by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come this Easter day,

Thankful for our greening earth,

Thankful for the community gathered here,

Thankful for promise of New Life.

Come, let us worship together.

Easter has always been a bit problematic for Unitarian Universalists.  We’re uncertain about what to do with it.  Some of my colleagues have come up with sermon titles that show their discomfort with Easter Sunday, titles such as “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” and “Disappointed Tomb Raiders.”  One of my colleagues, Daniel Budd, remembers that one year at Easter time his church was considering placing an ad in the local newspaper.  A congregant suggested as the headline for their Easter ad:  “Join us. We’re not sure what happened.”

We’re not sure what happened.  But then neither is anyone else.  If you read the various scriptural accounts, you’ll notice that Saturday is kind of left out of the picture.  There’s Good Friday, the time of the crucifixion.  There’s Sunday, the time of the resurrection.  But Saturday—Saturday is just silent.  Nobody knows what happened.

Did Jesus literally rise from the dead?  Well, the scripture doesn’t support that.  He was seen by his disciples is various guises.  Sometimes he was not at first recognized, and he was not in his bodily form.  He sort of came and went, so to speak.  In fact, this kind of thing happens much of the time when people lose a loved one—as many as 45% of widows and widowers report seeing their spouses after the spouse dies.  Did Jesus ascend, body intact, into heaven?  Well, since we have traveled into space, that calls into question this place called “Heaven.”  Is it a real place, “up there”?  Probably not.  So what happened?  Who rolled the stone away?  What happened to the body of Jesus?  We don’t know.  And ultimately, it doesn’t matter.  What’s really important is what happened to the followers of Jesus.  That is what the resurrection is about.  Not Jesus’ new life—their new life.

Let’s recount the story.  The various scriptures all tell it differently, but I’m going with Mark, thought to be the first account written.  Jesus had been executed as a common criminal the Friday before, and there had been no time to anoint his body for the grave, as was the custom in that day.  There had been no rituals of mourning.  The disciples had fled from the scene in fear. Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Salome, a follower, come early on Sunday morning to the cemetery.  These women are here to do what they can to bring some modicum of respect to this ugly, devastating event.  I don’t know anything about Salome.  But Mary Magdalene, according to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, was Jesus’ favorite disciple—in fact, Peter was jealous of the loving attentions Jesus paid to Mary, and she to him.  What must she have been feeling that morning? And then there was Mary his mother, the woman who had birthed him and raised him and loved him as her own flesh—and had elected to stay at the foot of the cross with him while he suffered in agony and died.  What must have been going on inside that woman? 

When they get to the tomb, it is still dark, but even in the pre-dawn light, they see that the heavy stone that had been placed by the Roman soldiers in front of the tomb has been rolled aside.  There is only one conclusion that they can come to—this is the final cruelty, the final injustice:  they won’t even have a body to anoint, won’t have a way to say goodbye.  They enter the empty tomb, all hope gone, and there they find “a young man clothed in a long white garment.”  Clearly he is not of this world.  He tells them, “Be not afraid.  You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He is risen.  He is not here.  Go, and tell his disciples.”  And the women run from the place, trembling and amazed. 

The angel tells them “Be not afraid,” the same message the angel brought to Mary so many years ago when she was told she was to birth the Messiah.  And of course she was afraid, and of course these three women on this day are afraid.   This is such a very human story!  Of course we are afraid when the hand of God reaches down to us and God says,  “I’m here, I’m with you, pay attention.  Things are going to be changing.  You think that it’s all over?” God says.  “You think you can adjust to this deadness?  Oh, no, no, no.  You are called to new life.”  And we look upon this new life with fear and trembling.

What an amazing story!  It has everything in it.  Let’s back up a little bit, and get more of the context—let’s go back to the Garden of Gethsemane.  Jesus knows he is going to his death soon, and he asks his disciples to go and pray with him.  But even as he kneels and prays in his agony, the disciples fall asleep.  Well, they’re tired.  He tells Peter, the one he’s depending on to carry on his work, he says, “When the cock crows thrice, you will deny me.”  Peter is incredulous.  “Me?  Impossible!  I love you, Jesus.”  And yet the prophecy comes true. Then there is the Passover meal, known as the Last Supper.  This is the last time Jesus will eat and drink with these ones who are his closest supporters.  And he says to the group, “Tonight, one of you will betray me.”  “Is it I?  Is it I?” they all say, looking at one another.  And Judas says, “Is it I?”  And Jesus says, “You have said it.”  Jesus tells them that he will no longer be with them, and they begin to argue over who will be honored the most in heaven.  Now they’ve been traveling with Jesus for three years, listening to his message, and they still don’t get it.  The end is here.  How must Jesus have felt?  How misunderstood.  How utterly alone, as he went to face his torture and death.  The chief priests turn him over to the authorities.  Pontius Pilate passes the buck.  The crowd—they don’t really know Jesus.  They are angry and fearful, and they make Jesus their scapegoat.  The Roman soldiers?  Well, they’re just doing their job.  Another day, another crucifixion.  Let’s roll the dice to see who gets the robe.

Yes, the story has everything in it.  The agony of a country occupied by a foreign power.  Religious leaders more interested in keeping the status quo, more interested in protecting themselves and their positions, than in living out of the word of God—a word of liberation, of justice.  A prophet who is filled with the Spirit of the Divine, who has come to say that Love is the way—not violence, not coercion—that power is in servanthood, and whose followers who think in terms of earthly power. There are friends just too tired to hang in there—friends who say they will be with you to the end, and then run when the going gets rough.  There is betrayal of a close friend, for a few shekels of gain. Violence in the street.  Violence by the authorities.  Does any of this sound familiar?  Oh, my friends, we live in a Good Friday kind of world!  How much we need Easter!  How much we need hope, how much we need transformation, in these times.

I find the Jesus story fascinating, compelling, and tragic.  Jesus is my kind of man.  A carpenter, who could work with his hands, a man of the people.  And yet a learned man who studied in the synagogue and knew the law. A man who doted on children.  Who knew how to have a good time, who ate and drank with the poor and the rich alike.  A man who didn’t mince words when he was in the presence of hypocrisy.  A man who would talk with tax collectors, who were the scum of the earth in those days, and who would stop and have conversation with prostitutes, with full respect for their dignity and worth as human beings. A man who was totally given over to the one he called Abba, Father.  The question I’ve always had is:  why did this good man have to die?  He had only three years of ministry.  Wouldn’t it have been better for him to continue to teach until a ripe old age?  Wouldn’t his movement gotten off to a better start if the disciples had had more time to mature in their understanding of Jesus’s message, to mature spiritually?  I abhor violence, and I refused to see Mel Gibson’s exploitative execution film The Passion of the Christ, but long before this film, I have shed tears in reading in the Bible what they did to Jesus, to this Spirit-filled man.  I don’t like this part of the story. 

I agree with Dan Ivins, my Baptist minister friend, who serves the church next door—in his sermon at the ecumenical Good Friday service, he said, “Couldn’t we have just skipped the whole crucifixion thing?”  Why does that have to be a part of the story?  Consider, Dan said, what would have happened if Jesus had done what he fantasizes doing in The Last Temptation of Christ, the controversial film based on Katzanzakis’novel of the same name. What if Jesus had decided, “You know, things are getting too hot, politically speaking—I think I’ll chill out.  I’ve always had a thing for Mary Magdalene, and I know she’s totally in love with me.  I think I’ll just back off this preaching and healing for a while, and get married.  You know, settle down, start a little carpentry shop, raise a few children.  It would be a good life.  And on weekends, maybe I would teach a little in the synagogue—they’d let me, so long as I didn’t make any cutting remarks about the Pharisees.” 

No, it just wouldn’t work that way, would it?  No death on the cross, no resurrection, and nobody would have ever heard of Jesus:  he would be just one more itinerant preacher—charismatic, to be sure—who had some gifts of healing and made a splash for a few years traveling around Galilee.

Yes, there had to be the death, without which there could be no resurrection.  But given that we’re not talking about a literal resurrection, then what do I mean?  Well, as I said, Easter is not primarily about what happened to Jesus.  It is primarily about what happened to other people by virtue of his death—about what happened in the lives of those early followers, and what can happen, then, in our own lives.  Good Friday was a horrible day—the man the disciples thought would be king, would be lifted up above all, was tortured and killed as a common criminal. All was lost. God did not speak.  Death was—well, just the end, the end of everything. 

But something very strange happened to the followers of Jesus after Easter Sunday, after the resurrection.  They somehow lost their fear.  They became so imbued with love, that they could take up their cross—whatever that might be—and follow Jesus.  And many of them went the way of suffering and death.  You know about the early Christians—how they were hunted down, martyred, fed to lions—and still they went on bearing witness.  There was a radical, a dramatic shift; they were transformed.  Faith somehow rose again in the hearts of those whose faith had died.  They found new life, and they went on to bear witness to others.  They spoke of something in the human spirit, they spoke of a love that is so powerful that it transcends even death. There was a transformation from absolute despair to a new sense of hope, from a feeling that Jesus was irrevocably gone, to knowing beyond a doubt that he was still with them. 

In various accounts Jesus appears briefly to different ones of the disciples.  In the account in John, Mary Magdalene sees the risen Christ, and as she moves to embrace him, he says, “Don’t touch me.”  He is saying, in effect, “Don’t cling to me.”  This is a new day.  Things are not as they were, and you are called now into a new kind of being, into a new responsibility you have not had before.  In our own lives, we live through the shock and the pain of our Good Friday, when all is lost; we live in the silence of Saturday, in the emptiness, and as we understand that that which we’ve pinned our hopes and dreams on is really gone, we long for what we have lost, for what we miss.  Easter doesn’t change that.  Things will not be the way they were.  What Easter does bring is the sure knowing that there will be a new day, a new vision.  Easter brings the promise of new life. 

And it seems so often true that we have to go through the Good Friday and the empty, silent Saturday, in order to get to Easter Sunday.  It is so hard to die to the old—to change.  Personally, I just have to become so miserable, or so angry, or so sad, or so scared, that I give up.  I say, OK, God whatever you want.  I don’t like myself this way.  I’m open to change.  I want new life.  Help me. Help me, O God.  In religious language, this is called relinquishment, and it’s hard to come by for Unitarian Universalists, because we’re so smart, so capable, and so spiritually stubborn.  Sometimes God has to just pick us up by the scruff of the neck and shake us and say, “Pay attention!”  I think maybe God is trying to say to us, “I want more for you than you’ve been willing to become.  Come on, wake up!”  And we hear this and we run, fearful from the tomb, trembling at the thought of this new life.  Afraid of our beauty, afraid of our power.

Yes, we’re afraid.  It’s only human.  But our God will not let us go.  On that first Easter morning, God spoke, and God speaks again and again, in the same way.  Against all odds, against reason, we are called to new life.  When we think that evil seems to have the upper hand, when peace in our world and in our own hearts seems elusive, when we seem stuck with our same old selves, when death seems to get the last word, Love calls us by name out of the tomb, out of the tragedy and pain of our lives, saying to each of us, you are precious, you are worthy.  Stop your endless searching.  Give up the shame and the strangling doubt.  Love says,  “I am with you.  I always have been.  Lift up your eyes.  After the long winter, the light has come.”  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

God of Easter, God of hope, we know the feeling of loss, of shattered dreams; and we have experienced your silence too long.  Lift us from our tiredness, take away our cynicism, and make real this ancient promise of new life.  Give us on this Easter day the courage to leave what we have been and move to what we yet can be. Let us dare to hope, dare to dream, once again.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May the Spirit that is Easter speak your name, and may the grace of the season fall upon you.  Go in love, and go in peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.