by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given April 15, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Words by e. e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any

--lifted from the no

of all nothing--human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Come, now and let us worship here together

A little over a year ago, Dave Buttenhoff was in despair. Some years earlier his marriage had ended and since that time he had lost a series of jobs, got hooked on methamphetamines, tried more than once to get off the drugs and in the process of it all had done a lot of hurtful things to other people.

Finally, on the night of March 24, he found himself on the waiting list for a homeless shelter and struggling more than ever. He found himself tired and at end of his rope. He didn’t know what else to do and he plotted kill himself the next day.

And the next morning he proceeded with his plan. He got his things together. He went to the Ross Island Bridge, a little later than planned because of all the traffic. But then he jumped, surprised at how easy it was. And as soon as he was over the edge, he knew that it was a mistake to kill himself. All of a sudden, he knew he wanted to live and didn’t want to die. But apparently it was too late.

He got into the water and looked to the banks, and they both seemed far away. He thought that it was over. He thought it was too late. But it wasn’t too late. It seemed that a group of breast cancer survivors, called the Pink Phoenix, were practicing for their dragon boat races that day on the Willamette. They practiced that morning despite the fact that they didn’t have a full crew. And it just so happened that they decided to row south instead of north. This put them squarely in the path of Dave Buttenhoff.

And you probably know how the story ends. Yes, the man trying to end his life was saved by a boatload of woman who knew a lot about surviving. The women got to where he was, got him in the boat and saw that he got help. And they have been seeing that he gets help ever since.

A year later, Dave Buttenhoff is still in recovery. He is doing well and getting on with his life. He is making plans for what he wants to do. And the women who saved him are still in his life and he is still in their lives. They have ended up helping each other along the way.

Not all resurrection stories are quite so dramatic. And most of them don’t make it into the newspapers. And certainly not everybody in despair has a group of breast cancer survivors show up to help. But the story is a universal story: that in giving up our life we save our life. That in the midst of death and despair, we find hope and come to find that new life can emerge. That as surely as the spring follows winter, we are called to life. That we are called, again and again, to the necessary resurrections that make life possible.

Life is full of turning points—some that we expect and plan for, most that we have little or no control over. And in all of these times we are asked to find meaning and to search for life in the midst of what we face.

The loss of a loved one.

We find that the career is not what we had hoped it would be.

We face an illness ourselves and possibly one we will not survive.

An important relationship comes to an end.

We find that we have had dreams and that nothing has come of them.

We are thrown a curve ball we did not expect.

It may be we feel knocked flat and we ask why. We don’t know what to do. We might get angry and we might try to negotiate with God. We try to find meaning. And in the end we come to know again that there is a limit to how much control we have in any given situation. And we figure out what options we have.

Sometimes, of course, we know all too well that we need to make some change. But it may be we are not ready to do that. It could be that our life feels pretty comfortable and we don’t want to take too many risks. We’re in a job that we don’t like or we’re in a relationship that doesn’t really work and yet we tell ourselves that it is not so bad. We don’t want to make the moves to make it better or to get out of it because, well, it just isn’t so bad. Or maybe we know the right thing would be to do something, but we find that we just put it off until another day. We negotiate with ourselves. Even if the present situation is not right, it is better than the unknown. And it may be that this is where we stay. Better to be comfortable than sorry we took the risk.

Sometimes, of course, life has a surprise for us and doesn’t seem to give us much choice about moving or not moving. It feels like we have no choice other than to do what we have to do.

According to the gospel of Matthew, when Jesus died on the cross, the earth shook and coughed up corpses. It says that: "many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised."

After the crucifixion, the disciples had run from the scene in utter terror that they, too, would be killed. They hid from the authorities. They talked about the days when Jesus was alive, and they bemoaned the loss of their dream, their dream of the leader who would take them out of bondage. They wanted to stay hidden in the tomb.

But then on the third day, Jesus appears to them and everything seems to change: they became bold preachers, risking their lives telling others about the man they had come to know, who had been killed by the authorities, and yet who was with them still. In seeing him again, they found purpose in their own lives. They, too, found new life. The parts of them that were dead in the tomb were no longer dead and they were ready to proclaim it to the world. The story may not be so much of what happened to Jesus as what happened to his followers. His death, and his continued presence among them rocked their world and gave them new life. It is as if they were not resurrected from death as much as resurrected from deadness. Parts of them were dead and now they were alive.

And with their new-found life they preached the words of Jesus: "You must lose your life to find it. Unless you die to yourself, your life cannot be saved."

Give up your life to find your life? Come into your power through surrender? Give up control and you will receive all that you need? Those are not easy words to hear. The paradox holds us. But that is the message of the resurrection. That in letting go of control of our lives, we find something more. That in giving up our life we find what it is we need to find.

For the apostles, it is what allows them move into the world and spread the gospel. They are no longer afraid, but buoyed on by what they have experienced. They are renewed in their passion. They reclaimed the parts of themselves that had died.

All this calls us to ask, what are those things that we need to give up? What are the attachments we have that take life instead of giving life? What are those things that keep us from being who we are? What are those things that hold us back? What are those things that are dead inside of us?

As the events of our lives roll out and we experience the inevitable losses of life, it can be as if parts of us get put away in the tomb, never to be seen again. We learn not to take a chance like we once did out of fear that we will be embarrassed or fail at it. We may simply find ourselves resigned to thinking that what we have is good enough, no matter what our dreams might be. And we find that there is comfort in the tomb because it feels safe and secure. We find it may represent a routine we can count on. But it can also be a place where we hide, where we don’t have to take any chances.

But the thing is, we have to live. As the jazz great Charlie Parker said, "Don’t be afraid, just play the music."

In my life, I have certainly known the comfort of tombs. Before I came out of the closet as a gay man, I can see now that a very important part of me was dead. I lived life through some screen where I was worried that someone would find out and my life energy was going into hiding versus into living.

And yet however painful it was, it was something painful that I knew. The familiar was better than the unknown. There is a lot of power in fear and it was that fear that kept me hidden, it kept me from being who I was. And, strangely, there was something terribly secure and comfortable about it.

But I also came to know that I couldn’t go on like that. I finally came to realize that part of me was dead and that if I was going to live it meant taking a chance. That if this is what living meant then it had less and less meaning. And once I did that, the world seemed to open up. Yes it was scary, but amazingly, the scariness quickly seemed to go away.

That was a big one in my life, but the events of our lives happen in many ways. We are called again and again to find life, even when we are afraid, even when we don’t know what the outcome will be. Even when we don’t know quite how to do it.

But there are many ways we keep ourselves in the tomb. When we feel an emptiness in our life and find ourselves consuming something we don’t need or when we find ourselves doing something at the expense of another all to keep us secure and in comfort. We keep ourselves in the tomb when we don’t take risks, but simply stay with what we know best.

Life is a series of deaths, large and small, into ourselves. We are called, again and again, to put ourselves forward and embrace life, and move through the hurt and pain we experience to something new, to redeem that pain by how it is we live. And we are called, again and again, to ask ourselves what are those things that keep us from living? What are those things that hold us back?

We are called, again and again, to have faith in the necessary resurrections of life.

The Greek word anastasis, which is translated as "resurrection," is made up of two words fused together: stasis means "an uprising" or even "an insurrection," which is how the word is usually translated. Stasis comes ultimately from the verb which means "to stand," and it means something like "to take a stand," or even "standing up and being counted." Ana is a common prefix that means "through" or "in." Anastasis means, therefore, "to stand up and be counted through or in your life." To live a life where you take a stand, and live by that stand throughout your days is to live a life of anastasis or, if you will, resurrection.

Living a life of resurrection is not such an easy task. It is something we are asked to do over and over again. And sometimes we may not even seem to make the choice. It may be something that circumstance calls from us. Sometimes we are startled into action.

Cathrine Sneed grew up in the inner city, and like a lot of young women around her, by the time she was 17 she had dropped out of school and was pregnant. But she didn’t let that stop her. She made her way to college and then started in law school. One of her teachers was the sheriff of San Francisco County. When a women’s counseling job came along, she decided to leave law school and take the assignment. It felt like the right thing to do.

A couple years into the job, Sneed developed a kidney disease that was virtually untreatable. She attributes the disease to the despair she was feeling from working in the jail. She said it was such a discouraging thing, to see women come back and come back and just lose hope. Sneed recalled her family and friends watching her die because she wasn't responding to treatment. They didn’t know what to do and she didn’t know what to do. About this time a friend gave her John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a book about farm workers and their attachment to the land.

And after reading the book, she had an idea. What if there was a garden at the jail where the inmates could work and till the soil and grow plants? Maybe it would help them find their way.

Now, most everybody thought this was a pretty half-baked idea and didn’t think it had much of a chance for success. But it was also true that nobody expected her to leave the hospital, let alone recover, and perhaps figured that there was not much to lose in letting her start her program. So the sheriff agreed to the garden.

She went back to the county jail. She was close to death and could hardly walk. When the women saw her they were shocked. She was so weak that she had to be carried out to an abandoned lot at the county jail where the garden was being created. The shock apparently had some impact. The women were moved to care for her and to start the garden. And she tells of what it meant to her to see the women work with their hands, preparing the soil, planting the vegetables, and also how they also came to care for her. And in the process of all this, something started to happen. Sneed started to get better and the women started to see their lives in a different way. The women started to care about something and in seeing this, Sneed recovered.

That was the beginning of a program that now involves a couple hundred people. There is the jail program and another program for people who have just been released from jail. In 1995, the program expanded further to include the Tree Corps, where former prisoners plant trees in the city. More than 10,000 trees have been planted in the city of San Francisco. Organic produce from the gardens is sold to Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley and the Tassajara bakery chain in San Francisco. It is in great demand. The people get a message of not only what it means to work but also something about how they are important and what it means that they are caring for other living things. They are given a message of self-worth and hope. I met some of the people in the project when I lived in the Bay area and I was struck by the honesty of the message. It was not that everything was going to be great, but that it was part of life and that they were part of life. They were taught skills and received information but they were also told that their lives meant something and had some purpose, and that they were not alone.

And something is working. A study of 300 ex-convicts found that within less than half a year of release, 29 percent in the general population had been arrested again, and only six percent were people who were in the garden project. After two years, 55 percent of the general population were back in jail and 24 percent were from the garden project.

Cathrine Sneed now travels the country telling her story. And she is alive and well.

Finding hope in our lives at times when we are down is not an easy thing. But throughout our lives, resurrection is necessary. It is necessary for us to come to a place of resurrection—that we give ourselves to the pain and loss and acknowledge that we have a limited amount of control in the situation. But it is in this place of letting go that we find where it is we need to go. It is in the letting go that we find what it is we need to find.

The ancient alchemists understood that if they were going to attempt to change a base metal like led into something like gold they first needed to break down the base metal by burning it and reducing it into its most elemental parts. It is from here that it could be re-created into something else. But until it is melted down, nothing new can come.

When we are faced with loss, when we are in despair, we are melted down and are changed. We come to see life in a different way. And we see what we can do in the situation we are in. And we are asked to take a strand—to find life for ourselves and for the world. Sometimes we have no choice. It may be that our life depends on it.

This story was found at a Holocaust memorial written by a woman named Gerda Weisman Klien, a survivor of a death camp in World War II. She wrote of how her friend, Ilse, once found a raspberry in the camp, and she carried it in her pocket for a full day so that she could present it on a leaf to her friend. Klien wrote, "Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to a friend."

In our lives, no matter the circumstance in which we find ourselves, may we give ourselves to life. May we take a stand to live the life we are called to live. In that giving may we find life.

As the beauty of the earth awakes again, may we sing, in all of our days, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Amen.

PRAYER

God of this Easter day, we give thanks for all that is our life. For the beauty of this day. For the beauty of green and trees. May we trust in the necessary resurrections of life. May the ears of our ears awake and may the eyes of our eyes be open. May this be so today and in all of our days.

BENEDICTION

On this Easter day, may you know life and may you know life more abundantly. May you bring that life into the world. Go in love and hope this day.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.