Easter Sunday: Life Calls Us On Reverend Susan Frederick-Gray April 5, 2015 Reading: Our reading this morning is by Mark Belletini, Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio. It is titled Exultet for Easter. Exultet or Easter Proclamation is the hymn of praise sung during the Easter mass. (Sonata for Voice and Silence) I could say they are beautiful, those stars hemming the blue veil of morning. I could say it gives me pleasure, that bronze and perfect Passover moon, or I could say they make me glad, those laughing daffodils along the lane. Or, I could just as well say they are lit from within, divine, overflowing with what some long to call revelation, or even the growing vision of God. But today, on Easter, I don t care which words I use to express my wonder. I just am glad to be alive, blest with such marvels. I could say that the earth hanging in space is an accident in the universe that just happened, or I could say it s one more miracle in a cosmos full of miracles, one overflowing with divinity. But today, on Easter, for all of my education and life experience, I cannot tell which word is which. Accident. Miracle. They seem to see each other s face in the mirror of my heart. And so I rise in gladness again, and sing the marvel that everything is! When some argue for heaven, and others argue for earth, for the life of me I cannot comprehend the seriousness of the debate. After all, the heaven I see daily overhead never argues with me. It just tumbles clouds through my eyes and yours and paints the horizons pink and orange come evening or come morning. And the earth I walk never argues with me either. It mostly just explodes with buds and petals Easter Sunday: Life Calls us On April 5, 2015 1
like some out-of-control fountain. Heaven and earth remain silent even when people malign the ancient exclamation O God! by fusing it with violence and entitlement. But now, on this Easter Day, everything grows beyond words, beyond earth and heaven, into a necessary vision of harmony and peace for all humankind who rise into life that is alive. Sermon Let s talk about Easter. Easter for Unitarian Universalists is complicated. It s complex. For here in this room, there are not only dozens of different understandings about the meaning of Easter, there are at least a half dozen different religious backgrounds. Some grew up in a Christian, Catholic or Mormon tradition. Others of us grew up Jewish, Indigenous, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Zorastrian, pagan, no religion, and yes - like me, Unitarian Universalist. Even though I am not a Christian, there is something in the Easter story that is compelling and meaningful. In a poem from Carrie Newcomer, called The Stories We Tell, Newcomer ends the poem saying she listened to the story, Not pressing to know if the story was real, or merely true. Many scholars offer evidence to show that the accounts of Jesus resurrection were written several decades after the scrolls written describing his life and teachings. Christians themselves have a variety of views and beliefs about the story of the resurrection. Some understand it as a physical, historical, bodily resurrection, others understand it as a spiritual resurrection. Personally, I prefer this image of not pressing to know if the story is real, because something in it, I know to be true. The Easter story reminds us that even in the darkest of times, hope is present, hope is possible. And it tells a universal story that love cannot be silenced, even by death. This past week was Holy Week in the western Christian tradition. Throughout the week, this powerful story of hope turning to despair and then returning to hope is told. It begins with Palm Sunday, the day that it is said Jesus rode into Jerusalem. The biblical story describes crowds gathered in celebration and exhalation, praising Jesus arrival. And the crowds placed their robes and palm fronds before him as a sign of the honor and the welcome they gave him. Palm Sunday is a day of hope, when the story tells us that Jesus, a teacher of love and justice comes to Jerusalem, a center city of power, to bring a message of justice for the poor and oppressed, and a love of neighbor. By mid-week, the tone begins to change. On Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, as it called in many places in the world, Christians remember the night of the Last Supper, the Passover meal that Jesus is said to have shared with his disciples. At that dinner, he predicts his own betrayal and death, 2
and so after the jubilant entry into Jerusalem just a few days prior, the story turns more ominous. Good Friday is the day of Jesus crucifixion and death, a day of despair, when Jesus ministry and teaching were cut short at the hands of the Roman Empire. Good Friday is a day of mourning and lament. It is a day when all hope seems lost. And then, three days later, this day, Easter, is a day of joy, a day of miracle, for it is said that three days after his death, Jesus was resurrected - life out from death. The meaning, the truth, of this story is not to be found looking at the story as a historical retelling of facts. Its power is in this message that hope and love and the teaching of truth cannot be killed, nor silenced, not even by death. Even death cannot silence love. Who we are, what we teach, what we give these live on in the lives of those we have loved. And what is true lives in the hearts of men and women no matter how many attempts are made to put out its light. And hope can be reborn in us even when we feel it is lost. This message is important, because the story of humanity is often a story of truth and hope emerging, only to be later covered over, distorted, forgotten. Again and again, truth gets forgotten in ritual and dogma, distorted by greed or power, and yet it emerges again in the lives of hope, and movements of people for liberation and justice. We see this, if we look critically, even within the story of Christianity. Here is an example that gets right to the heart of why Easter is so complicated, even unsettling, for Unitarian Universalists, especially those of us raised within or close to Christianity. On the one hand, the images of rebirth, of the celebration of Spring, the symbolism of the egg as a central piece of the Easter story, this resonates with us as Unitarian Universalists. We understand ourselves as a part of creation and these images of the abundance and beauty of the earth, or as Mark Belletini describes it, the earth that just explodes with buds and petals like some out-of-control fountain, resonates with the mystery and beauty we see in creation, in our own lives, in every life. But, the images of Jesus torture and death on the cross, that is the part of the story that has always given me pause. Honestly, I have never been able to find anything redeeming in that image of Jesus death. The idea that his teaching, his radical ministry grounded in love didn t end, wasn t silenced, by his death - that I understand. But the importance of his torture and death as a necessity, as a substitutionary atonement for humanity s sins, for my sins, no that has never made sense to me. Well, there just may be something to this. In their book, Saving Paradise, Rebecca Parker, former President of the Unitarian Universalist seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, and Rita Nakashima Brock, a laywoman and theologian in the Christian Church: Disciples of Christ, explore how the crucified body of Jesus became so central to Christian identity and theology. And what Easter Sunday: Life Calls us On April 5, 2015 3
they find surprises them. It surprises them to such a degree that their book is written like a detective story - for when they go looking for the body of Jesus in the early Christian church, guess what? They don t find it! The full title of their book is Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. Much to their great surprise, in searching the oldest Christian churches and writings and art, these two theologians, Parker and Brock, find no depictions of Jesus s death, no depictions of the crucifixion. Not until the 10th century, more than 900 years after Jesus life, is the image of the crucified Jesus found in Christian imagery. Instead, for the first 900 hundred years of Christianity, the art in churches and cathedrals and the texts depict images of paradise. Lush gardens, verdant rivers filled with fish, deer and animals joyfully alongside human beings abound, with Jesus pictured as a living presence, as a teacher, a shepherd, a healer. Images of life, of peace, of harmony among humanity and nature were the images that adorned the walls and ceilings and imagination of the Christian church for its first millennium. In their study, Brock and Parker find that paradise in the early Christian church was not about the after life, but indeed something present and possible here on earth, in this life. A few weeks ago we talked about one of the sayings of Jesus, where he is talking about the kingdom. He says, beware of those who tell you the kingdom is in the sky, for if it is in the sky, the birds will get there first. And if they tell you it is in the sea, the fish will get their first. Rather, Jesus says, the kingdom is within you, and around you. He is pointing not to some promised afterlife, but to the capacity for people to create paradise right here and now by how we live and treat one another and all of life. The tools, the wisdom are inside of us; the kingdom is inside of us, right here, right now. In their research, Parker and Brock look back nearly four thousand years to explore how the ancient people of West Asia imagined paradise. [They show] how the Bible s Hebrew prophets invoked the Garden of Eden [- an earthly paradise -] to challenge the exploitation and carnage of empires. [They found how] Jesus s teachings and the practices of the early church affirmed life in this world as the place of salvation. Within their church communities, Christians in the first millennium sought to help life flourish in the face of imperial power, violence, and death. 1 1 This Present Paradise by Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock, UUworld.org, Summer 2008 [http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/107992.shtml] 4
However, this all began to change in the 9th century with Charlemagne and the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire when Christianity and loyalty to state became one and the same. With this change, the visual world of Christianity changed, with the image of the crucified Christ becoming dominant and images focused on death replaced images of paradise. 2 Even the theology around the eucharist, or communion table, changed at this time. In the first centuries of the Christian church, people brought offerings of milk and olive oil and fish to the eucharist table. It was a feast, and the prayer that was said asked that the Holy Spirit would be present infusing the gifts of food and the people of the community. Parker and Brock explain it this way, The beautiful feast of life returned the senses to an open, joyous experience of the world; it was an encounter with divine presence infusing physical life. But in the 9th century Christian theologians began to teach that the wine and bread of the communion table was the literal body and blood of Jesus and had to be eaten to obtain the benefits of Christ s sacrifice. Again, images of death and sacrifice, came to replace images of life and paradise and the goodness of creation. Alongside these images of death, came the gothic churches filled with violent images of hell and Jesus as ultimate judge of who would be saved. These changes came as the Holy Roman Empire began its brutal sweep across Europe on their way towards the Holy Land determined to kill all who were not Christian. The decisive turning point in this focus from love of this life to crucifixion came in 1095 when Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade. Killing had up to this point been the ultimate sin for Christians. Participation in warfare was seen as evil to early Christians. But Pope Urban II in calling for the Crusades issued the ultimate incentive, the idea that those who went on the crusades could substitute the journey as penance for all sin. And with this, the emphasis on the human capacity to create paradise by how we live was replaced with the idea that killing and death became the ultimate pathway to salvation, to an after-this-life paradise, rather than the thousand year long emphasis on learning to recognize and cultivate a present paradise. But hope is not lost, my friends. For just as the story of Easter tells us that the Roman Empire could not fully silence the radical message and ministry of Jesus, the Holy Roman Empire did not fully silence the human ability to see the truth of a present paradise. Throughout the second millennium of Christianity, despite this tremendous change in imagery and meaning, there has also been an active resistance to this theology of death and crucifixion. Throughout this time, there have been those who have reclaimed the messages of Jesus that emphasized the gift of life, the love of this world. 2 Saving Paradise a sermon by the Rev. Wayne Arnason, 04.09.2009, [http://www.uuchristian.org/pdfs/savingparadise.pdf] Easter Sunday: Life Calls us On April 5, 2015 5
We are a part of this tradition of resistance, proclaiming the possibility today of living, not in ways that destroy life, not in ways that rest on some hoped for afterlife, but in fostering communities and families and practices of life and love and justice today. We are the inheritors of the great Universalist tradition that refused to accept the idea that Jesus was sacrificed to atone for our sins; refused to accept eternal damnation - an idea that fueled the incentive to die or kill as a pathway to paradise. Here is how Rebecca Parker summarizes the view of one of the most influential Universalists of the 19th century, Hosea Ballou s understanding of who Jesus was: Hosea] Ballou did not accept the idea that selfless devotion to God required enduring misery and sorrow in this life for happiness in the next... True happiness lay in seeking it not only for oneself but for every human being... Hell was what human beings created in this world by cruelty and greed not a realm of eternal punishment after death. Paradise was also available here and now, manifest in beauty and marked by relationships of justice and care. Like the early Christian communities that Parker and Brock describe as seeking to help life flourish in the face of imperial power, violence, and death, we too seek to help life flourish in the face of oppression, and environmental destruction and unending warfare. And this is a meaningful message for us as Unitarian Universalists on Easter. It is not a message unique to the early Christian church. It is not unique even to Jesus. We hear it in philosophers and prophets from around the world, for example the Buddhist message of the power of compassion to transform the world; the idea of Tikkun Olam in Judaism to repair the world; the central metaphor of beauty in the Navajo tradition; the idea of the mystical union between humanity and the divine described in the Sufi poetry of Islam. Throughout history and tradition, humanity has proclaimed the possibility of peace, the reality of paradise here and now if we can only learn to see this gift of life - this generous, miraculous, improbable gift - as precious, today. We hear this in the images Mark Belletini describes in his Exultet for Easter, which describes the abundance of life and earth like an out-of-control fountain of buds and petals. Images of the earth and the heavens not arguing with humanity, not in battle, but everywhere offering images of wondrous beauty. As he says, But now, on this Easter Day, everything grows beyond words, beyond earth and heaven, into a necessary vision of harmony and peace for all humankind who rise into life that is alive. 6
Easter offers us this image of paradise and reminds us that it is a present paradise, within us to create. Life calls to us with this truth. The heavens and the earth - everyday they show us what is possible, calling to us with beauty and light, at sunrise and sunset, offering signs of hope, reminders of love and peace. Life is the gift, the gift we have. And life calls us on with images of beauty and hope, of paradise and possibility - all around us, in a cosmos full of miracles, it speaks to us of peace, of beauty, of love, of possibility for all of these, within us, as it is within all creation. As Jesus often was quoted as saying, may those with ears hear, and those with eyes see. Endnotes: 1 This Present Paradise by Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock, UUworld.org, Summer 2008 [http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/107992.shtml] 1 Saving Paradise a sermon by the Rev. Wayne Arnason, 04.09.2009 at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation. [http://www.uuchristian.org/pdfs/savingparadise.pdf] Easter Sunday: Life Calls us On April 5, 2015 7