Happy Easter. Did you love the story of the Birds’ Gift that Cassandra shared? I loved that it is from the Ukraine. If you can’t find a message about hope rising up in resistance to the violence of empire in the Ukrainian story this year… …well.
I loved the way that story centered on the generosity of the community and of the spirit, care for others and gratitude rather than the suffering of the birds.
And I loved that the story began with those golden birds being rescued from the snow.
Here we are in mid-April, and the weather story of this week has been snow and sleet and hail. I was texting with a congregant a couple of days ago…heartfelt, pastoral messages…when suddenly her text went to all caps…MORE HAIL…there was also an expletive involved.
Today we get a break from the precipitation…is that Mother Nature nodding to this holiday of rebirth and resurrection?
What story do we tell today? What story are we living? What is the story we need to live into…in this season?
There is the story of the renewal in the earth after winter dark and dormancy. We live in and into that story each year. We feel it in our spirits…despite the snow this week. That is a story of cycles…of birth and death and rebirth, of rising up and returning. Our bodies know that story…our bodies live that story.
But there is also the narrative of renewed life…of resurrected life that centers the Christian story…the story of Jesus’ life and his death and what followed his death…that story so deeply a part of the western cultural tradition…
Our Universalist religious ancestors found different meaning in that story. And our Unitarian religious ancestors rejected it… …the miracles involved were more than their rationalism could accept…
Even those among us who find meaning in the Christian tradition struggle with some of the ways the Easter story is told in many churches…the story of how his death had some power to save us…
We prefer the story of a Jewish teacher long ago who became a martyr, killed by the empire of his day, and whose spirit somehow lived on in those who followed him after he died.
The stories of his death and his life led to the creation of communities that celebrated the promise of his presence…the early Jesus communities…
And those communities changed and grew into the Christian churches that we see around us today.
What I know is that even we gather to hear that story each year….
perhaps to search for some truth that we still need to discover…or to discover again each year…because we all still yearn to rise, to find the love of living restored in us, to quote Clarke Wells in our Responsive Reading. To be lured to fresh schemes of life…
Because we all somehow need that story or will, as Imani Perry told her sons…after all the violence we are told to accept…because loss is a part of life just as is new birth and the return of spring.
We tell that story each year and we wrestle with it…not because its meaning is easy for us to discern…to figure out…but because there is a knowing in us that we are not done with that story…or that that story is not yet done with us.
Perhaps what we need to remember is that there is more than one way to tell that Christian story…
Tom read from the Gospel of Mark…how the women rose early to go and prepare Jesus’ body with spices…
How they discovered his body gone…
The story ends with their bewilderment and their fear…”they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.”
The Gospel of Mark was the first, the earliest story about Jesus’s life that was written down. The other stories were written much later and added increasing certainty as the Jesus communities developed….
What was the meaning of his death and of the apparent absence of his body? What did it mean?
Rev. Molly Housh Gordon writes:
“Could Jesus really rise again? Could it really be that the violence of empire and the pain of loss would be denied the final word? In the first, ancient telling of the story, we don’t get an answer. There is no resolution. There is no certainty. There is only a seed of complicated hope and the persistence of human love to help it grow.”
The persistence of human love.
The women were dealing with the loss of one they loved. Sooner or later we all learn something about living through and living after loss.
We all also know something of the persistence of love.
The women rose early…despite their loss…the women rose up…
The Easter story is not just the story of loss and suffering…
It is also the story of our human response to loss and suffering…the rising to the occasion…the rising to care and to practice that care.
The rising of the women to practice care is the first rising up in the Easter story.
The later Gospels and other books in the New Testament, written in the various Jesus communities that developed, tell more elaborate stories about what followed…they tell about the power of the spirit and the promise of a final victory for love…
But one important thing to remember is that those communities rose up and kept rising up…despite the response of Empire…
Individual spirits were lifted, it is true…but the rising up was into community…
And the promised victory of love was realized in community…
The rising up was to model…to live the life that they wanted to live…not the life empire told them to live…
A life of generosity, care for one another, hospitality…and joy…
A life in community where the spirit moved and moved them to constant resurrection and renewal of the spirit…
Diana Butler Bass, progressive Christian theologian, wrote in a post earlier this week, that most Christians have gotten the emphasis in the Gospel story wrong.
She believes that those early Jesus followers did not experience that first Easter primarily through the lens of loss. It was not the violence or the sacrifice that moved them.
It was the joyous celebration of the Passover…the celebration of liberation that spoke to their spirit… and the yearning for liberation in their own lives.
That is why…in the later gospels, the risen Jesus does not call the disciples to Calvary, does not center his last words to them on the cross…
He meets them, returns to them, for meals and conversation and commitment to the power of love…
From Diana butler Bass: “For centuries, Christians have been told that everything changed that [first Easter] day, that the cross was the bridge between the sinful world [of empire] and the world of salvation. The cross is all that matters.
[The day of his death was a somber day of course.] But what if the most significant day [in that Holy Week] was the day before…the day [when Jesus washed the feet of his followers] and the day of [that last celebratory meal], the day of conviviality and friendship, the day of Passover and god’s liberation? What if we’ve gotten [Easter’s] emphasis wrong?”It was his life in community that moved his followers. It was not his death, but his life that inspired his followers and gave them faith to carry on. This is the stunning discovery by Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock that so many of the earliest churches did not even include an image of the cross. It was his life…not his death in which they found their hope.
And after his death, his followers rose up to become what Jesus called The Kingdom of God…
They rose up to embody that dream of Beloved Community… by their living of it.
Those communities and that faith as it evolved…came to be associated with empire and most progressive theologians and all liberation theologians see that association as a major wrong turn….
There is a lot to say about the rising up that surrounded that first Easter…with its loss and the bewilderment that followed.
There is a lot to say because that first Easter left those who had loved Jesus without certainty…it left them questioning…not questioning the love they had known with their teacher…about that they were certain.
Those early communities rose up and kept rising up…asking themselves what lives they would choose to live…after his loss…
Would it be lives centered on that loss?
Would it be lives centered on the dictates of empire…grim lives, deemed of worth only to serve the purposes of the privileged?
Or would they center their lives on the hope they had found in his life and in their lives together…
How he loved dinner parties and invited sinners and centurions to join him at a welcome table…
How he loved to gather people on hillsides and lakesides and preach to them about kindness and abundant life… about justice, equity and compassion…about welcome and inclusion…
There was so much in his message that is central in our Unitarian Universalist way of being religious…the impulse to bring people together, to affirm the power that is present in pluralism…the faith that difference can be experienced as blessings, not s curses…
How he believed in the power of love as embodied in communities of commitment…
Those early Jesus communities choose to live in and into that story…not in denial of the loss…because losses are a part of life…the need for comfort and renewal is a truth we cannot deny…
But there is hope and love to be found in the creating and sustaining of communities of the spirit..
Of welcome tables where joy can be reclaimed and from which we can all rise…
We come to this Easter in need of renewal…there is no doubt about that. We have lived through two years when separation has been the path to safety…
And we are now, in this Easter season, regathering….yearning for community…learning that life will never…was never…free of risk…
As we re-gather…the message of the Easter story I want to tell today…is that now is the time to ask ourselves how we want to live…
The story I want to tell is about our opportunity…purchased by our long isolation and so much loss…
This opportunity when old habits have been disrupted and we have the chance to see with new eyes…
This opportunity will not come again in this same way…
How do we want to live?
The question for us is whether we are willing to take our lives seriously enough to honestly ask that question…
Because asking that question is the first step…Asking that question is where our resurrection can begin…
What will each of us do with our one wild and precious life?
And how will we shape and re-shape our communities to allow us to live…not as the cultural empire of our day tells us to live…and not as we were living before…but as the spirit calls us to live…with lives pointing toward liberation
Will we choose the possibility that love might have the last word? Will we have the faith to truly begin living as if love were real? Will we align our living with what we value most?
Will we take our lives seriously enough to live them as we want to live?
Will we choose both personal liberation and the relationships of trust and accountability that authentic freedom requires….
Will we rise up?
The question for us…this Easter…is whether we will choose…
To rise.
Prayer
Spirit of Life. God of Easter and new growth blossoming in the earth
around us.
Help us find the rebirth that can point us toward hope.
Help us listen to our lives and our yearning for connection.
Help us bring what we have learned in these last two years…
Help us bring our knowing that even when we are most uncertain,
Even when we are grieving, even when the losses keep coming,
Even when we are weary of body and of spirit…
We keep hearing that still small voice
That insists that there can be a better way
That tells us the Beloved Community can be built
That voice that tells us that the Kingdom of God
Is possible among us and within us
If we would only listen to the truth of our lives
That voice that calls us to keep rising, in love.
May that be so.
Amen
Topics: Liberation