Bishop Robert J. Baker

 

 

Easter homily
April 16, 2006
St. Mary of the Annunciation Church, Charleston

I join Monsignor Roth, Father Anthony, and our Deacon Tom in wishing you and your loved ones a happy Easter and a blessed Easter season.
Saint Melito of Sardis describes so beautifully what Christ our Passover has done for us. He "covered death with shame and cast the devil into mourning." He "smote sin and robbed iniquity of offspring." He "brought us out of slavery into freedom, out of darkness into light, out of death into life, out of tyranny into an eternal kingdom."

 

He "made us a new priesthood, a people chosen to be His own for ever. He is the Passover that is our salvation."
Today we celebrate the victory He won for us by His passion, death, and resurrection. That Easter victory becomes ours as we in Holy Mass enter into His paschal mystery, dying with Him, so we shall rise to new life.
Last evening we celebrated the Easter vigil ceremony and welcomed into our church the catechumens and candidates who were preparing for entrance into our Catholic community. The ceremony began outside the Cathedral with a tracing of the symbols on the Easter candle, after it is lit from the new fire. Tracing the symbol, I said these words: "Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to Him and all the ages. To Him be glory and power through every age forever. Amen.

 

"All time belongs to Him and all the ages." That is, I believe, a beautiful creedal statement of faith for us on this Easter season. It is an acknowledgement that in and through the paschal mystery, and through our entering into it, we enter the time of God, sacred time, God's time. Our limited experience of time becomes God's time. It becomes eternity; by the victory Christ won for us through His dying and rising.
And you and I, through the sacred liturgies of the church, have a blessed way of entering into that experience of time. In so doing our time becomes God's time. We allow the God who transcends time to enter into our time and take us beyond time as it were.

 

You know as well as I how precious our time is. We always feel we have so little time to accomplish what we need to. We are usually in a hurry to catch up with ourselves and complete seemingly impossible tasks in the course of a 24-hour period of time.

 

Most of what we do probably we do for our own personal purposes and goals-perhaps success in the world of business & finance, advancement on the plane of material, academic, social or political success. Entering into God's time, however, through celebrations such as the one we are experiencing today, in the aftermath of the Easter vigil ceremony brings us into another experience of progress and time. It is in the sphere or plane of the spiritual, of success determined by the divine scale that is of a transcendent character, with its own values that may be diametrically opposed to the ones we live on in a time frame that is limited to human concerns and human projections.

 

As we indicated at the start of the beautiful Easter vigil ceremony, with the symbols of alpha and omega, we were reminded that all time belongs to God, and all the ages. Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega of time and of history.

 

When Mary of Magdala and Simon peter and the other disciple made the discovery that Jesus had risen from the dead on that first Easter morning, they learned that Jesus as the son of God had power over time and history. He in His life and death was not limited by the human limitations of time. He surmounted them. He surpassed them. He destroyed the limitations we human beings put on the concept of time. In dying He destroyed death. In rising He initiated His followers into the experience of eternal life, so that as His followers celebrate the paschal mystery through the sacraments and holy Mass, as we do today, we pass into an experience that transcends time and history. We enter the time that belongs to God, the time that surpasses and transcends human time. Calvary, through the celebration of Holy Mass, enters into our experience of time. Sacramentally the event of Christ's dying enters our temporal framework now. The event of the resurrection touches our lives

 

Now, through the transcendent character of God's embrace of time and timelessness, God's embracing of our lives into an eternal embrace of His divine love.
If all time belongs to God, then we are called to live in a way that acknowledges that time belongs to God, and not to us. We should no longer be driven to accomplish plans of action and goals that do not conform to God's will for us or His plan of action. Our time, if it is His, is lived in faith in an entirely different framework.

 

Some people refer to it as the stewardship frame of life. And I think that is a fitting one, where I give all my time to God; every moment is consecrated by the prayer of the morning offering to serving God and His kingdom.
Might I suggest first of all a return to the daily praying of that morning offering prayer, if it has been overlooked. It is an important and powerful prayer to start the day, in which we offer to God all our prayers, works, joy, and suffering, in union with the holy sacrifice of the Mass being offered that day throughout the world. Begin your day, consecrating it entirely to God.

 

I want to emphasize the importance of our Sunday Mass. We give God one hour of the week for Mass. That is but a small percentage of our time. It is precious time. It is sacred time. And it helps consecrate the Sabbath day and our week to God. Many people attend Mass daily. One hour of the week, I tell my young people being confirmed is just a small portion of our time to give to God.
Keeping the Sabbath holy by not just avoiding servile work, but making it a family day helps give to God a day that will be a blessing for our families. Our society has lost the meaning of that special day-the Sabbath day, which is our Sunday.

 

Priests, deacons, religious brothers & sisters pray the liturgy of the hours five times a day, taking time out to consecrate the day further to God, making sure that we acknowledge that all time is God's time, by praying the prayer of the church. Lay people are welcome to pray with the church universal part or all of the liturgy of the hours, the official daily prayers of the church.
You recall how the Moslem community prays facing Mecca five times a day on their knees. It is pretty impressive to see that happen, as I have, while visiting the country of Jordan. Our Judeo-Christian
Heritage calls us Catholics to do that as well, to consecrate our day to God.

 

A visit to a church in the course of the day or daily meditation on the scriptures or some spiritual writings help us also focus on the fact that the day belongs to God. That all time is God's time.
If we do that, if we have that stewardship perspective of time, we will be less prone to judge the success of our endeavors from a human standpoint, but allow God to determine how well we succeeded in serving Him. Prayer, especially, helps us turn our time into God's time.

 

May this celebration of the victory of Christ over the limitations of time, of the life-time of human beings, enable us to enter into the time of God, here and now in this sacred liturgy, this sacramental experience of God's entering into our time with His saving time and the saving event of His paschal mystery, His passion, His death, His resurrection, celebrated on this altar at holy Mass, so that one day we can enter into the eternal time and eternal embrace of God's love in heaven, with the risen Lord Jesus, for all eternity. Have a blessed celebration of the feast of Christ's resurrection from the dead and a happy Easter!