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READING:
“Why Easter” by Marilyn Sewell
(excerpted from Quest: The Church of the Larger Fellowship, Vol LXV, No.
4, April 2010)
"Why do we have Easter anyway? Where does it come from? Well, the simple
answer is that the name is derived from the German Eostre, a fertility
goddess who was honored with a fertility festival. When the Germanic
tribes were Christianized, Eostre merged with the Christian Pesach
celebrations. That’s the history. But why do we persist in celebrating
Easter? I believe we celebrate Easter because we know we’re in bondage,
and we want to be free ...
"Anyone who lives for very long in this world will know what it is to be
in bondage, trapped by cultural expectations, or by the past, or just by
circumstance. We know what it is to suffer various kinds of deaths: not
only the loss of people we love, but the loss of a dream, the loss of a
life plan, the loss of certain abilities and options as age creeps up or
as we deal with illness or injury. And so we all, whatever our theology,
need Easter ...
"I don’t need a corpse rising from the dead to believe in the miracle of
Easter.....The real miracle (historically) is what happened to Jesus’
disciples. They were delivered from their preoccupation with self, from
their egotistical plans, and gave themselves to Love. That’s the real
miracle ...
"I see love doing absolutely amazing things. I see lives changing -- I
see it all the time. It comes about, I think, through both
intentionality and grace ... it comes when we are willing and when we
enter into a partnership with the Holy, and we say, ‘I just want to do
some good in this world.’ Intentionality on our part, and grace from the
universe, freely given. Jesus came not to do magic tricks and have us
worship him as God --- he came to show us that we are all OF God--- and
that these miracles of love are possible in our own lives, every day of
our lives."
SERMON: “Many Resurrections: Many ReBirths”
 his
morning millions of people around the world are celebrating Easter. Most
people celebrating Easter this morning are followers of Christianity, in
its many manifestations. Some recognizing Easter are Unitarian
Universalists like us here at Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church.
Most Unitarian Universalists, following this liberal faith routed in
Judeo-Christian traditions, recognize in some way or other both Easter
and Passover at this time of year.
Why do we humans celebrate Easter? There are many answers to that
question. In modern times, Easter has usually been identified by the
story of the resurrection of Christ from the dead, as recorded in
various gospel stories in the Christian Bible. As we just heard in the
reading by Marilyn Sewell, one predecessor for Easter started long
before the Christian era, when humankind created rituals to honor the
re-awakening --- the rebirth --- of the earth. Those springtime
celebrations merged nicely with the early Christian need for a festival
to explain the crucifixion of Jesus as a vehicle for achieving atonement
for all his followers. That is, in sacrificing this one very special
human, the sins of all the rest of humanity were therefore forgiven,
atoned for. This rendering of the Easter story is the one we hear often
in contemporary life, especially here in a region of the country marked
by conservative religious culture.
But why do Unitarian Universalists celebrate Easter (and Christmas)?
Haven’t we been for centuries heretics of orthodox Christian traditions?
Well, one answer is mostly ‘secular’ in reasoning: because much of the
rest of American culture in some way recognizes Easter and Christmas as
holidays, it’s convenient to join in. Perhaps we’ve been on school break
this week, perhaps we think it’s time for a holiday, perhaps we recall
the tradition of the ham Easter dinner from our childhoods and want to
continue the habit. But there are many other more spiritual ways we can
engage in Easter and even consider how a concept like resurrection can
apply to us.
Interpretations of the Concept of ‘Resurrection’
I
suspect that for many of us the concept of literal ‘resurrection’ may be
a hard one to grasp. Dead bodies just don’t rise again, and it’s a
stretch to believe that one man dying can save a significant portion of
the population of the planet. Personally you may reject all the features
of Easter I’ve mentioned thus far, except the ham dinner awaiting you
after church.
However, there are explanations for why the orthodox version of the
resurrection story evolved as it did, largely political in nature. By
the fourth century, when Christianity became the official state religion
of the Roman Empire under Constantine, there were certain doctrine one
had to accept. The ‘state’ spin on the resurrection story supported the
political structure of the church: that is, only those apostles who
reportedly had seen the risen Christ directly were considered to be true
heirs to his ministry, and thus, the true representatives in the line of
succession that created the church hierarchy that is believed to
continue on down to the present day in some traditions. That is, there
was a need for the presence of a risen body to substantiate this
lineage. In this political religious system, those who conformed were
among the select, the ones who achieved atonement.
It is important for us to remember that there are many renderings of
Christian doctrine, and I call you to consider yet other interpretations
of Easter and resurrection. Recall, for example, that our religious
ancestors on both sides --- Unitarians and Universalists --- who were by
definition Christian until well into the twentieth century, still
rejected much of the establishment’s rendering of the Easter story. For
instance, Unitarians in the mid-nineteenth century (such as Channing,
Emerson and Parker) wrote volumes on divinity as a unity --- unitarian
--- making Jesus a ‘regular’ human being and thus not subject to bodily
resurrection as told through miracle stories. Likewise, our Universalist
ancestors such as Ballou argued that Christians didn’t need
substitutionary atonement --- they didn’t need someone dying so they
might be saved --- because they believed that all humans are born into
inherent goodness and thus eventual salvation.
But it hasn’t been just us rebellious Unitarians and Universalists who
promoted heretical interpretations of Easter. As far back as the first
decades after Jesus’ lifetime, a variety of interpretations of his life
and death emerged. Many of these interpretations were recorded in the
form of other ‘gospels’ that never made it to the ‘canon’ of the Bible
as we know it today, because these stories didn’t support the
establishment political system. The religion scholar Elaine Pagels has
written several reader-friendly books about these early heretical
movements. Pagels suggests that the controversies over the concept of
‘resurrection’ were the biggest factor in shaping the early Christian
movement.
For example, today we know about a large collection of gospels known as
the ‘Gnostic’ gospels (they were found in 1945 in Egypt) which offer a
very different take on Jesus’s death and resurrection. The meaning of
‘Gnostic’ is ‘knowing’: that is, Gnostic Christians followed Jesus as
source of inspiration to expand their own knowledge of the sacred. These
Gnostic interpretations --- which Pagels tells about in The Gnostic
Gospels --- give us a different view of the early years of the Christian
movement and early understandings of ‘resurrection.’ Yes, these
followers of Gnosticism affirmed the story of Jesus’ death by
crucifixion on a cross, and, yes, they affirmed a process of
‘resurrection,’ but they understood resurrection not literally but
metaphorically. For them, Jesus’s life and death provided a spiritual
vision for how to become more holy, how to be in a process of growing
into more knowledge about humans’ relation to the divine. Gnostics
searched for the sparks of divinity that lie in each of us.
We modern Unitarian Universalists can identify with the early Gnostic
Christians, because they were considered heretics just as our later
Unitarian and Universalist ancestors were.
More Interpretations of Resurrection: Freedom from Bondage
But let’s go back to Rev. Sewell’s reading. She suggested yet other
reasons for Easter. It is also a celebration of rebirth. In addition to
those pagan celebrations recognizing the rebirth of the earth after a
long, cold winter that we’ve already referred to, Rev. Sewell also
suggested that humans celebrate Easter as a reminder that we do have the
power to get out of bondage. Do you have a sense of what she means by
‘bondage?’--- things in our lives --- habits, beliefs, people, and more
--- that lock us into ways of being that take us away from our authentic
selves and cause us to experience various types of deaths --- loss of
dreams, loss of plans, loss of good health. The miracle of the Easter
story is that we each have the capacity to transform our lives --- to
raise our lives from what sucks us downward --- and to promote goodness
and love in this world. Easter, the holiday on the springtime calendar,
stands as a reminder that personal re-birth is possible any time of the
year.
Another writer who brings us thought-provoking ideas about this notion
of rising from bondage is Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, currently president
Starr King Theological School, the Unitarian Universalist seminary in
Berkeley, California. She and a colleague, Rita Brock, wrote Proverbs of
Ashes, a new theology of atonement based on their own personal
experiences. It is a very touching book that I recommend to you.
As a young Methodist minister Rev. Parker heard many stories from within
and outside her parish about physical and psychological abuse, including
severe injury and killings. Most of these stories came from women, whose
religions had taught them that suffering is noble and Christ-like, that
they should not complain, but suck it up. (This reminds us of new
allegations of sexual abuse in the Catholic church, allegations that
have reached the news again in the past few weeks.) Parker herself had a
personal experience of being forced to accept some hurts that caused her
to live less than the full life she wanted to live. She began to
question the theology she had grown up with, and one Lent she took her
concerns to the pulpit, preaching a series of six sermons calling her
congregation --- especially the women --- to break out of any cycles of
violence and abuse. You can guess the strong reactions: some rejected
her and threatened to leave her church, some wept and began to tell
their stories, some left abusive relationships. Because this occurred
around Easter time, there was a true experience of resurrection in her
parish: a new way of finding love and getting in touch with what really
saves us. Atonement for her congregants came through finding their own
voices, their own search for the holy outside of the orthodox religious
doctrine that had been keeping them in bondage. Parker herself found
personal rebirth. She eventually became ordained in the Unitarian
Universalist tradition. So many ways we can experience resurrection and
rebirth.
Your Call
How do you relate to the many meanings of
resurrection and how resurrection can help transform our lives? Are you
in need of some resurrection, some rebirth, and might springtime be a
good time to explore that rebirth?
Is you sense of resurrection grounded in nature? Do the emerging
flowers, the budding trees, the newly-born animals in the field, inspire
you to seek your own ventures into new avenues of life?
Do the stories of very human figures such as Jesus call you to your own
spiritual deepening, on whatever path that deepening may take.
Are you living in any personal bondage that you would like to escape
from? It is so easy to fall into personal tombs, to get caught up in
life styles that keep us from connections to goodness and love and our
authentic selves. We get caught up, addicted almost, in working too hard
or worrying too much, we get caught up perhaps in addictions to
substances like unhealthy food or drink or medications that take us away
from ourselves, we become swayed by habits and principles that we don’t
really believe in. There are many ways that bondage can remove us from
ourselves and many way to experience resurrection.
At the end of our service today, our children will return and hand out
Easter eggs that are filled not with sweets but with spiritual messages
that may inspire your own rebirth.
Is there some resurrection, some rebirth, out there, awaiting your
engagement? In your personal life, in your family or work life, in you
place in this congregation, in your hopes for this country or for this
fragile planet Earth? There are so many places waiting for rebirth.
Today as we celebrate Easter with its many meanings, may we find
resurrection and rebirth, and in so doing, bring hope to ourselves and
those we love.
MAY THIS BE SO.
Please do not copy or reproduce without permission of the author.
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