I always like it when Easter comes around. I grew up in a place in which, like here in Colorado, spring hasn’t always sprung come late March or April. More than once Easter dawned not with the sun but with snow showers. Easter is a reminder that no matter what the weather is like, the warmth and beauty of spring will soon be with us. As Thomas Wolfe put it, no matter how harsh the weather has been there is an uplifting spirit that comes with this time of year. He wrote that with spring:
The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s [or a man’s] laughter in the dark, the clean hard rattle of raked gravel, the clicking stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air –
These things will never change [nor will]
The glitter of sunlight on roughened water….
The feathery blur and smokey budding of young boughs….
The leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again….
All things belonging to the earth will never change.
All things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth, these come up from the earth that never changes and they go back into the earth that lasts forever.
[Though] pain and death [and the darkness of winter] will always be the same….
Under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower.
Something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.
It is because Easter is linked to such a rebirthing that the music and poetry associated with it is so uplifting and the clothes people wear and the flowers they surround themselves with are so bright. The images associated this day, the ones that Ashley talked about – the eggs and rabbits and flowers – are reminders that nature is not about to parish no matter what the weather has been like. They are also reminders that no matter how difficult our lives have been we, too, can reborn into something better. No guarantees, but there is the possibility that something good will come with, as the hymn puts it, this “day of light and gladness.
Easter is meant to remind us of this – to remind us that the forces of darkness, either in our personal lives or in nature, are not meant to prevail. I think this is why, even when I was a youngster, I loved going to church on Easter. It was one of the few times, other than Christmas, when a church service seemed to something other than somber. But that all changed when I went off to college. In college I began to learn so much about what life was really like I became skeptical about religion, particularly the Christian stories with which I’d been raised – like the drama of Easter week, with Jesus coming to Jerusalem where he confronts the powers of oppression and then is betrayed and killed as though he was a traitor to Rome. Still, every year while I was in collage, come Easter I went to church, including my senior year when I stayed on campus to work and decided to go to the little Episcopal Church in town. But, when I got there, I found I couldn’t get past the foyer. I couldn’t go into the sanctuary because, even though I still liked the uplifting feel of Easter, I could no longer say the words I’d be asked to repeat if I went in to take part in the service. I couldn’t say the words because I no longer believed in the divinity of Jesus, nor in his bodily resurrection – and in that church, that’s what Easter was about.
It wasn’t until I became a Unitarian Universalist I found people able to celebrate Easter in church without having to affirm things in which they no longer believed. In the UU church I began attending the minister was really good at keeping Christ out of Easter by explaining that the story about his death and resurrection was just a fiction of someone’s imagination. It’s as though, in that church, as the poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, once put it: “Him just hung there, dead, real dead” on Good Friday, and that was the end of the story. There was no resurrection, no coming back to life. It’s not that the minister and members of that church didn’t appreciate the justice-seeking, peace-making, and compassionate ethic of Jesus. They did. In fact, the minister was as much of a “Jesian” as anyone I’ve ever met. But neither he nor the members of his congregation wanted to build their faith around a belief that someone had to die to relieve us of the taint of a sin with which we’d been born. For them – as for me – the message of Easter, as it relates to Jesus, doesn’t have to do with him sacrificing his life to atone for something we’ve done or something with which we were born. It has to with the immortality of the message Jesus preached: a message that couldn’t be killed by the agents of oppression, even though on Good Friday Jesus, indeed, “just hung there, dead, real dead.”
I suppose this should mean that Easter shouldn’t different for us than any other Sunday. After all, our kids could have their Easter egg hunt somewhere else – in fact, many of them do – and if we wanted to dress them up and dress up ourselves we could do this and have our Easter Parade at the Mall, instead of here, as some of us may do. Or we could just stay at home and read The New York Times or watch sports on TV. After all, the baseball season begins today and “March madness” has leaked over into April.
Dan Wakefield, a well-know modern mystic, says it was reading The New York Times he preferred to do on Sundays, including Easter, until he discovered Unitarian Universalism. After encountering us, he says, he found that the “age-old religious rituals marking the turning of the year” began to deepen for him, giving “fuller meaning to the cycle of the seasons.” Wakefield says it was by taking part in worship that he began to appreciate:
The year was not only divided into winter, spring, summer and fall, but was marked by the expectation of Advent, leading up to the fulfillment of Christmas; followed by Lent, the solemn prelude to the coming of the dark anguish of Good Friday; that is then transformed in the glory of Easter.
He says:
Birth and death and resurrection, beginnings and endings and renewals, were observed and celebrated in ceremonies whose experience made me feel I belonged – and not just to a neighborhood and a place, but to a larger order of things, a universal sequence of life and death and rebirth….
Wakefield concludes:
Going to church, even belonging to it, did not solve life’s problems … but it gave me a sense of living in a large context – of being part of something greater than what I could see through the tunnel vision of my personal concerns. I now looked forward to Sunday because it meant going to church; what was once strange now felt not only natural but essential.
A sense of this is what drew me back to church, as well, and renewed my appreciation of ritual events, like Easter, a celebration that takes place: “in Just-spring” when “the world is mudluscious” and “the lamefooted ballonMan goes whistling far and wee.” At Easter we’re invited to dip into the poetry of a lover of spring, like e.e.cummings, who says: “sweet springtime is your time is my time is our time for springtime is love time … and viva sweet spring,” and: “love is a deeper season than reason; my sweet one (and april’s where we’re.”
Says cummings, son of a Unitarian minister and, as he put it, an “even more Unitarian” mother, there is something ultimately redeeming about the Easter we’re in and the coming of the season it announces. It prompted him to write:
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty . how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death they
rhythmic
lover
though answerest
them only with
spring)
Every year, no matter how snowy or rainy, how dark and cold and cloudy it’s been, nature comes back to life and the promise of the celebration of Christmas and the Yuletide are fulfilled. The music, stories and poetry of Easter remind that as powerful as is the Christian story for some, the promise of Easter is not confined to what happens when one goes beyond the foyer into the sanctuary of some Episcopal or Methodist or Baptist or Catholic Church. It’s contained in what happens when one goes beyond the foyer into the sanctuary of our church, too. The way we tell the story of Easter may be different from the way others tell it, but the wonder of this season touches us just as deeply as touches anyone else, and that includes our knowing that Jesus’ message of love and justice and peace-making that couldn’t be killed by those who wanted to replace it with oppression. Easter is about life. It’s about the resurrection of the Spirit. It’s about the rebirth of a sense of aliveness we can feel as the earth, itself, comes back to life.
According to R.C.A. Moore, a long-ago colleague of mine, no matter what else it does, Easter remind us:
It’s going to come out all right – do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass – they know.
They get along – and we’ll get along, too.
Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting
And the letter you wait for won’t come.
There will be ac-ci-dents.
I know ac-ci-dents are coming:
Smash-ups, signals wrong, washouts, trestles rotten –
Red and yellow ac-ci-dents.
But somehow and somewhere, the end of the run,
The train gets together again
And the caboose and the green tail lights
Fade down the right-of-way like a new white hope.
I never heard a mockingbird in Kentucky
Spilling out its heart in the morning.
I never saw the snow on Chimborazo,
Sitting there looking like a high, white, Mexican hat.
I never had supper with Abe Lincoln,
Nor got a dish of soup from Joe Hill,
Though I’ve been around….
I know a girl from Des Moines who has beautiful eyes.
I saw her and said to myself:
“The sun rises and the sun sets in those eyes.”
We took away the money for a prize waltz at a Brotherhood dance.
She had eyes; she was as safe as the bridge
Over the Mississippi;
So I married her.
Last summer we took the cushions going west.
Pike’s Peak is a big old stone, believe me.
It’s fastened down; something you can count on.
It’s going to come out all right – do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass – they know.
They get along – and we’ll get along, too.
It’s going to come out all right, because as another of my colleagues, Patrick O’Neal, says:
Easter is an impossible story written for everyone who has ever
felt the sting of death and wishes for something new.
Easter is a story to tell for anyone who loves life so much that they
pray for more to follow.
Easter is a story for people who can envision a message of love
that cannot be conquered by evil.
It’s a story of a love that never dies;
of seemingly immoveable objects that get tossed aside;
of happy endings in a tragic world;
of miracles, of faith rewarded,
and a vision of hope justified.
It is a story reminding us
of the spirit of perpetual rebirth
that must live in us, as well. (Adapted from Patrick O’Neal)
May Easter be like this for us, a time whether they are any guarantees or not, we allow ourselves to rise up from whatever darkness may surround us and experience for ourselves life as the gift it is.
Opening Words
Today we come -- as people have come for thousands of years at Easter
- to celebrate the victory of hope over despair
- to be reminded of the ever renewing life of the spirit
- and to mark the season of rebirth come again.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Praise all that’s divine in life
Welcome to a festival of joy!
Words for the Offering
Spirit of Life, though war now rages, we come together on this Easter Morning to rejoice in the ongoing creation that is around and within us.
We come to rejoice, but we come with burdens as well, knowing our world is not yet free of violence and hate.
On this Easter Morning may we discover a joyous and courageous faith enabling us to deal with what burdens we must.
On this Easter morning may we be assured that we have a hidden inner beauty ready to unfold to empower us to work toward the creation of a New Time of Life, in which love, justice, beauty and peace will be available to all.
In this spirit may we join in the offering.
Closing Words
May you have joy this Easter,
a joy born of life well lived;
May you have love this Easter,
a love made stronger by a light we bring to those places where it feels dark;
And may we have peace this Easter,
a peace that
allows us to be open to all that is yet to be.
Poem for Easter ~Barry Bloom
The rock rolled away from the cave
and the battered man of light walked painfully away.
Trumpets sounded, family rejoiced,
disciples fearfully came forward to touch and see,
afraid to believe that the Master lived again.
As he walked people fell down at his feet.
His wounds lay untreated on his feet and hands.
“I am going home” he said.
“I will prepare a place for you.”
And the world breathed a great sigh of relief.
Hope lived.
Many of us who sit here
in this sacred earth bound room
fervently wish that we could believe.
Believe that death is not the end of life.
Believe that our father/mother God awaits us in heaven,
while loving us through the daily trials of life on earth.
We honor and rejoice for those who do believe,
who are cradled in the safety of that belief.
We add our voices with theirs in celebration.
And we celebrate the budding spring,
the dripping flowers emerging
from their snowy cocoons,
the balmy breeze cutting through the lingering
cold pockets,
the spring birds whose voices raise in noisy greeting
to the gods of change.
We do not know our fate.
We only know how our ancestor’s touched
our minds with outrageous ideas of love.
We know we are saved.
And that we are loved, by each other.
That is what we share in common.
We shall be known by the love we share
with each other,
and the world.
Today, our spirits are resurrected
into the body of the miraculous cosmos
of which we are all a part.
May we walk in peace. Amen