Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

This may go down in history as The Angry Spring, 2016.

Not unlike the Arab Spring, this spring of 2016 has the early blooms of summer angers.

We have lived through several angry springs: The spring of 1968, April 4th, when Martin Luther King was killed. I was in the riots at Columbia University in April of 1968. It was the spring of ’68, with the Vietnam War rising, June, when Bobby Kennedy was killed. We may feel the chill of anger, even violence, in the warming air.

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, all happy people resemble one another, each angry person is angry in their own way. Each of us has a legacy of anger, angers we have received, angers we have enacted or re-enacted.

Or to paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how am I am angry, let me count the ways. Or to directly “phrase” Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, “nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.” “Jane Eyre” as a recent biographer of Bronte noted was the original angry young woman.

After reading “Jane Eyre” (or was it “Jane ‘Ire’’?) Florence Nightingale resolved to find herself a “necessary occupation” or like millions of readers feeling, as Jane says in the book, that if they “were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way….When we are struck without reason, we should strike back again very hard.” Therein, like her mother on her death bed, recanting of her Christian turn-the-other cheek sentiments.

A few months after “Jane Eye” appeared in print the revolutions of 1848 broke out across Europe. Coincidence or historical synchronicity?

It’s not, of course, that there is no reason for anger. The slogan may be true, if you are not angry you are not paying attention, although not-paying attention seems increasingly attractive.

And there are religious and political parallels to our personal angers, of course.

If you like angry political rebellions April is the coolest month. Along with the American spring of ’68, or the recent Arab Spring, the first American Colonial Yankee revolt was on April 18, 1689 with conspirators raising a flag on a ship’s mast atop Boston’s Beacon Hill eventually toppling the British Dominion of New England, New York and Maryland’s Tidewater. Eighty-six years and one day later, April 19, 1775 Boston’s militia minutemen routed the British at Concord and Lexington.

Of course Abraham Lincoln, the first American President to be assassinated, was shot on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, dying in the early morning of the 15th. The cruel month.

Armies at war always used move in the spring simply because of the thaw of winter. Like the news we now can have war 24-7.

By the way, in April 21st of 753 B.C. Romulus killed Remus and the City of Rome was founded, that being Rome Foundation Day. Blood, fratricide, in the spring, was the origin of Rome.

The political and military connection to spring and anger and violence has parallels in religious rituals, especially in our deep, though recently re-vaunted, Judeo-Christian heritage. There are religious parallels to personal and social anger.

The Jewish Passover season of celebration is tied by the moon to the Christian Easter Passion story. Usually it is the same moon, this year not, but still it was the lunar calendar that brought Jesus into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, to mark Jewish freedom from Egyptian slavery–the great non-violent exodus liberation of the Hebrew people from the Egyptian Pharaoh. It was non-violent for the Hebrews in that they went unarmed. God took care of the violence with the flooding of the Red Sea back on the mud-sinking Egyptian chariots, much to the noble later lament of the Hebrew’s prayers.

But blood is in the air at Passover as blood comes to be in the Chalice cup at the Last Supper of Jesus. And it is the blood, and its religious sources, that I want to have us deal with today. Particularly here, in the Unitarian-Universalist setting while in the midst of the massive world-wide cultural and religious celebration of two billion Christians celebrating this dark and bloody feast of the killed and risen lord. Not to evangelize but to awaken us to the relevance of anger and violence, personally, politically, and religiously.

We have two fire walls against anger: Reason, sweet reason, and religion, blessed religion. Both seem powerless to contain the angers among us.

This was true in the run up to the Civil War—reason and religion failed to unite and move the country forward. Enlightened passion in the form of abolitionism, and in a deep love for the American union, became the only way forward. Those passions ran into the darker passions of slavery and provincial notions of liberty. There was no greater voice for sweet reason than Abraham Lincoln’s in his First Inaugural Address, and it failed completely.

So where’s our reasonable light? And where’s our blessed passion?

Unitarians have been surrounded these weeks by the strange stories and rituals of the Christian Passion narrative, the rituals of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter morning. All this can be an arcane and nearly oriental pageant of religious emotions and ideas that bear little on the editorial-page-NPR mind-set we value.

We, Rebecca and I, have very good friends who, as a part of Lent and last week’s Palm Sunday worship, spent four hours at home listening to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion mass. People engage in deep and aesthetic and symbolic rituals during this time. What does that say to us as we may choose a lighter, seemingly more rational, way of worship and life?

As much as the Christian season can be a purple and awkward time—until the break-out of a pink and green spring—eggs, bunnies, and a sunny resurrection—I believe the turmoil of the Christian season are instructive to us all, now.

Serious political commentators, such as Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal and David Brooks in the New York Times have confessed that the surprises of this year’s political season have taught them both to believe that they need to talk and listen to people they have heretofore discounted and excluded, that there are voices and movements, passions and feelings, ideas and hopes, and ugliness-es, that have been left out of the enclaves and media bubbles of enlightened liberal-ish peoples.

What then might the two thousand year old narrative of the New Testament, Jesus’s entrance into the Capital Jerusalem and his murder and subsequent message of hope have to tell us about the life we live?

Is there power in ad lib anarchy, in spontaneous uprising such as Jesus’ Palm Sunday hosanna parade into Jerusalem, and its potential, violence? Is there hope in spiritual practices and truths and feelings, all shown in the Last Supper and in the Garden of Gethsemane, and is there real value in transcendental hopes such as the Resurrection story.

The angry mobs of Jerusalem, the exquisite emotional spirituality of Holy Week, and the off-the-charts Easter hope of a re-born life, all three are themes many of us put into a graduate school footnote.

Angry mobs. Exquisite emotional spirituality. Off-the charts hope. They need to be in the texts of our lives, not after-thoughts.

They are the deeper and underlying themes of this potentially angry spring time.

There are a lot of people really angry about the subjection of their lives–just as Jane Eyre was, just as James Baldwin was, just at Black Lives Matter is, just as displaced old white males are, just as some Muslims are, just as there were in Jerusalem the time when Jesus rode in on his donkey and had his last supper with his frightened disciples.

The air was rich with the smell of blood that night as hundreds of unblemished lambs were being slaughtered for the altar at the temple. You may know the smell or the reality of blood. I lived in Kansas City when the stock yards were still there, and spring and summer air was heavy with the smell of blood. You may have been in war or accidents. You may have given birth. We need to know blood.

Along with those things that give rise to angry mobs, blood passions, angers, deep unmet needs, there are exquisite spiritual practices that sustain life, maybe Masses by Bach, maybe candle lit rituals, maybe songs and silences, all, beyond our rational minds but calling our hearts, our fears, our angers to the surface. We need to know our intricate exquisite spiritual selves.

And at the surface there are still transformational hopes, hopes that are off the charts of reason but hopes that pull us into fuller life and into life with each other, religious, national, universal, maybe even eternal.

Let it be so.