Staying Alive: An Easter Reflection
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington
March 31, 2002
It's not at all uncommon for Easter sermons delivered in New England to open with some comments about how we've all survived another tough winter. Indeed I recall last year, even with Easter coming a couple of weeks later than it does this time around, how I took note of the fact that it had only been a few days prior to that Easter day that the snow in my front yard had melted down enough for me to finally remove our Christmas/Winter Holiday decorations and get them back in the attic. What a difference a year makes! Easter is two weeks earlier than last year, but we still seem to have snuck through the winter without really getting clobbered (knock wood). Opening Day at Fenway Park is tomorrow; and it actually does feel out there like the spring we want and need to celebrate at this time of year. All of which makes me a happy guy.
But a year can make a difference in more ways than one. Yes, we have been spared a harsh winter. The earth awakes again; and not from near as much of "winter's toil as pain" as we're generally used to. Being spared a harsh winter, however, has not spared us from other types of toil and pain, and other kinds of death, even as we seek to celebrate renewal and rebirth. The bodies continue to be recovered from where the World Trade Center stood when we last celebrated Easter. This cannot be an easy Easter or Passover for the families of those mostly directly affected by the continuing horror of that event.
The land which provides the backdrop for both the Passover and Easter stories or legends endures a cycle of ever escalating violence and terror, with the latest round taking place in the Israeli city of Netanya with the suicide bombing at a Passover gathering, and then the Israeli retaliation in Ramalla; another suicide bombing, another retaliation, the near leveling of Yasser Arafat's headquarters, and so it goes. This is a hard Passover for those celebrating it. This is a painfully hard time for any of the peoples of the Middle East to envision peaceful and secure lives for themselves right now.
In addressing this ever degenerating state of affairs our UUA President, Rev. William Sinkford, has this week sent a pastoral letter to our UU congregations, copies of which I've placed on our Information Table. I'll share just a few sentences of it here: "Government leaders and religious people must find new ways of imagining what could be. The present headlong rush to kill and avenge makes it painfully clear that our imagination to date has been sadly inadequate...both parties in this ancient conflict must step back from the violence and join with people of good will around the world to find the way to a Middle East where the state of Israel is confident in its security and the Palestinian people have not only their own state but also a sense that justice has (been done for them)..." He continues: "For all their differences, the peoples of the Middle East know a common pain and live in a common fear. So let our conversations strive to articulate a common ground where trust can take root and drive out suffering and despair."
The full text of Bill's letter, which also contains his suggestions for how both UUs and other persons of faith can respond to the terrible state of affairs in the Middle East is, as I say, available on our Information Table. I hope you'll take and read it. As helpless as we may feel as we view these events from afar, there are ways--certainly small, but still not insignificant ways--we can try to be agents of hope and rebirth for an area so desperately in need of it.
This is a difficult Easter, I would imagine, for many of our Catholic friends, for our sisters and brothers of that faith this year as they face the scandal that has so deeply wounded their Church--a scandal that has reached into our community of Nashua. Persons of any faith must be able to regard their religious homes and places of worship as safe places for themselves and their children; and their religious leaders as the most trustworthy of persons when it comes to their children. To have such safety and trust violated in the ways that continue to be revealed is also a violation, bordering on the death, of faith itself.
It has been my privilege, and my joy, to work with many fine and dedicated priests and Christian brothers in a variety of inter-faith efforts and activities during my three decades in the ministry both as a Unitarian Universalist, and prior to that, as an American Baptist. It brings me great sadness to see persons who I know are as good and faithful to their calling, and all it demands, as I try to be to mine, to be placed under such a cloud of suspicion and mistrust because of the terrible misdeeds, and terrible abuses of trust, by a certain number--whatever that number may prove to be--of their priestly colleagues. If there is a rebirth to come out of this tragic and horrific set of circumstances it will be as the men and the women of the Catholic faith, who constitute the true body of their Church, seek ways of claiming rightful ownership of their Church, and reshape and redefine it so as to serve the needs, and respond to the make-up, of its 21st century membership. We may witness yet another Reformation before all is said and done here.
On yet another front, and one that I know hits close to home for a number of our members, this is a difficult springtime for those facing economic uncertainty or the loss of a means of livelihood. In addition to a loss of income, jarring as that is, there is also a loss or diminishment of spirit. At least a certain portion of one's identity is generally bound up in how a person provides for him or herself. Its very painful to have that identity challenged or put to a test. I trust we in this community will continue to find ways of supporting and strengthening one another while facing uncertain economic times.
Finally, in the most private reaches of ourselves, we each and all alone know our most personal of struggles, whatever they may be. We each and all know of our own deaths-in-life; we each and all know where we most need healing and rebirth--even as we affirm and celebrate the ways in which we find personal wholeness.
So we have been delivered into yet another springtime, with all the hope and glory it brings; but also knowing that newness of life still awaits in our world and in our lives. We come into a season that human beings have celebrated in some fashion or other for, probably, as long as there have been human beings. Before there was what the Christian Church calls Easter, and before there was a Jewish Passover, there was the welcoming and embracing of new life to a seemingly dead earth, along with, I would imagine, a reawakening of the human spirit. The term "Easter" itself most likely derives from one of the fertility goddesses who was worshipped in the earliest human celebrations of this time of year. There is a universal human need to reach for the possibility of new life in the face of seeming death, whatever the particular stories and rituals that are used in that reaching.
But there is also the very common human response to pull back, or even hide, in the face of death or loss or despair. There are parts of our external world, and of our internal worlds, that we'd just as soon hide from, I know. One part of the Christian legend about the death of Jesus that I'm still drawn to, even as I reject much of the doctrine that came to surround this combination of legend and myth, is the reaction of Jesus' followers to his death. For the disciples, Jesus represented hope. He'd given their lives some purpose and direction; and now he'd been executed. So they ran off. They hid. They retreated into themselves. As some feminist theologians and Biblical scholars like to point out, it was the women who stuck around, who tended to the body, and who saw it was properly laid to rest, while the guys took off. Hard to argue with that; it is the way the story is told.
But the story goes on. In three of the four New Testament gospels there is the account of a resurrection, told according to the mindset and world-view of the first century of the Common Era. In response to this resurrection--whatever it actually entailed--the disciples pulled themselves together, chose life once again, and set about to carry forth the lessons and the messages they had received from the One who had been the central part of their lives. They, found, that is to say, a way of re-engaging with life even after it had seemingly been taken from them.
To say that the earthly Jesus, whoever he was, and who did indeed die, became mythologized as the risen Christ is a true statement. To dismiss the value of the story on that basis is, to my way of seeing it, shortsighted. A myth, as the late Joseph Campbell and many others have pointed out, is not about something that happened "out there" or "back there" somewhere; but rather it is a truth about something that is going on "in here" right now. And that truth is that life at times can wound us, can hurt us deeply, can even drive us to despair; but we still must remain truly alive for as long as we are given life. Our individual lives, as we well know, will not go on forever. And in the course of those lives we will experience wounding and healing, we will experience deaths and resurrections. Staying alive, truly alive, means being open to both; and being able to live with and through both.
I'd like to read you a story; an alternative Easter story as I've come to understand it. This one is both historically true and has a mythic quality to it as well. Its one the theologian Sam Keen tells about his father in a book called To A Dancing God:
"Once upon a time (near) the woods of Tennessee where I played, a promise was made to me. One endless summer afternoon my father sat in the eternal shade of a peach tree, carving a seed he'd picked up. With increasing excitement and covetousness I watched while, using a skill common to all omnipotent creators, he fashioned a small monkey out of the seed. All of my vagrant desires came to be focused on that monkey. If only I could have it, I would possess a treasure which could not be matched in the whole town of Maryville, Tennessee! What status, what identity, I would achieve by owning such a curio! Finally I marshaled my nerve and asked if I might have the monkey when it was finished (on the sixth day of creation). My father replied: 'This one is for your mother, but I will carve you one someday.'
"Days passed, and then weeks and, finally, years, and the someday on which I was to receive the monkey did not arrive. In truth, I forgot all about the peach-seed monkey. Life in the ambience of my father was exciting, secure, and colorful. He did all of those things for his children a father can do, not the least of which was merely delighting in their existence. One of the lasting tokens I retained of the measure of his dignity and courage was the manner in which, with emphysema sapping his energy and eroding his future, he continued to wonder, to struggle, to grow . . .
"In the pure air and dry heat of an Arizona desert, my father and I sat under a juniper tree. I listened as he wrestled with the task of taking the measure of his success and failure in life. There came a moment of silence that cried out for testimony. Suddenly I remembered the peach-seed monkey, and I heard the right words coming from myself to fill the silence: 'In all that is important, you have never failed me. With one exception, you kept the promises you made to me--you never carved me that peach-seed monkey.'
"Not long after this conversation I received a small package in the mail. In it was a peach seed monkey with a note which said: 'Here is the monkey I promised you. You will noticed that I broke one leg and had to repair it with glue. I am sorry I did not have time to carve a perfect one.' "Two weeks later my father died. He died only at the end of his life."
With this story as a backdrop, the question and challenge I would put before us--before you and me--on a day that celebrates rebirth is this: What do I need to be doing, or expressing, with my life, so that it may be said of me that I died only at the end of my life? I trust you know I don't mean this in any morbid way, but, using the metaphor of Sam Keen's story, ask yourselves these questions: What are the peach-seed monkeys I need to be carving in order that I may fulfill the promises I've made to myself, to others, to the values I hold most deeply, to Life Itself, and to that which is greater than I know? How do I respond to life, and to the many deaths-in-life that we each and all encounter, in a way that is consistent with the person I most want to be? Our responses need not be perfect--Mr. Keen's monkey had a glued on leg, remember--they just need to be made.
While a personal God is not part of my personal theology, I do believe in a Creative Power that is at work, or can be at work, both in our lives and beyond our lives. I've even been known to call this Creative Power "God" on occasion. It is this Creative Power we each and all, I believe, possess that allows and enables us to keep saying "yes" in the face of the many "no's" we encounter. It is this Creative Power that calls us from our times of retreat and hiding, back into re-engagement. When it comes to our earth we do have to wait for a resurrection; we have to wait for the Creative Power to bring us the blessings of spring. But when it comes to our lives and to the world of human events, in all their great glory and in all their deep tragedy, we are the ones who must be agents of resurrection. To use the metaphor of Keen's story once more, it is something greater than us that produces the peach seeds, but we are still the ones who must do the carving in order that we may fulfill the promises of our own lives.
I'll move to a close by citing some words I've used on other Easters, and that I keep coming back to for the message they carry. They are by a UU minister named Rev. Mark Harris: "If we believe in a creative power which shatters the icy tomb of winter with the life-giving miracle of spring, we have seen a resurrection. If we believe in a creative power which moves tens and then tens of thousands of people to cry out against injustice, enabling the downfall of hatred, then we have created a resurrection. If we believe in a creative power within each human breast which enables us to break the bonds of personal pain and know the hope of new tomorrows, then we have experienced a resurrection."
"He died only at the end of his life." So said Sam Keen of his father. It's something I'd be extremely gratified to have said of me when my own earthly life is summed up; for this is both the challenge and the promise of living: That we can indeed create and discover meaning until the end of our days. In the course of that living there will be woundings and healings, despair and hope, deaths and resurrections. If we can be open to all of these, and willing to live in and through all of them, then we, too, may well create and discover meaning until the end of our days--we will truly stay alive for all of our lives. On this note, I wish each and all of you a blessed and happy Easter.
