Rising
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Easter Sunday, April 8, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Call to worship for Easter:
From the Song of Solomon 2:10-12
Arise my love, my fair one,
And come away;
For now the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone,
The flowers appear on the earth,
The time of singing has come
And the voice of the turtledove
Is heard in our land.
Prayer:
Enlivening one, be here
Hear the prayers of the people.
Bring us hope and dignity, and healing where you can.
Help us to care for one another well.
Spirit of hope rising
We thank you this morning
Thank you for spring
Thank you for green
Thank you for rain
Thank you for sunshine
Thank you for the aches in our stiff and winter-dormant bodies
Returning to life.
Thank you for Lent
Thank you for the holding back
Thank you for walking with us
Through the valley of the shadow of death,
Thank you for Easter
The bursting forth
The life returning
The earth restored
The rising.
Amen
Reading:
From the Gospel of John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All
things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into
being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of
all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome
it.
Reading:
From God in Pain by Barbara Brown Taylor
Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a God who suffers. It is not all that popular an idea, even among Christians. We prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got. What the cross teaches us is that God's power is not the power to force human choices and end human pain. It is, instead, the power to pick up the shattered pieces and make something holy out of them - not from a distance but right close up.
From the Gospel of Luke 24:1-5
But on the first day of the week, at
early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.
They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did
not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in
dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their
faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the
living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen."
Anthem
Sermon:
We have gone on something of a
theological journey together over the last several months. Today we arrive at a
particular destination of that journey, and it is, in my 30-year experience
within Unitarian Universalism, one of our very hardest destinations.
I think I should start autobiographically - this is autobiography by way of apology actually. I was not raised in any faith. I was raised by a Jewish man who had ceased to be Jewish in any way except ethnically, and by a Catholic woman who had long ago lapsed in her observance, and now considers herself an atheist, and we did not go to church. My first impression that there is something here on earth which accompanies what I can see with a sort of disembodied holy music which is always present, always abiding, and which is the source of love in the world came from my experience as a little pagan girl running around outside on our farm down in central Illinois. I didn't know then that I was practicing natural theology but I was, and I still am.
I have, therefore, never been abused by any church hierarchy (unless you want to talk about my progress toward ordination in our own association, but I don't want to talk about it, since it ended well).
I've never been held hostage by a brutal theology of the cross. I've never been told by someone in a position of religious authority that my inherent sinfulness was going to land me in hell unless I straightened up. I've never been trained in the pathway of redemptive violence, or submission to violence as religious duty, thanks be to God, and I hope that you haven't either, though it's likely that someone here has.
We talked last time about stories that are helpful - that have power - that are true - even though they didn't really happen. The story of Easter, most emphatically, one of those stories.
I would rather celebrate the day with love for the stories than to do what Unitarian Universalists in my experience more commonly do, which is to revert to the worst of our lowest-common denominator tendencies. We have lilies and we hide eggs or candy for the children, and we use a lot of the imagery of spring that is tied to the Easter holiday through the pre-Christian pagan celebrations. And we avoid the rest of the story as much as possible.
Here, in fact, is the scoop on the peculiar blend of pre- and post-Christian elements in the Easter celebration from my trusty Oxford Dictionary of World Religions in the Easter entry:
Easter: The Christian feast of the resurrection of Christ. According to Bede, the name is connected with an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess Eostre. The derivation is uncertain, but some Easter customs, e.g., the giving of eggs as gifts, are certainly pre-Christian….
The primitive Christian feast known in the 2nd-3rd cents. As the Pasch (Aramaic, pasha, Passover) formed the Christian counterpart to the Jewish festival. It celebrated Christ's death and resurrection together. By the late 2nd cent. It had, however, been removed from the Jewish date and attached to the following Sunday, except among the Quartodecimans. The Saturday night was celebrated by the illumination of churches and even whole cities; the catechumens, after watching all night, were baptized early on Sunday and received Holy Communion.
Since the council of Nicea (325) Easter has been fixed for the Sunday following the full moon after the vernal equinox….
And so on.
Without avoiding the part where Jesus rises from the dead, what, you might very reasonably ask, is all this mixing of pre-Christian and Christian tradition, and pagan celebrations of spring and the observance of the festival of the risen Christ about? What are we trying to tell ourselves by practicing this mishmash of celebrations here in the early days of spring?
Religion is doing what religion always does. It is telling us stories that help us to make sense of the pain and disorder of the world. The stories of Jesus' post-death appearances are stories that first helped those who were with him make sense of the world without him. And obviously they worked - because the ministry of Jesus became their ministry and they went out into the world and started, for better or for worse, what became the Christian church. There were no jelly beans in the empty tomb. No bunnies either. But those elements have become part of Easter or Easter has gone to meet them on the calendar because they, too, speak about life triumphant - life resurrected.
About twenty years ago I went to the All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., and probably my favorite UU minister ever, Rev. David Eaton, was the pastor there at the time. He had the whole church stand up together on Easter Sunday and sing that line from "Godspell" - the "prepare ye the way of the Lord" song. And since it was Eaton, we did it. He was that kind of guy. I thought about asking you to do that this morning - it would feel really good to you once you stopped trying to think about what it meant. But then I thought I'd probably pushed you far enough already.
Something else Rev. Eaton said that Easter morning. He said that the story of the appearance of Jesus after his death to the disciples who were walking on the road to Emmaus meant something. He said that he didn't know what happened that day, but that the disciples of Jesus were all scattered and frightened and hiding. They were denying their association with him. They were afraid that they would suffer the same fate as he had just suffered and they weren't looking to die. And then something happened. And they all came back together. They found courage. They went public. They laid down their lives and followed him. Something happened between the death of Jesus and the beginning of the church - something important. Something that changed everything.
It's probably taken me every day of the intervening twenty years to get from feeling pretty good about standing up in church and singing "prepare ye the way of the Lord" to loving the ceremonies of Lent and of Holy Week, of keeping the Good Friday vigil with the Episcopalians, as I've been known to do, and of going to the Easter mass at St. James Cathedral if I'm not engaged elsewhere, because they start the morning with a blast of trumpets and a processional of every conceivable clergy type person in their most wild-colored liturgical clothing, there is no equivocation anywhere, and Christ is risen indeed. Whatever that means.
Well what does it mean? Let's look at the stories of Jesus's death and resurrection. All the gospels say that Jesus wasn't in the tomb when people came to take him out and bury him. Mark, the oldest gospel, says pretty much nothing else after that.
Luke has that chapter I read to you a few minutes ago. I include it because I like the question that the angels asked the women - "why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here." To me that question is the central part of the Easter story.
Matthew says something less than Luke, and it really doesn't matter what John says because the gospel of John is deeply beautiful but from the point of view of describing the events of the early church it's never right about anything. Luke was written by the same person who wrote the book of Acts, which means that whomever wrote it was strongly interested and influenced by the need to legitimize the role of the disciples in founding a church. Stories are told for political reasons as well as to make sense of the pain and disorder of the world. Both are present in the story in Luke.
But that question is important: Why do you look for the living among the dead? Because you know we do that all the time. We do it when we look for the power of Jesus in the institutional church, frankly. We do it when we confuse the stories of a holy man with the abuses of a human institution.
Clearly, from the variety of stories that are contained just in the gospels, that abuse was already occurring.
Which doesn't mean that these stories are about nothing. They are about something. Something, as Rev. Eaton said, something happened that day. And it changed everything for the people who witnessed it.
Religious stories are a bet that if we follow the right narrative or the right formula or ritual then God will be on our side. They are all superstitious to a degree. They say that God can be appeased, and that when appeased God will hold back from using God's power to smite us.
But this story, of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is making a radically different claim - which is why I would suggest that it still matters. It is claiming that God does not operate by swooping in and controlling the situation. God operates by being God, even when that means suffering and death. In her book of teaching sermons God in Pain, Barbara Brown Taylor says:
By entering into the experience of the cross, God took the manmade wreckage of the world inside himself and labored with it - a long labor, almost three days - and he did not let go of it until he could transform it and return it to us as life. That is the power of a suffering God, not to prevent pain but to redeem it, by going through it with us. Some of us like it better the other way. We would rather have a God who makes everything happen, including the cross, than a God who hangs there with us. Maybe because that allows us the hope that we can still get God to spare us.
The story of the death and resurrection of Jesus is a story of powerlessness and a story that a different kind of power will ultimately prevail, not somewhere far away but right here on earth. It makes the claim that a man was God, and you have to be prepared to live with the ambiguity of that, but having made the claim it says that God operates by being true to who he is up to and through the point of death. That God will endure all the suffering of Earth to be with us.
It's comforting but if you were raised in a traditional church it's not the God you were taught to look for.
There is a tendency among rational educated folks to do a couple of things with the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The first thing we do is to try to skip the crucifixion part.
We would prefer to go directly to Easter, with baskets and hats and chocolate bunnies, and skip that unpleasant business about being nailed through the hands and feet to the cross and hanging there until suffocation killed him.
That's how crucifixion worked, it was a standard punishment for political prisoners at the time and it was a very exceedingly ugly practice that there is no reason to believe didn't happen to Jesus, because all the reports are in agreement that it did.
Jesus preached a radically simple message of love and forgiveness and keeping our eye on what really matters - and he was killed for it because a message that service to God is what really matters is undermining to any political authority.
There is great wisdom in the rhythm of holy week. There is a narrative progression from Palm Sunday and the triumph of the return to Jerusalem to the tenderness of Maundy Thursday and the washing of the feet of the disciples. There is the loneliness of the vigil in the garden of Gethsemane and the deep pain of betrayal when Judas identifies Jesus for the Roman authorities with a kiss.
There is the awful vigil of Good Friday when we suffer the three hours of darkness, the solemn recitations of the seven last words, the stillness, the smoke rising in silence to the top of the sanctuary. There is the quiet waiting through Saturday into the night. Then, at the breaking of dawn on Sunday, there is the light. The empty tomb. The baptism of the catechumens, the restoration of life.
It's a process and we have to earn the end of it, or we wouldn't appreciate it. It is a story of meaning - of the worst thing we can imagine - that God would be among us and we wouldn't know him and we would execute him and recognize him only when the deed was done and we were forced to reckon with our own sinfulness. And then, only after we have sat with that brokenness and despair long enough to acknowledge that it, too, is part of who we are, does the rising come. The response from God that this is not all that we are. That we remain the children of God. That forgiveness for any sin is possible, and redemption is more powerful even than death.
Skip Good Friday and you lose all of that. I don't recommend any shortcuts through holy week. There is a value in keeping the liturgical calendar as a counterpoint to the calendar on which you write your business meetings and grocery list. It points you toward the larger reality - the one life that is greater than any individual life including your own.
The other thing we like to do is to try to figure out literally what happened to Jesus after the crucifixion. If you showed up this morning hoping that I would have something to offer you on that score, you're going to leave disappointed. I really don't know what happened to Jesus after the crucifixion. There are lots of theories. Maybe they took him down alive and he recovered and went on to marry Mary Magdelene and have children, and they really were all buried in those ossuaries that James Cameron just made that film about (though the tombs were discovered at least 27 years ago). In the most recent edition of Christian Century, the opening editorial starts by saying "An old joke has a graduate student giving the news to the great theologian Paul Tillich: "They've discovered the bones of Jesus" To which Tillich replies, in his thick German accent, "So he really did exist!"
Since he was a true historical figure and he had a body, something happened to it after his murder, and the most likely thing is burial.
Look. You may think that I've been evangelizing these last four months, and today you might have expected it all to culminate in an altar call - a true "come to Jesus" moment here at the Unitarian Universalist church.
Let's pretend right now that I am holding up here a shoebox, covered in brown & grey construction paper so that it looks like a tomb in a garden. And suppose I put a paper cut-out of Jesus in his burial wrapping, maybe attached to a popsicle stick, inside that shoebox. And then I wave a black cloth in front of the opening and I say the magic words and there is a little puff of smoke and the Jesus cut-out on the popsicle stick would be gone. Maybe I'd be waving my right hand around a lot with the cloth in it so you didn't notice my left hand pull the Jesus figure out through the trap door in the bottom. But what I'd be trying to tell you by doing all of that is simply that the world is larger than our eyes alone can tell us. That there is more potential here - potential for good, and for beauty and for the power of love - than any of us can see. And you, if you were listening only for the empirical and not for the story would say that I was trying to tell you that there is more here than meets the eye and the more is simply a trick - a slip of the hand.
If you analyze the stories for their tricks - if you go looking through the resurrection story looking for where the body actually landed - then you will miss what the story is trying to tell you. In all of our storytelling history we've never done better than this - a man who is holy is so filled with love for the rest of us and so sure of the love he is preaching that he subjects himself to death rather than violate his own teachings. And as he hangs there broken and dying the full unmediated spirit of all the holiness, the one life greater than all our lives, greater even than his life, comes to him and allows this most terrible waste of a holy person to be redeemed by filling that moment, that terrible point of intersection of the two lines of the cross, with meaning. Meaning that we are still compelled to talk about two thousand years later, here, this morning.
I'm just telling stories up here because that's all I've got for you. Mine, other people's, the stories that are sacred from scripture because we've decided that they belong in a special category of human experience. Stories from the Bible because on the balance after all the stories I've read (and I promise you I've read a lot of them) these are still some of the most beautiful ones we have - some of the ones that go farthest in pointing us toward the reality that is with us always that we cannot see.
I tell you stories about ant hills and biological emergence and the hidden amazing capacities of nature too.
All my stories are true and some of them happened.
I want you to learn to open your hearts fully to story. I want you to make yourselves vulnerable as humans - vulnerable to the better people that you want to be. I want that for myself as a religious person so I want it for you.
What these stories are saying is that there is always more here than meets the eye, and that this is confidently a good thing. What these stories are saying is that human beings in their anger and brutality and hatred and violence can create an utter wreckage on the face of the good creation and that the one power God still holds, and the one power God has always held and always will hold world without end is the power to pick up the broken pieces and turn them meaningful.
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here.
Amen
Benediction:
Maybe John has it right after all: If you
love me you will keep my commandments. This is my commandment, that you love one
another as I have loved you. So he rises. Blessed Easter. Go in peace.