IS OURS AN EASTER FAITH?

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday March 27, 2005


[extemporaneous introduction - Easter snowstorms and the 22nd Psalm]

Of course, one of the great things about having my mother here visiting me this past week is that it gave me a chance to think back about what Easter was like for me and my brothers when we were kids. As a lot of you know, I grew up attending Unitarian Universalist churches -- first at University Unitarian Church in Seattle (where I would eventually work for a year as an intern assistant minister), and then later at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto California. But I don't really have that many specific memories of attending church at Easter -- just a few vague recollections about having to get a little extra dressed-up (which in my case meant a short-sleeved white shirt with a clip-on bow tie), and trying to get my cowlick to lie down; and also the delicate negotiations with my mother about how much candy we would be allowed to eat before leaving the house, and how well we would have to behave at church in order to be able to redeem our Easter Baskets when we got back home: a complicated incentive formula combining the threat of penalties and the promise of rewards, along with a few outright bribes, all of which were carefully calculated by her to produce the optimal appearance of youthful prayerfulness during that hour or so we were required to sit still in church. Of course, my brothers and I were even further motivated by the knowledge that if for some reason we DIDN'T get our Easter Baskets back right away, our Dad would quickly nibble them down to next to nothing, just like he did at Halloween, naturally beginning with the very best stuff. I'm not really sure what kind of life lessons I was supposed to learn from this experience, but I did manage to figure out how to sit still in church without wiggling around TOO much, and also (unfortunately) how to gobble down the entire contents of an Easter Basket so quickly that it made my tummy hurt.

My mom was kinda "old school" when it came to Easter baskets. Sure, there was always plenty of candy, but she also always insisted on boiling and coloring a dozen real eggs -- which, of course, none of us kids had any real use for -- and then for Easter Breakfast she would use them to make us something she called "Goldenrod Toast" -- which was basically hard-boiled egg whites in a creme sauce poured over white toast and then topped with the grated egg yokes. It was something we only ate once a year, and none of us really liked it, but we ate it anyway, just because it was something we always ate at Easter, just like my mom had eaten it when she was a little girl, and probably her mother before her.

And those are my childhood memories of Easter. Of course, now that I'm an adult (and a minister) I think of Easter very differently. Even in Unitarian Universalist congregations, Easter and Christmas Eve are the two "high holy days" which anchor the church year between the Sunday after Labor Day and Memorial Day weekend. It's a day when I can almost always count on a higher than usual attendance, which means of course that I always want a little better than usual sermon as well. Several years ago I wrote what many people (including a retired Methodist minister whose opinion I greatly respect) have told me is the best Easter sermon they have ever heard; and during the years that I worked as a visiting consultant I used to preach that same sermon every Easter in a different church (which is probably how it got to be so good). So when I arrived here in Carlisle to become the settled minister at FRS, I was very tempted just to continue this practice...until it dawned on me that for some you this may well be the only Sunday you attend church all year, and I would hate for you to come to think of my Easter Sermon the way that I remember my mom's Goldenrod Toast.

Writing and preaching a good Easter sermon is a difficult challenge for a Unitarian Universalist minister. Basically, there are two options. The first is the tried and true "Easter is a metaphor of Spring" sermon: an ancient, pagan celebration of the end of winter and the return of new life, which Christianity later adopted and adapted to its own purposes. And the second (which can also be used in combination with the first) is the slightly more sophisticated "Easter is not about the Resuscitation of a Corpse" sermon: that whatever else you may think, the miracle of the Resurrection is not (as Bishop John Shelby Spong once described it) "A conjuring trick with bones," but rather represents something else at once far more mysterious, more subtle, and more spiritual.

The consequences of knowing (or not knowing) the real difference between resuscitation and resurrection -- between the revival of an unconscious (or even apparently dead) physical body, and "Something Else" -- can be seen in a couple of situation that are prominently in the news just now. I hope this doesn't come as a shock to anyone, but Pope John Paul the Second is on his last legs, and approaching the end of his life. No one can be certain how much longer he may live: it may be weeks, or months...or it may just be a matter of days...but I personally think it would be highly unlikely for him to survive to see another Easter. I could be wrong of course, since I'm not a Doctor...(or at least not that kind of Doctor). But what is most interesting to me is the way that the Pope is reacting to his situation. Obviously, he's been receiving excellent medical care (including some fairly invasive procedures, like a tracheotomy), but more importantly (at least according to his Vatican spokesman, since he apparently can no longer speak for himself) Pope John Paul is dealing spiritually with his failing health by "serenely abandoning himself to the Will of God."

Serenely Abandoning Himself to the Will of God. Contrast that attitude to the controversy that has been swirling around the fate of poor Terri Schiavo. I certainly feel a great deal of personal sympathy for Terri's parents Bob and Mary Schindler, and also for her husband Michael, and for all the people who know and care about her and who have had to live with her tragic situation for the past 15 years. And I certainly don't want to contribute further to any of the stereotypes or gross generalizations and outright misrepresentations that have been circulating around this case in recent days. (And if any of you still have doubts about the actual facts of this situation, I would encourage you to look at the report of Terri's independent Guardian Ad Litem, which is easily found on the net). People obviously have very strong opinions about some of the profound moral and ethical issues evoked by her situation: opinions which can easily distort one's views and understanding of the medical facts (which are frankly at this point both clear and well-established). Yet ultimately this is not just a question of the "medical facts" -- it's about a religious world view which has confused the nominal survival of a physical body with the ultimate transcendence of the human soul, and which is therefore fundamentally incapable of serenely abandoning itself to the Will of God. Instead, it continues "to seek the living among the dead," in effect worshiping the flesh rather than the spirit, and thus (in my interpretation at least) committing the sin of Idolatry in the bargain.

This next part is really a topic for a whole other sermon( and I'll probably get around to preaching it someday), but I never really understood what Christian faith (and Easter in particular) was really all about until I studied a little Buddhism. And it all had to do with this notion of "serenely abandoning" oneself to the "Will of God," and what that really means. In the second chapter of Paul's letter to the Phillipians, Paul quotes the words of an earlier Christian hymn, a text which represents perhaps one of the oldest independent expressions of the beliefs of the very first Christians. The passage goes like this:

"Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death --
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exhalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father."

It's this notion of a God who "empties" himself and becomes a slave, who embraces humility and obedience even to the point of a painful death on a cross, that is so unusual. It's not about power and glory and being exhalted -- the kind of things you might expect from a Diety. Rather, it is only by abandoning one's attachment to those things (along with the desire for them) that human beings acquire the capacity to become more "godly" themselves.

And it all starts with Humility, which is both the most important and the most difficult virtue to master. It's difficult because there is such a thin line between true Humility and the experience of humiliation, an experience which often leads to marginalization rather than eventual exhaltation. Both words share the same root -- humus or "dirt." A common source of humiliation is some form of scandal (another lovely Greek word which means "to stumble")...we trip ourselves up and end up eating dirt, and afterwards we feel humiliated. But we humble ourselves when we recognize that "from dust we have come and to dust we shall return;" when we ground ourselves in a profound appreciation of the limitations, the fragility, and the contingency of our lives.

And this realization that we ALL sometimes stumble becomes the foundation for the rest of our spiritual formation. From Humility we learn Gratitude, and develop our capacity for Empathy and Compassion -- an ability to listen without fear and to feel the pain of others, along with the courage to be present and vulnerable to their affliction. We develop a sense of Tolerance for diversity, and an authentic appreciation for those who are different from ourselves; as well as the capacity for Forgiveness -- which is again a difficult virtue to practice, and sometimes an even more difficult gift to accept.

Eventually the three so-called traditional "Theological Virtues" take root in this fertile ground -- Faith, Hope, and "Charitas" (which can be translated either as "Love" or "Charity"): the ability to Trust what we cannot see, along with a patient Optimism that can sustain us in the presence of the unknown, and a Generous Affection for our fellow creatures...in which the ACT of Generosity often both precedes and cultivates the Attitude.

And then finally, Liberation...the fruit of all these other virtues. Freedom, liberty, the experience of being "released:" released from bondage; released from sin; released from the tyranny of our ambition and our enslavement to the demands of our appetites; from the prison of our physical bodies; from our attachment to the material things of the world, things which (in the Buddhist terminology) "come into being and pass away;" released from our obsessive need to be in control of every little detail of our own lives, and the lives of those around us.

This is the real "miracle" of Easter...not the promise of physical resuscitation, but the spiritual power of serenely abandoning the things that don't really matter in order to embrace humility and obedience and all of the good things that grow from that simple act of letting go. And in that act of emptying ourselves, we open ourselves to the possibility of being filled with the Spirit of God, of being exhalted and glorified and lifted up before all the world -- not for our own sake, but as an example and an inspiration for all who might see and do likewise. And in that moment of Liberation, all our suffering, and all our sacrifices, suddenly become profoundly meaningful, and we become "at one" with something Greater than ourselves. This is the miraculous Resurrection we witness on Easter Morning: when New Life comes once more into the world in all its power, and makes all things new again.