by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given March 31, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! We come this Easter day

--to give thanks for the beauty of the earth and the new life springing from it;

--to reconnect with a community of people who wish to know more deeply and love more largely;

--and we come to rediscover the wondrous gift of a free religious faith.

Come, let us worship together!

When I was a little girl, my faith was simple. I was raised Catholic, and so I took my prayer book and my rosary and went to church with my mother and my little brother and sister without fail each Sunday morning. We were all dressed to the nine’s, especially on Easter Sunday. My mother was regal in her navy-blue polka-dot dress and her white hat, her head thrown back proudly. I wore a frilly dress with the sash tied in back, my long hair held with a bow that matched my dress, my white mary janes polished until they shone.

I went to confession, had my First Communion, went to confession some more, and said Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s to atone for the sins of my childhood. My prayers came easily in those days, and were direct. I asked the Virgin Mary for a dog, and lo and behold, I got a dog—a mangy flea-bitten thing, tail tucked under, eyes darting around in fear. I found him in the alley a few blocks from my home. I named him Poochy. My prayer was answered. My faith was strong.

Then when I was around 8 years old, I decided that I wanted a pony. I didn’t just want a pony—I fantasized about a pony daily, imagining myself petting him and riding him and being the envy of the neighborhood. My parents were not so keen on the pony idea, though—a dog is one thing, they explained to me, but we had no place for a pony to stay. "What about the garage?" I said. I felt that they were narrow-minded and without vision, but I let the pony idea go. I began to question the goodness of God. If God was good, why couldn’t I have a pony?

My father and mother split up when I was 9, and I went to live with my father and my paternal grandparents, who were Southern Baptists. For several years, I tried to be a good Catholic, taking my brother and sister to Mass each Sunday, but around the age of 13, I left the Catholic Church for good. I was having several problems with the Church. One was the doctrine of transubstantiation: the bread and the wine of communion supposedly turned into the body and blood of Jesus. I asked the priest if the bread and wine really did actually turn into flesh and blood as they were ingested, and he said yes. Try as I would, I just couldn’t wrap my head around that one. Then the other problem I had was with confession. I felt that some of my sins were—well, in bad taste—and I just couldn’t see confessing them to anyone, much less a priest.

I became a Southern Baptist, the preferred faith of my friends. (I know—you’re thinking "out of the frying pan into the fire.") During a revival, led by the best-looking man I had ever seen—his name was Angel Martinez—I went down the aisle and took his hand and looked into his eyes and accepted Jesus as my savior, as they said, accepted that Jesus died for my sins. Truthfully, I never understood the doctrine of atonement. It just didn’t make any sense. Why would Jesus’s death be necessary to take away my sins? Wasn’t I responsible for my own sins? When I went down into the baptismal waters, I had hoped that I come up feel clean and whole. But I did not. I felt wet and embarrassed, the thin white robe clinging to my young adolescent body.

About the time of my emerging adolescence, the pony idea suddenly and completely faded from my mind. I began instead to fantasize about having a boy friend. I fell in love with Henry, the Baptist preacher’s son. He more or less ignored me, though that did not deter me from loving him. I remember when his father got called by God to a larger church and Henry left town. My heart was broken.

I had this theory about boyfriends at the time—I thought everybody got one, that you get to a certain age, and one just appears. That’s just the way it should work, I thought—like learning to drive, or graduating from the eighth grade. Everything in due turn. But time went on and no boyfriend appeared, so I began to doubt my theory. I decided to test it out. One day I went up to the homeliest senior girl I knew—her name was Yvonne—and I asked her, just out of the blue, "Yvonne, ah, who is your boyfriend?" She said, "I don’t have one." I gulped. I, too, might never have a boy friend. I might never be kissed. Well, this experience really called into question my theology: what good was God if He couldn’t deliver my heart’s desire?

Many Easter Sundays have passed since that time, and here we are once again, trying to understand what God is all about—trying to make sense of this idea of resurrection, trying to comprehend the doctrine of atonement. Easter themes are particularly difficult for many Unitarian Universalists. Most of us—around 90%--are either "come-outers" from other churches—that is, people who have found their childhood faith no longer satisfying—or people who have been raised with no religious tradition at all.

Part of what we do as Unitarian Universalists is to provide a community where people can examine their religious past, accept what was life-giving and be thankful for it, and move on to a mature adult faith that is their own, that has integrity for them. Part of our task is to reframe theological language—words like sin, redemption, resurrection—and give that language contemporary relevance. We want a faith that holds us steady, that gives us resilience, offers hope. But that faith—at least for Unitarian Universalists—cannot be one that we simply adopt wholesale. You see, when life puts us in the trenches, in those places where we feel helpless and hopeless, we need a faith that is our own, that is congruent with who we are, that reflects our own true beliefs and values.

Let’s think for a moment about why some of us left the faith of our childhood. Some of you, like me, simply couldn’t believe the dogma. We could not say Sunday after Sunday that we believe something we really didn’t believe. Some of us may have been turned away by the church itself because we did not adhere closely enough to their theology. You may have read the recent story about Robert Bryant, the man who killed his wife, his four children, and then himself, after being shunned by his church community and his extended family. This tragedy illustrates an extreme form of the suffering that can occur when a church community rejects a person who cannot in good conscience follow that church’s teachings.

I left the Baptist church because when I was divorced from my husband, I became a sinner in the eyes of the church and no longer worthy of teaching the children. I was not shunned, but I was certainly not accepted. My whole social structure had fallen apart. I remember my therapist saying to me, "Why don’t you go over to the Unitarian Universalist church? There are lots of divorced people over there." And the rest, as they say, is history.

Other people leave the church of their childhood because they have been wounded, some grievously wounded. The pedophilia recently exposed in the Catholic Church has been devastating to the men who were abused as boys and devastating to the Church, in terms of the authority of its priests and the trust of its parishioners. Whenever a clergy person—Catholic or otherwise—engages in sexual abuse or misconduct, and when such actions are shoved under the rug by church officials, the religious tradition itself may be called into question.

Some leave the church, or even leave God, because God doesn’t live up to their expectations. God doesn’t always send the pony. For others, the Bible stories have been presented as literal, and so if they simply can’t believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale or that Mary was a virgin, they just throw out the whole story. As did I when I left the Catholic Church, they lack a sense of metaphor. The Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament and the Koran are not history, are not science—they are myth. They reach us at the universal archetypal level and give us not fact but wisdom.

What about the Easter story? How much of it is factually true? Well, we know little of Jesus, but according to the Jesus scholars, not much of the Easter story is true. The four gospels give slightly different accounts, of course, and scholars believe that the narrative details and the words of Jesus were invented in the telling and the re-telling of the story. Much of the Jesus story was suggested by the Hebrew prophecies, for Jesus was to fulfill these prophecies. So if the story isn’t true, then does it lose its meaning? I would maintain that narrative is never true in the literal sense of that word, even when it’s based on a "true story." It’s always an interpretation of the story, an artistic creation that serves a greater truth. If the story is true to human experience, then the story is true.

One particular focus of the Easter story is the doctrine of atonement—this concept I mentioned earlier, the concept that Jesus died for our sins—a concept which many of us have trouble with. I never understood this doctrine growing up, and I never understood it as a seminary student—in fact, I came to some understanding and acceptance of this doctrine only when I was preparing a sermon on Martin Luther King, Jr., during my internship in Dallas, Texas. This is how it happened. I had been out visiting an elderly woman in the parish who had been ill. A very wealthy woman, she was surrounded by the greatest luxury, the most expensive antiques, I think I have ever seen in a private home. I asked her how she was doing, and she was in a snit: "My gardener just up and quit. I don’t know what I’m going to do. He has worked for me for 30 years, and now he just up and leaves me. Said he got a job that pays more. These nigras just don’t know how to be grateful. After all I’ve given him . . ." I found it difficult to minister to her. And she needed ministering to. But I just wanted to run out of there.

But when I was driving back to the church, that’s when it hit me—I got it: Martin Luther King, Jr., died for my sins. For every racial slur I had ever listened to without speaking up. For every black housecleaner I had paid a low wage. For every time I judged as dangerous a black man walking toward me on the street. Martin Luther King, Jr., died for my sins.

And Jesus died for my sins. For every time that I, like the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, was just too tired or too self-involved to stay with someone who was hurting. For every time that I, like Judas, betrayed a friend. For every time that I, like Peter, said I would be loyal and then turned away when trouble came. For every time that I, like Pilate, washed my hands of a political matter and said, "Let somebody else handle it." Yes, Jesus died for my sins. Not to take my sins away so I could get my ticket to Heaven—no, Jesus died for my sins that I might see those sins for what they are, and to see the amazing power of sacrificial love, and to repent of my wrongdoing. Jesus died for my sins.

Oh, I’ve had to change a lot in trying to develop a mature faith, and I’m far from finished with that process. Unitarian Universalism has given me the freedom to doubt, and that is good, for out of doubt integrity is born. But we can’t stop with doubt. When all you can cling to is what you don’t believe, that becomes a dry crust, indeed. That leaves a big empty space where faith needs a home. We must start with the part of us that believes, no matter how small that may be, and nurture that part and help it grow.

I’ve had to change my ideas about God. I used to think of God as "up there"—but then came the age of space travel, and we knew what was up there, and I had to look elsewhere. Where? Inside, perhaps. Or in the shining mountain in the distance or the curve of every leaf.

My prayer life has had to change. As a young child, I saw God as a kind of ethereal Santa in the sky, and my prayer was "gimme, gimme, gimme." As I grew older, I became distinctly uncomfortable with the way God broke the rules—my rules. Where was He when I needed him? I had tried so hard to be "good," so why didn’t I get what I wanted—now? Why did God punish us with disease and accidents? God became a very undependable ally, a real disappointment.

Even in seminary, I hadn’t worked this out. I came to a tough place in my life, and my prayers seemed to go no higher than the ceiling. Is anybody up there? Anybody at all? I wondered. I remember going to a priest—another seminary student had told me that this priest was a very holy man. I called him, and he said he was ill, but he would see me once. Hesitantly, I went into that sparsely furnished room, with its table and two chairs, and I sat in the rocker across from him and poured out my story, weeping through the whole telling. When I finished, he simply said to me: "Prayer is not changing God; prayer is being with God."

Oh, I get it! Prayer is a relationship. So now my prayer life can pretty much be reduced to four statements of two words each—just eight short words, or elaborations of them: "Thank you." "I’m sorry." "Help me." And "What’s next?" First: "Thank you." Simple gratitude, spontaneous thankfulness, is the most basic religious impulse—it connects us with all others as well as with God. Second: "I’m sorry." Contrition—asking for forgiveness—clears the air. Third: "Help me." Asking for help brings the humility that allows the working of the Spirit in our lives. And the final prayer, "What next?", seals the covenant—yes, I understand I do not belong to myself, I belong to you. So what would you have me do, what would you have me become? I’m available." And sometimes, yes, I do pray for what I want. Sometimes a deep desire sweeps over me, a wanting I cannot contain, and I fall to my knees. And yes, I think a loving God hears my prayer. And who is this God who hears my prayer? I don’t have a clue.

What is your faith? Call it by any name. It’s all the same thing—it’s all about leaving home. God told Abraham, "Leave your home, your land, your father’s people, and follow where I will lead." Abraham obeyed. All of the founders of our great religious traditions—Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Mohammad—they all left home. They had to. They had to wander in the wilderness, they had to doubt, they had to go through times of despair: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

To mature spiritually, we must get to a place where we don’t know what to do next. We must have no goal, no path. We must travel blind. We must give up what we thought we were, where we thought we were going, and open ourselves to what we are becoming, trusting that the way will be made known. Sometimes we will feel forsaken. My friends, do not think you can get to Easter Sunday without Good Friday. On the other hand, know this beyond a doubt: Good Friday is not the end of it—for resurrection, for new life, is our sure promise. It is a promise that cheats even the grave and holds us close in the Love that will never let us go. So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

O God who has brought us safe thus far, we confess we are sometimes frightened of the journey ahead. We cannot see clearly, and too often we feel lost and alone. Give us courage for the difficult times, give us faith that a path will open, and we will find the way home. On this Easter day, may we celebrate your good gifts of hope and renewal, and in this community called church, may we be drawn ever more fully into the circle of your love and care. Amen.

BENEDICTION

On this Easter morning, may you know that after the days of rain, the sun will appear, the flowers will blossom, and all the earth will be fair once again. Go in love and go in peace.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.