Christ's Own For Ever, by Archdeacon Stringfellow

From the Lectionaries
Christ’s Own For Ever
The Easter Vigil
Romans 6:3-11
By Archdeacon Howard Stringfellow
3 April 2010

At each Easter Vigil, we hear St. Paul’s famous Epistle exploring our union with Christ in his death and in his resurrection through our Baptism: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4).

Over the years, I have so accepted St. Paul’s identification of each of us with Christ’s death and resurrection that I have often thought that at our births and certainly at our Baptisms something of Christ’s dead body lies buried in each of us. And when it is raised in us, when we experience something like the Easter moment, we are raised with it to newness and abundance of life. It is the moment, in the words of the Celebrant’s opening address to the people at the Easter Vigil, that “we share in” the Lord’s “victory over death” (Prayer Book, page 285).

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