the thanks of many hearts.

Two memories always wash over me when I come to this service.

One, is of 1983 when at the inspiration of Tom Lumpkin, seven of us including Maria West and Gordon Judd, walked the easter vigil onto Wurtsmith AFB when first-strike cruise missiles were then being loaded on B52s. We cut the fence, breaking the seal on death, walked down the 3 ½ mile runway, pausing at a small building to spray paint “Christ Lives! Disarm” and there renewed our baptismal vows – renouncing Death and all its works – finally partaking eucharist on our knees at the open gate to the high security area of loaded bombers. Our Easter declaration, that we were free to unmake these weapons, changed then and there my understanding of resurrection.

The other is during the service in this sanctuary, in 2001 – as we gathered in a circle to receive eucharist, just as Jeanie Wylie was passing the bread to her daughter, she went into a seizure. The circle were all people who had loved and supported her through her brain-tumored illness, so folks beside her instinctively lowered her to the floor and the loaf and cup continued round. Before it was complete she was sitting up and insisted on receiving. By the time we sang Jesus Christ is Risen Today, her voice was back and almost full throated. She herself lived a resurrected life. Today when we invoke the ancestors and saints, join our voices with them, she, like others we name, will be present to us. Holy Holy Holy – Hosannah in the Highest.

If you are a community traditionalist and missed Wade in the Water – following the Exodus reading, fear not – We will wade into it during our baptismal renewals.

Blame me, I specifically asked for O Mary Don’t you Weep

         Want to treat it as a text itself, side by side with, even linking – Exodus reading and Mark’s gospel

Fair to ask: Who is Mary? –

first of all Miryam (Heb rendering of Mary)

If we’d read further in Exodus 15, we’d have heard,

19 When the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his chariot drivers went into the sea, YWH brought back the waters of the sea upon them; but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground.

20 Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them:
21 ‘Sing to the Lord, for God has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.’

Those last two lines were echoed in our reading, but we have it in Moses’s voice – who goes on for nearly a chapter, By the time she sings, Miryam seems to be just adding a chorus. But, this prophet’s impulse, leading, and song – is regarded as the oldest liturgical text in all of Heb scriptures

Miriam sang it; but the scriptural elites later claimed it for Moses and expanded it – another old story

I’ve heard Rabbi Alana Abert tell a Midrash (a story which the rabbis elaborate in the cracks and silences of the scripture texts)– which says this was a song they sang not only at the end, but as they were passing through the sea – to keep their courage up and encourage one another

Our song version layers on top of it, all the Marys at the foot of the cross, and empty tomb:

Mary, mother of Jesus
Mary, the wife of Clopas
Certain texts: the “other Mary”

In our Marcan gospel reading, as in every single account: Mary Magdalene. And with her Mary, mother of James and Salome.

At the foot of the cross, at the empty tomb, they are comforted: Don’t weep – Pharoah’s army got drownded.

I know of another midrash – story in the Talmud – angels wanting to dance with Miryam and the women; God stops them: ‘My creations (my creatures/my children) are drowning and you are singing before me?'”

Yet “Pharoah’s army” is more than individual soldiers; it is a principality – a stand-in for the power behind the powers: Death with a capital D. Power of death – which haunts us and confines, enslaves, holds us in fear and bondage. Says the song: we are set free – of the power of death

Now we ask: who wrote this spiritual? Of Miriam, Mary Magdalen and all the Marys? This version is sung in the hush harbors of American chattel slavery:

“Gonna put on my shoes,” what’s that about? Wouldn’t you take them off on holy ground? Or better to ask who has no shoes? Slaves; barefoot, not free, hard to run – made difficult walk out from under the power of bondage and death – But here “gonna put on my shoes and run… round glory and tell all the news

So, the oldest liturgical text in Hebrew Bible, is run through the crucifixion and resurrection accounts, told as good news by Black folk in American bondage. And then…

Add another layer from the Freedom Struggle:
[Sung]
If you miss me in the back of the bus And you can’ find me nowhere,
Come on up to the front of the bus, I’ll be ridin’ up there
I’ll be ridin’ up there Oooo, Pharoah’s Army got drownded
I’ll be ridin’ up there.

Other verses – from the swimming hole to the city pool

from the cotton fields to voting at the courthouse…

Underneath that story is the freedom of the resurrection, the breaking of the power of death…All the layers of meaning brought along, recalled, carried entirely by the common tune – and its deep echoes

All of these are pulling the oldest song in the bible into the present tense.

Yesterday, we had a Good Good Friday – the concluding station, a meditation of the cross in the rubble of Gaza and Palestine. Taking our grief and turning it into a liturgical act of mourning.

So a word on behalf of mourning – and the blessedness of it.

Mourning is said to be an act of resistance, the cry and the groan that gives body and voice – to those against whom this genocide is targeted – 32 thousand dead, mostly women and children, and the countless others missing, buried beneath the rubble. Those remaining suffer death by starvation and illness – the greatest calculated famines of our time. To mourn to name and remember. Refuse to forget.

Part of our grief, is a bitter irony: IDF and its US funder/weapons provider, have become Pharoah’s army – And that for Palestinians, Israel has become – the “tight place,” “hardship” “the straights,” the “narrow places” which in Israel’s own tradition is called “Egypt.”

Pharoah’s army drownded – what does it mean for the power of death to be broken – can we believe it? Can we buy it? Can we see it? Can we live into it?

Here’s one resurrection story: South Africa, structurally deep in church- supported racial apartheid was faced by internal non-cooperation, Kairos documents, church struggle and resistance, plus an international movement of BDS, cd at embassies – and apartheid falls in the early 90s. Thirty years ago Nelson Mandela was elected president and the country now has the moral authority to bring charges of genocide to the ICJ and have its case not only be heard, but be prevailing.

There is also a resurrection of movement by young people in this country. Especially young Jews, claiming the prophetic history and tradition of Israel. Critical and loving, radical and non-violent – the power of death is actually getting drownded.

Tis afternoon I listened in on the Easter Vigil service with a sermon by Rev. Munther Isaac from Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. (It was going on midnight there). This was the church who last Advent set their nativity in rubble – which inspired our own placing of the cross in rubble. When the camera pulled back I could see that they had done exactly as we did – the cross arising from the piles of destruction. Moreover there was a lot of Good Friday in his Easter Vigil homily – and clear that finding the resurrection in the present moment is only with great difficulty and greater faith – and yet that was indeed what he was preaching: hope.

Tonight, in our baptismal renewal, we pass again through the waters and are not drowned; well maybe we are. We die with Christ, so we are raised with him. Death has no dominion over him; and we dare say, therefore none over us.

On top of that, he’s gone on be fore us and we are to follow. Go tell his disciples – and St Peter. Alleluia.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is non-violent community activist, teacher, writer, and Methodist pastor retired from St Peter’s Episcopal Church in Waawiyatanong/Detroit, though he is now also based at Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center on Lenape Land in Bangor, PA. Author of seven books, his most recent is Celebrant’s Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection (Cascade 2021). His teaching, writing, and action are generally framed by a theology of the “principalities,” which is to say, in Jesus, he bets his life on gospel non-violence, good news to the poor, Word made flesh, and freedom from the power of death.