by Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister

A sermon given April 20, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Easter. What a fitting time we are at in history to arrive at Easter again. What a fitting time of year this holiday falls in. It is Passover, birds are laying eggs, the soft, succulent leaves are poking out of the usually manicured hedges. On Wednesday, my 16- year-old Chihuahua and I went for a morning walk and spring made herself present to us for the first time this year. There is a softness in the air, though Mt. Hood is still imposing in its snowiness on the horizon. There is affection, tenderness between people, though loneliness always looms in the background. Somehow the morning paper seems a little less devastating, though the news isn’t much different than it has been.

Easter is a holiday of resurrection. Life from death. The new isn’t created out of the old, but out of the death of the old. Flowers bloom from the corpses of last year’s growth. The death of the worm feeds the bird in the nest. From death will come life. What a hopeful holiday. My advisor at school, Harvey Cox writes, "Hope . . . is what the Easter story hopes to evoke, a hope that is not based on weighing possibilities but on one’s own experience of what is most real in life – what some call God – especially at times when there seems to be no way out."

The story of Jesus is a story of hope. He lived his life because he had hope. He had a radical hope that even as the world was crashing down around him; even as poverty and corruption crushed his people; even as the empire had its boot on their necks, that there was something worth living for. Jesus knew God. He surrendered to the Holy, lay down his sword and shield, turned that other cheek, and rested in the grace of love.

I think of Jesus as a man. A good man. He was an illiterate, landless peasant who was fed up with being oppressed. I think he was resentful, he was angry. Jesus was human. He protested! His driving of the vendors from the temple was some serious direct action. His entrance into Jerusalem was some well thought out political theater. And the fact that he even went to Jerusalem in the first place . . . A teacher of mine says that going to the capital, where he was sure to be arrested and killed, was not his first choice. To be honest, it wasn’t going so well for the movement in Galilee. A lot of people came to the rallies, but not that many. There wasn’t the critical mass of support to make real changes in their dusty province. So, they went to plan B—go to Jerusalem and shake stuff up. But his vision, his hope was greater than ideas, greater than actions. Jesus gave himself over to God and walked the road of sacrifice because he had no other choice. His hope lay not in a specific vision of the future, but in the faith that whatever the future holds is okay. He found his moment in history where his hope intersected with reality and tragically, bravely, he answered that call

It is this story, this reading of the passion of Jesus that turned me on to the Bible. Jesus the muckraker. Jesus the Yippie. Anarchist or Black-bloc Jesus. I came to Jesus through radical politics. And I found myself reading scripture and finding strength in these stories of brave men and women struggling against the deepest oppression. But somehow, I had missed something. I found myself carrying some torch of self-righteousness high aloft in my heart. I understand what Jesus was saying and doing but, I haven’t really gotten it. I have missed the authentic drive, the non-attached hope for the future that Jesus so perfectly embodied. I, along with many others, found myself on a path steered more by fear and anger than love and hope. This is not the path Jesus laid for us. But it is so easy to be distracted.

It doesn’t look like a very hopeful time when we look across the world. Recently, John Crossan, a prominent Bible scholar speaking to students down at the Starr King School for Ministry, Marilyn and Tom’s alma mater, said, "Rome was not the axis of evil in its Mediterranean place. The city represented the normalcy of civilization within first century options. We are, at the start of the 21^st century, what the Roman Empire was at the start of the first century." His assessment doesn’t inspire hope in me. We are in some cycle of oppression and suffering that goes on and on. Where does that leave us? Where do we find hope?

I am finding that it is not about the politics. It is not about the history or theology or economics or other higher brain functions that we use to explain our world. Jesus does symbolize all these things, and I think he symbolized this for his contemporaries too, but Jesus is much more than a symbol. Jesus didn’t symbolize love, he was love. He didn’t just symbolize promise and salvation, he was promise and salvation. Jesus didn’t represent hope, Jesus was hope. And his horrible end, as a broken, suffering man reminds us how dangerous true hope can be.

A couple of days ago a story of a poor school district suing a wealthy district over funding inequity came on OPB. It just set me off. "They’re going to equalize schools by reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator? If we’re willing to pay for schools, we should be allowed to. They should lift up the poor schools rather than hold down the wealthy!" All reasonable arguments, I think, and ones similar of the problems Portland has had recently with much of the state opposing our new school-supporting income tax. What was most remarkable about this story was how angry I became. How fed up, frustrated, powerless I felt. I felt angry because there is no easy solution, and quickly I fall into the trap of them vs. us. Haves vs. have nots. Educated vs. uneducated.

We all know that feeling. One more law passes, damning the poor to stay poor; one more corporation gets 10 tax-free years in exchange for locating here, a baseball stadium built with our tax dollars. I can almost hear an audible groan, like galley slaves straining at the oar, or a packhorse trembling as one more stone is loaded on her back. And the hurt and fear flows freely, and the one thing we need, the one balm that will soothe that ache is furthest from us in that moment. It is the balm of connection. The connection of each human being to each other is the mother of hope. This is what Jesus was telling us. That is what the Buddha taught. We are all one.

Connectedness. We are brothers and sisters. The health of one is the health of all. Once we can understand that lesson, we can be that connected person. We will embody the teachings of Jesus and find hope in our world.

Two weeks ago I visited with a 3^rd/4^th grade RE class and we talked about the Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." We colored and painted our own versions of this rule. Mine turned out really well. It has glitter and gold paint . . . We all understand this rule, virtually every major world religion has some version of this teaching. But like all the important things in life, understanding has so little to do with it. Being is the key.

Be that person who feels, who knows in your bones that your fate is not different than anyone else’s. That Being . . . thinking falls short in describing Being. Think about the poem we read about peaches. Poems, like music and painting, get us where thinking can’t. "O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach." Now that is being. If you have ever bought a peach at a roadside stand, you know what she is saying. She is being a peach eater and we are one with her in that. We are it.

That is what this connectedness, the root of hope, is. It is being with each other. Being connected, we have no choice but to feel the pain of others. We have no choice but to truly do unto others as we would have them do unto ourselves. We will know that we are not different, that my well being is utterly linked to your well being. That my school doing well at the expense of yours is not okay, no matter how difficult it is, no matter the politics. That me stepping on you to get ahead just doesn’t make sense.

I am working on this for myself desperately, for I know that this connection, being a person in the world among others is the most important lesson before me. Being this in my core; being connected is what will complete me as not only a minister, but as a human being. This is not something that we can learn from a book. This not something we can get a degree in. It is something that we must learn by being in the world. By being in the world mindfully.

The key to hopeful connectedness is humility. Humbleness. This is not something I learned in school. Or the Marines. Or in Business. Humility: I am not better than you. No one is better than anyone else. Of course some of us may be better at some tasks than others, some of us may be better at taking a test, or throwing a ball, or accumulating wealth, but skills, talents have nothing to do with our worth as a person. Arguments for Affirmative Action speak to this well. What makes a better law student: the ability to score high on tests or the ability to relate to oppressed populations? Is it high earning potential or willingness to do low paying public service law? I don’t know if anyone has the answer to that question, but we do fight over it, don’t we?

Where do we find that humility? Where do we gain that understanding that we are not different from our neighbor? The place I have been going to, the only place that I have seen a glimmer of light in, is Faith. Faith on many levels. Faith is believing in the Holiness of existence. It is trusting in the world’s ability to work out. Faith is believing that our fellow humans are worth being around, that we are Good. But the key to faith, the path to humility, connectedness and hope runs much deeper, and much closer to home. We must learn to trust ourselves.

The only thing that we have any ability to change, any ability to truly care for, any possibility of actually understanding is ourselves. Trust yourself. Trust that your inner core, your inner being, is good. This is your soul. Trust that you are strong enough to survive in the world. You are. Trust that you just might be right, and that the withering criticism you hear might not be true. Listen to the world, learn what you need to, then let it go. Trust that the voices you hear in your head that say, "You are not enough. You need to be better. You don’t measure up," are simply wrong. Because they are wrong. We are good enough.

In my life, I spend so much time protecting myself from criticism; externally and from that sometimes deafening inner critic. I get so distracted from the important things in life: noticing spring, listening well to people, being still. I am usually so worried that people are watching and might think less of me. I heard somewhere that everyone’s ego would be destroyed if we really understood how little time everyone else spends thinking about us. So why do so many of us dwell on ourselves and our perceived shortcomings? When we see that our core being, our soul is good enough, we are led to a place of security. Outcomes are not certain, the world is unpredictable and scary, but if we truly trust in our own goodness, our own worth, this uncertainty isn’t so dangerous. In this kind of security we learn that we are not worse, or better than anyone else. But we are the same, and in this sameness, are completely interdependent. Through this, the hope can come.

Hope is hard. It is one of the greatest struggles I face. Having hope. Even if we can learn to trust ourselves; even if we can free ourselves to feel the interconnectedness of humanity, it is still a leap of faith to have hope. Hope is not grounded in things getting better. Things might not get better. So hope does not lie is our ability to change the world, because we really can’t. Hope is Active faith; it is partnership with the Holy. Hope is knowing that the big picture is infinite and far beyond our ability to perceive it all, let alone change or fix much. Hope, however, is knowing that in the end, life will take the form it needs to take. The world will end up the way it needs to, and hope leads us to do what we need to do. It leads us to be our true self, our authentic self in relationship with God. That is the hope of Jesus. That is the hope I seek.

There are places where hope lives. And in finding these places, finding those rare and authentic people who have the faith to live hopefully, we may find inspiration for our own hope. I found hope at the Sisters of the Road Café. The café is a place where homeless people and advocates have formed a community. They have a café where food is offered at a fair price for all. The people who run it are the same folks being served, and the suffering some of them have experienced is nearly incomprehensible those of us from the middle classes. I added being housed to my list of privileges I enjoy like being white and male and educated. I have taken housing for granted all my life. They haven’t. And the hope they embody . . . Each day, getting up, doing it again, working hard because that is what they do. Do they believe they will see a just economic system in their lifetimes? Not really. Are they saving the world? Well, little by little, one hungry person at a time, but not in a grand way. But even as they have been beaten down again and again, they have a hope that life is going to work out, though they may not live to see it. Their hope inspires them to serve one human being at a time, and serve them in the way of non-violence, not because it is a good tactic, not because it is inoffensive, but because they see that they are one with each other. There are not worthy or unworthy people, or good or bad people, there are just people. Each of them has found that they have something wonderful to offer the world, and with courage and humility, they do that.

I found hope in a woman who, on her 101^st birthday, was asked about her favorite Bible verse. She recalled the story of the woman who anointed Jesus’ head with a jar of very expensive perfume. It was worth a year’s salary. The disciples were angry, "We could have sold that and fed the poor for months!" They cried. But Jesus quieted them and said, "Leave her alone, she has done what she could." "She did what she could," the 101-year-old said. That verse gave her the hope that her faith, and the service she performed over the years was not in vain. Have we done we do what we could? Have we done what we could knowing that maybe it wouldn’t work, but it was what we had to do?

We can not save the world. None of us can. And no matter how loudly we shout, no matter how hard we work are going to bring peace to the Middle East or end domestic violence or right any of the countless wrongs in the world. But that does not excuse us from trying. Jesus knew his death wouldn’t change things. The myth and reality of his death and resurrection inspired hope in his followers then, and it continues today. Hope frees us to make the choice to do what we can. Live hopefully: learn to trust yourself. Live hopefully: work hard to be that connected person. Live hopefully: do what you can, even though you have considered all the facts. Live hopefully as your authentic self, answering the call of the Holy each and every day you live. Amen.

PRAYER

Holy one, lead us on. This Easter morning, may we taste the loving sacrifices so many have made. Guide us through our confusion, our grasping and our suffering. May we be made still so we can hear your call in our soul. Lead us inward to the loving arms of hope. Amen.

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Copyright 2003, Brent Gavin Was, Intern Minister.  All right reserved.