Easter Blessings
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 23, 2008
Those of you who are on Ric Masten's "Words and One-Liners" weekly e-mail mailings have already gotten the news. A few weeks ago, after eight years of battling and surviving prostate cancer - our Unitarian Universalist troubadour/poet/songster and minister-at-large - was discovered to have a couple of sizeable and cancerous brain tumors. He's now under hospice care at his home in the Big Sur hills of Carmel, California.
As sad as it was for me to receive this news, given the relationship he and I have developed over the past 8-10 years, there was gratitude mixed in with the sadness. I'm glad he and I got his story told, and into a book, while there was still time to tell it. I was also especially glad that we were able to be together back in January at the UU Church in Carmel to honor and pay tribute to Ric's life and ministry at their Sunday morning service.
It's early Easter morning in Carmel. I'm not sure that the sun has even made it's way above the mountains to the East out there just yet. What I do know is that the odds of Ric seeing another Easter once this one has come and gone are pretty astronomical. So I'm going to use one of his poems to frame up my Easter thoughts for today; and, who knows, in the course of doing so I might even touch on some of the things I was going to say anyway this morning. The poem, which was written at a much earlier point in his life, is vintage Masten in that it combines a saucy and jaunty kind of irreverence with a little wisdom that sneaks up on you at the end.
It's called On Butterfly Wings:
you know for the life of me
I can't recall what happened
last Good Friday...
Christmas I can
because mother got smashed
and the baby seeing his image
distorted
on the surface of a thousand ornaments
cried all day
and on Easter it rained
so that the candy hidden in the grass
got sticky and we had to wash the ants off
before we let the kids go out
but somehow I missed Good Friday
looking the other way I guess
like I do...
muttering under my breath
about the high cost of funerals
and how the undertakers are bleeding us dry
like vampires
not stopping to realize
that we can't pay those guys enough
to handle what scares us to death.
I mean
if Aunt Maude bites the bag in my kitchen
you're going to find me outside in the yard
waiting for some weird cat to roll up
in a long black vehicle
and clean up the mess - cart the problem away
smiling all the while
oh,
I'll stop by the parlor
Saturday afternoon...
check the flowers out
and have a quick look in the box
but then I never was able to accept
a gift graciously and it's my loss...
an old guru once told me
that the only thing
we really have to do in this life is die
and I think I shall repeat this statement
over and over - a hundred times each night
before I go to sleep
perhaps
if I could bring myself to believe it
I mean really believe it
and remember what happens
on Good Friday
I just might come out and find myself
some sunny Easter morning
on butterfly wings
rising!
I hesitate to dissect a poem when it makes a pretty complete statement all by itself. But if I hadn't chosen the ministry for a career there's a good chance I'd have been an English teacher, so I hope you can indulge that side of me for a few minutes. It's one of the oldest of human themes, of human truths, and of human paradoxes that Ric is waxing poetic about here. He pokes fun at his own avoidance, or denial, of death ("can't recall what happened on Good Friday." "If Aunt Maude bites the bag in my kitchen you're going to find me outside in the yard"), and puts in a good word for morticians ("we can't pay those guys enough to handle what scares us to death").
Then when he's gotten his humor out of what is also most fearful, he cuts to the chase: "An old guru once told me that the only thing we have to do in this life is die" while referring to this embrace of mortality as a gift - "A gift I was never able to accept graciously." But then how many of us can accept our mortality as a gift to be received graciously? The concluding stanza is really no more than a reminder that it is just such an embrace ["If I can really believe and remember what happens on Good Friday] that allows life to take on some of it's deepest meanings and gives us some of it's deepest joys; it's Easter morns on butterfly wings, that is to say.
It is so hard to believe - so hard for me to believe, anyway - this idea that the fullness of life emerges out of an encounter with the starkness of death. Perhaps this is why this very theme is at the heart of most of the religions and rituals and celebrations that we human beings have created for ourselves over the course of human history. Our earliest human ancestors created rites and ceremonies that would appeal to those gods and goddesses whom they believed would cause life to emerge once again from a dead earth. They knew that without a resurrection of the earth there could be no life, in the most literal sense of the word, for them. The very name we give this day - Easter - comes from one of those goddesses of fertility - Eostre - to which our pagan predecessors appealed.
The same theme is found, in more human terms, in the legends and myths that gave rise to both the Judaic and Christian faiths - and it's pretty ghastly stuff in both cases. The first born sons of the Egyptians had to die, even as the spectre of death passed over the sons of the Israelites, before the journey to a Promised Land could get under way. I can still get hooked on Cecil B. deMille's The Ten Commandments. I watched it last night and saw that green spectre of death move through the land killing all the first born Egyptian sons.
Jesus, as the legend/story of his life tells it, had to die an excruciating kind of death before his followers could experience his risen presence and carry forth his message of radical and redeeming love.
The Easter moment, the sense of a newness of life, the feeling of rising on butterfly wings - to use Ric's metaphor - all come, eventually, out of an awareness of both our own mortality, and the mortality of those whom we know and love and share life with - those whose lives touch ours deeply.
An Easter moment is also a time when life calls us back - back from a time of loss or defeat or from the deaths-in-life that inevitably come our way. The Easter challenge is this: Are we ready to respond when that call comes? It is true, you cannot rush a resurrection. If your life has been broken in some way it doesn't quite work to pretend that all is well and healed if that hasn't happened. Just as our earliest human ancestors did, we have to wait for the earth to come back to life; and I have to say that in this particular year that wait is getting pretty long. But in the same manner, we have to wait for life in its fullness to come back to us after a time of diminishment or loss. But when it is time to re-engage again, when life calls us back, we have to be ready to respond.
What I'm saying is that there are resurrections we have to wait for, and there are resurrections we have to create, or have a hand in; and sometimes the two even overlap. One of my colleagues in the UU ministry, the Rev. Mark Harris, makes this point with these well chosen words:
"We Unitarian Universalists celebrate the many resurrections of this season. We celebrate the glories of the earth when birds take to wing and crocuses force their way through the crust of snow to announce the arrival of spring. We celebrate the untold number of courageous individuals and groups who sacrificed their lives to liberate others from oppression and create a more just and loving world. We celebrate the ability of the human heart to overcome terrible personal tragedy or handicap, and affirm once again the ability to love and to excel, when many others would have given up hope. Easter celebrates the times of witnessing, experiencing, and creating the resurrections of human life."
Note those three words there at the end: witnessing, experiencing, and creating. Some resurrections we witness, as we see the earth and nature slowly work their way back to life. This is an Easter blessing we simply and joyfully receive, knowing that it will arrive on it's own good time; time which we do not control. Some resurrections we experience, such as when we experience the influence, the impact, and the meaning that the lives of those loved ones whom we have lost continue to bestow upon us - and that lets us know that our loss is not a complete one after all. This too is an Easter blessing that will come to us if we can give it the time to arrive. It's one of the Easter blessings I experience at this time of the year as I think about my Uncle - in the way that I spoke to the boys and girls about earlier in the service.
Then there are the resurrections we create, in the manner that I referred to a few minutes ago: Times when we pick ourselves up after a personal defeat or disappointment or a time of pain and grief, and decide that the life journey is one still worth taking for the promises and possibilities it still holds out for us. These, too, are Easter moments we create for ourselves, and on the strength of our own human and spiritual resources.
On that note I'm going to go back to another Ric Masten poem as a way of drawing these thoughts to a close. This one was written many years after the Butterfly Wings one, and after his cancer diagnosis.
The title here is pretty simple and stark: Endline:
I've always been
a yin/yang - front/back - clear/blur
up/down - life/death kind of guy
my own particular duality being
philospher slash hypochondriac
win win characteristics
when you've been diagnosed
with a life threatening disease
finally the hypochondriac
has more than windmills to tilt with
the philosopher arming himself
with exactly the proper petard
an explosive statement
found in an e-mail message
beneath the signature
of a cancer combatant's name
a perfect endline, wily and wise
quote: I ask God:
"How much time do I have before I die?"
"Enough to make a difference,"
God replies.
Be it from God, from the Spirit of Life, or from the inner stirrings of our minds, hearts and souls, that is the Easter message and the Easter blessing for each one of us today. It is who we are on this Easter morning, and on all the mornings of our lives that remain before us and that will greet us. We are people with time enough to make a difference.
In a beautiful world that still remains tragically and horribly tainted by the evils of war and disease and human want and environmental waste and degradation, we are people of faith with time enough to make a difference. In our local community, in our own piece of the world we occupy, with its needs and its tensions, we are people with time to make a difference. In the liberal religious community we continually seek to build here - a place where lives can be transformed and minds made free - we are people with time to make a difference. And in the lives we each are living - lives with their unfinished business, with their unhealed places, with their needs and hungers that are best, any maybe only, known to each one of you; we are, each and all, people still with time to make a difference.
Good Friday is a reminder that our lives are not ours forever, and in that sense it is "good." Easter is a promise that life is still a joyous choice we can make, a hope-filled "yes" we can say, for as long as we have breath.
On that note - a Happy and Blessed Easter to all of you.
Stephen Edington
March 23, 2008
