Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Charles J. Stephens

Easter Sunday

Opening Words: by retired UU minister Dick Gilbert,
A tomb is no place to stay,
Be it a cave in the Judean hills
Or the dark cave of the spirit.
A tomb is no place to stay
When the fresh grass rolls away the stone of winter cold,
And valiant flowers burst their way to warmth and light.
A tomb is no place to stay
When each morning announces our reprieve,
And we know we are granted yet another day of living.
A tomb is no place to stay
When life laughs a welcome
To hearts that have been away too long.

Reading:      March 16:1-8

“Family Circus” often appeals to me, especially one that pictured the children on Easter Sunday discovering their Easter Baskets and then enjoying the contents. Then one of the children asks, “Who colored all these eggs?” The other child replies, “The Easter Bunny.” Then in rapid succession: “Who gave us the jelly beans?”  “The Easter Bunny.”   “And the chocolate rabbit?” “The Easter Bunny.”

For those children, nothing was impossible for the Easter Bunny. The parents were pleased. Later that morning they went to church. They heard the preacher said, “They came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been rolled back. And when he read, “Who could have done this?” The children cried out in unison, “The Easter Bunny.”

As young children, we accepted what our parents and other respected adults told us. I know I did. They were the authority. When we got older, we started thinking for ourselves. I remember my mother telling a story about my older sister Charlotte. She was a very strong-minded child. One day, my sister said something in a very self-assured way and my mother said, “You sure have a mind of your own.” To which my sister replied, “I should hope so!”

A number of years ago, we invited the Rev. Jack Spong, an outspoken liberal theologian and retired Bishop of the Episcopal Church in New Jersey, to speak at the UU congregation I served in NJ. About Easter, Bishop Spong wrote, “To literalize Easter has become the defining heresy of traditional Protestant and Catholic Christianity. That transforming mystery has given way to propositional truths.” (Spong, 2007. p117)

Bishop Spong wrote about the importance of metaphors that enrich religious writings. He sees a danger in literalizing any metaphor, even the Easter Story. The literalizing of the many biblical stories told with beautiful metaphors that enrich the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is what he sees as heresy. What he calls a heresy is one of the chief reasons why so many Unitarian Universalists, as well as many others, shy away from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. It is when we feel that we must understand the Bible literally that we react by avoiding not only these scriptures but all the miraculous metaphors used to tell about Jesus.

When people first meet me and learn I am a UU minister, I have been asked the question: “Is Jesus relevant to modern Unitarian Universalists?” So, I ask myself, “Is Jesus relevant to me?” True, I don’t preach about Jesus most Sundays. And for that matter we do not use readings from the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures most Sundays. Yet, having said that, it is clear to me that much of my ethical, moral and theological foundation comes from the stories about the Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. I would guess that the same is probably true for the vast majority of us, though certainly not everyone.

On the other hand, many conservative Christians believe that Spong himself is the heretic. They believe everything that the Bible says is factually true. Other more progressive or liberal Christians say no, not everything in the Bible is true, but there are some basic facts in the Bible and some theological claims about him are true.

One of my favorite biblical scholars Marcus Borg died this past year. Borg grew up in North Dakota, as did my parents. And one of his professors in college became a professor of mine in Seminary. Agreeing with Bishop Spong, Borg wrote, “This emphasis on factuality has had a pervasive and distorting effect on how we see the Bible and Christianity.” (The Once and Future Jesus, p. 51) Borg challenged the common assumption that having a Christian faith means that one willingly believes that many doubtful statements are factually true.

We used a Responsive Reading from Max A. Coots earlier in today’s service. He served the Unitarian Universalist Church in Canton, New York, for many years. About the resurrection stories of the New Testament, he wrote, “The resurrection stories of the New Testament need neither be taken as fact or reinterpreted to appear scientifically acceptable. They can be left as they are, myths of meaningfulness. They are the poetry of reverence. They are the stories of the reaffirmation of life that even death cannot end. They are the songs of the experience of a people, who having experienced grief and loss and disillusionment, felt a restoration of their hope.”

The resurrection story is a wonderfully persistent and elastic metaphor used not only about Jesus, but also by many religions over the eons concerning a wide variety of shapes and forms over the eons about other religious heroes. This metaphor is so present in our thinking today that it plays a central role in J.K. Rowling’s story of Harry Potter. Of course, the name of the metaphor in the Harry Potter story comes through the image of the Phoenix. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the fifth in the Harry Potter series.

The Phoenix mythology comes from the Bennu, a sacred bird of Heliopolis. This giant heron-like bird was associated with the sun and represented the soul of the sun god, Re. Herodotus, the Greek historian, says the following about the Bennu, “Another sacred bird is the phoenix; I have not seen a phoenix myself, except in paintings. For it is very rare and visits the country (so they say at Heliopolis) only at intervals of five hundred years, on the occasion of the death of the parent bird.”

Ironically, my father-in-law, who had little to do with theological speculation, was so attracted to the symbolism of the Phoenix that he named his sail boat The Phoenix.

So too, the resurrection metaphor can be significant for such Unitarian Universalists as Richard Gilbert, who wrote,

“A tomb is no place to stay,
Be it a cave in the Judean hills
Or the dark cave of the spirit.”

The resurrection metaphor continues to be significant for religious liberals. That is when we remember that we do not need to take the story literally for it to convey metaphorical truth. This spring, the cold of winter and the gradual arrival of spring will be hard for us to forget.

Violence and death continue to have a firm grip on our world. The wars begun years ago in Afghanistan and Iraq have not ended but rather are continuing in those lands plus also in Pakistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen and recently in Kenya. Also, the fighting between Russia and Ukraine continues and seems to expand. Add to that we have the ongoing violence against unarmed black people here in our own country.

Feeling hopeless – be it repressed people in other lands or here in our own country – can cause people to lash out in violent ways. Feeling hopeless can even cause people to crash airplanes or take their lives in a more solitary way.

The resurrection story as it is celebrated is no longer primarily about new life 2000 years ago in Jerusalem. It is about finding life in each and every age amidst that which was or seems dead or hopeless! When you hear of something bad happening we wonder: “Why is life so difficult for so many?” “Why can’t we be kinder to one another?” “Why is there so much selfishness in the world?” “How can we feel better about humanity?”

My message today is not that we should, “always keep on the sunny side of life.”   That is not the message of the resurrection metaphor. Rather, the message is that even in the midst of that which is dead, even in the face of death, our own or that of someone we love, there can be the promise of life continuing. And the message of the resurrection is that regardless of the challenges or disappointments we face as individuals or as a congregation there is hope.

Taking another theological insight from Marcus Borg, “It seems that the ancient communities which produced the Bible often metaphorized their history, and then we have often historicized their metaphors.” (I want to repeat that because I like the play on words).

Take the metaphorical story of Jesus and the resurrection or the earlier metaphorical story of Moses and the Passover story in the Exodus. What happens when we try to turn a metaphor into literal history is that we something that is just plain silly. And something that we can no loner identify with in our own lives.

A metaphor like the story of the resurrection is something that conveys the truth that the death and burial of Jesus, the Jewish prophet of radical love and hospitality, could not erase the essence of who Jesus was to his followers. He may have been put to death, but his followers continued to experience the spirit of the pre-Easter Jesus. This happened to such an overwhelming degree that a post-Easter Jesus lived in their hearts and minds and spirits even after he was cruelly executed by the Roman state.

To put it in a more picturesque manner, in a more symbolic metaphorical story form, the spirit of Jesus was like the legendary Phoenix and could not be kept buried in the land of the dead. The flesh and blood pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth said to his disciples, “You will not always have me with you.” Then two chapters later, in the same book of the Christian Scriptures, it was the post-Easter Jesus who lived on after his death and burial who said, “I am with you always.” In literalism, you can’t have it both ways, but as metaphor both make sense.

The very essence of Jesus lived on within the hearts, minds and spirits of his followers. This meaningful metaphor gave them the strength to go on after the death of Jesus. This meaningful metaphor allowed Jesus to live on within their community even as he had taught them how to live. The resurrection metaphor was not meant to perpetuate a fantasy or an exaggeration, or a deception of who Jesus was. Rather, the resurrection metaphor demonstrates that the spirit of Jesus’ message, the spirit of the life Jesus lived continued to be alive and active within the community of his followers. They went so far as to call their community the Body of Christ.

Certainly, a tomb really was no place to stay for Jesus’ followers during the time after his death. Even as a tomb is no place for people to stay today when personally faced with death and destruction. Nor is a tomb the place for us to stay when our world seems as dark and as cold as a cave. We too can appreciate the metaphorical story of resurrection to new life, symbolized for us in the Exodus story, the story of Jesus, the story of the Phoenix or simply the melting of the snow and the appearance of a bit of green grass and the beginnings of the flowers of spring that have so recently burst upon the scene.

The reason for gathering here today is that together we create a world in which we can celebrate and embrace metaphors of life with faith, hope, love, and action.

Because, a tomb is truly no place to stay.

Closing Words: by Charles Stephens

When we feel the pain of the world encircling us like a dark tomb, may we have hope enough to use the experience to better reach out in compassion to those who may be experiencing similar or even greater pain and in so doing lighten their load and our own, easing the pain of the world.

On this Easter Morning when the light of day has lengthened further beyond the dark of night, let us be grateful for both the dark and the light in our lives, knowing that both nourish and sustain us.

And, if we are tempted to lose our confidence that light, life and hope will return to our lives, let us remember stories of the power and sustaining strength of compassion.