New Life for Old

15 April 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

(This was the Easter service, which is also this church’s annual celebration of the Flower Communion created by Dr. Norbert Capek in 1923. While it doesn’t read like a straight sermon, all the words are reproduced here for those who would like to know more about this unique “communion” and how this particular church celebrates it.)

FLOWER PROCESSIONAL AND STORY OF THE FLOWERS

As the flowers are brought forward, I want to tell you a little about the story of the flowers. This ceremony was created by a Czechoslovakian Unitarian minister named Dr. Norbert Capek in 1923. His church in Prague had 3200 members, and was the largest Unitarian church there has ever been. Today, Unitarians hardly even know how to dream of such numbers and such influence.

Capek had felt the need for some symbolic ritual that could recognize people’s unique gifts, but also bind them more closely together – the idea of diversity within unity with which we still struggle today. The traditional Christian communion service with bread and wine was unacceptable to the members of his congregation, so he turned to the native beauty of the Czech countryside for the elements of a new kind of communion that might speak to them. The Flower Communion we will celebrate today was the result. It was an immediate success, and was held annually. His wife brought it to this country in 1940, and it is now celebrated annually in most Unitarian or Unitarian Universalist churches here.

Dr. Capek was arrested by the Nazis in 1941 because of his liberal religious beliefs, and taken to Dachau. He died in a concentration camp in 1942, so he is also seen as a martyr for the cause of more honest and open religion.

In his service, as in this one, he asked each member to bring a flower to church. This signified that it was by their own free will they joined with the others. And, as we also do here, his church provided a lot of extra flowers, to make sure that everybody would get one. The flowers were arranged in a vase, as we have arranged them in baskets. The baskets represent the united fellowship of the whole church. After the service, as people left the church, they each took a flower other than the one they had brought. The significance of the flower communion is that as no two flowers are alike, so no two people are alike, yet each has a contribution to make. Together the flowers form a beautiful bouquet. Our common bouquet would not be the same without the unique addition of each individual flower, just as our growing church community would not be the same without each of us.

By exchanging flowers, we show our willingness to walk together in our search for truth, rising above all that might divide us. Each person takes home a flower brought by someone else – thus symbolizing our shared celebration in community. This communion of voluntary sharing is essential to a free people in a free religion.

CENTERING: (Adapted from “Prayer Before Birth” by Louis MacNeice)

I am not yet born; O hear me. I am your tomorrows, but I am not yet born.

I am not yet born, console me. Protect me from the doubts that strangle, the fears that stifle, the friends who drain and demean.

I am not yet born; give me dreams of what we may yet become, and nourish me, that I do not starve before I gain the strength to walk, and to fly, and perhaps even to soar with the eagles.

I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the woman who is a beast or the man who thinks he is God come near me. And those who can remain big only by keeping those around them small – guard me from them, for I am yet a fragile thing.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity, who would make me into a thing, a mere thing, who would dissuade and dissipate me until I lose my spirit, and then my soul, and then my hope, and your hope as well.

For I am the greater you who is not yet born, And together we must strive, must strive with the gods if necessary, for so much is at stake, there is so much to be gained. I am the you who is yet to become, and I am not yet born. Help me.

SERMON: New Life for Old

This morning I want to take this sermon title in two directions. The first is to talk a little about the very ancient Easter tradition. It’s message, both in pre-Christian and in Christian cultures, was the message of “new life for old.” Literal religions took it literally, liberal religions took it symbolically, and it always takes some work to relate the old Easter stories to the world as we know it today, and to life as we are living it today.

I have a confession to make that will sound very un-Unitarian to nearly everybody who has been here for a few years or more: this is the first time I have ever been involved in a Flower Communion. I didn’t even know the story, except in the barest outline. It is almost always celebrated in Unitarian churches on the second Sunday in June, which is when Dr. Capek celebrated it, as the last regular church service until fall. We are a full-service church that meets every Sunday of the year, so we don’t have a “last regular church service until fall,” and in this church, the Flower Communion has been celebrated on Easter Sunday.

So the second thing we’ll be doing this morning is becoming acquainted with Dr. Norbert Capek’s invention of the Flower Communion as another kind of “new life for old” – inventing new stories and rituals that may communicate a little more easily with us today, while still connecting us with what Dr. Capek called the “Infinite Spirit of Life.”

But first, let’s begin with Easter. There are several things about our culture’s two favorite holidays – Christmas and Easter – that are very ironic.

One is that both of them are ancient pagan celebrations, with no necessary connection to Christianity or any other modern religion whatever. The symbols for the winter solstice festival, which most of us have learned to call Christmas, are all from the ancient days of nature religions: evergreens, the holly and ivy, mistletoe, and of course light. Whether a Yule log is burned, or Christmas bonfires are lit, or just candles, there is always light. This is also clear in the festival the Jews created for the same time, Chanuka, which is also called the festival of lights.

And the symbols for the vernal equinox, or Easter, are also completely pagan, from nature religions and ancient agricultural societies. Easter is about new life. The two prime symbols of Easter are that timeless symbol of fecundity, the rabbit, and those numberless symbols of fertility, eggs – this isn’t subtle. The other symbols of Easter are signs of spring: bright colors and Easter bonnets.

The name “Easter” probably came from an ancient goddess of spring named Eostre, who also had a special rabbit [hare] who laid eggs for good children to eat. And “Easter lilies” probably began as Eostre’s flower. It was said they were “lily white” because they grew from Eostre’s milk. Later, the Romans said the lilies were Juno’s and were white because they grew from her milk. And still later, the Christians identified “Easter lilies” with the Virgin Mary, and said they were white because they grew from her milk. It’s a story people liked, and told in many cultures.

Another ironic thing about these two holidays is that they are really celebrating the same thing, the power of life over death, or of new life for old. They are our two most optimistic holidays. Many thousands of years ago, people noticed several examples of this. They used the cycles of the moon as a symbol of death and rebirth. Each month there is about a three-day period between the shrinking moon and the expanding moon when it is almost gone. They saw this as a three-day period of death followed by the rebirth of the new moon. Then the moon grows larger into a full moon, then grows smaller again, “dies” again, and is reborn again. This plot of dying for three days then returning to life was woven into many religious stories, including the Christian Easter story, where the man Jesus is said to have died, then three days later risen as God. There is a similar cycle in plants. Seeds look dead, we bury them in the ground, and then new life springs forth through the ground – like all these flowers. So when people were buried in the ground, many hoped they too would rise again into a new kind of life. These are ancient hopes, myths arising from deep in our souls and our past.

I like these stories, but they are so fantastic that it’s hard for us to know just what to do with them. We live in an age of science, but these ancient stories aren’t written in the language of science. They are written in the language of hope, the language of faith.

A friend of mine, a colleague from the Jesus Seminar, retired about six years ago after a forty-year career as a minister in the United Church of Christ. He founded the Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix, Arizona in 1955 with about fifty people, and when he retired in 1995, it had 2500 members. He made a point of telling people who attended the Jesus Seminar — and wondered how you could ever preach the truth from a pulpit — that he had never lied from his pulpit. He began every Easter sermon, he said, by saying that Easter isn’t about corpses walking, it’s about the chance for our lives to be reborn, rejuvenated, here and now, in ways that might seem magical, but were not supernatural. This man, Culver Nelson, had a lot of charisma, and I think he could get away with saying that where thousands of other Christian ministers could not get away with it. Usually, it’s hard work to relate these old stories of death and resurrection to the world as we know it and life as we actually live it. I’ve done an Easter sermon every year of my career, and a lot of times I’ve wished we could just use different stories, stories and symbols that communicated more directly.

Now I want to make a transition to the second part of this short sermon. I couldn’t find a smooth and classy way to do it, because the two halves aren’t very closely related. So I decided to do it in a light-hearted way, maybe even a silly way. This week an e-mail made the rounds of some ministers’ groups where we exchange some ideas and materials. It was a list called “All I need to know about life I learned from the Easter Bunny.” It’s a play on the book title All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Unitarian Minister Robert Fulghum. It’s kind of like some Easter sermons you may have heard, taking an old story and loading it with some funny modern messages. I don’t know who wrote it, but here are some of the life lessons you can learn from the Easter Bunny:

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket

Walk softly and carry a big carrot

Everyone needs a friend who is all ears

There’s no such thing as too much candy

All work and no play can make you a basket case

Everyone is entitled to a bad hare day

Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits

Keep your paws off other people’s jellybeans

Good things sometimes come in small sugarcoated packages

The grass is always greener in someone else’s basket

An Easter bonnet can tame even the wildest hare

To show your true colors you have to come out of your shell

And – The best things in life are still sweet and gooey

The Flower Communion

That’s one way to give new life to old symbols. But there is another way that is distinctly liberal. And that is to introduce new stories that open us up to some of life’s gifts in more direct ways, so we don’t have to keep working so hard to translate ancient symbols like the symbols of rabbits, eggs, death and resurrection so they don’t mislead people into confusing religion with superstition.

It’s a pretty bold move, inventing a new ritual. Most of the time it will probably bomb, because it’s hard to find new rituals that speak to people easily. But that’s what Dr. Capek (Chah-Peck) did with his Flower Communion when he invented it in 1923. I already told you the story earlier, but it’s worth going into a little more detail about some of Capek’s religious beliefs, which were inspiring both then and now.

He thought that all people were inherently religious, and inherently good, and he taught that religion should, above all, provide that “inner harmony which is the precondition of strong character, good health, joyful moods and victorious creative life. It is my ideal,” he wrote, “that unitarian religion in our country should mean a higher culture – new attitudes toward life. In short, unitarian religion should mean the next advanced cultural level of our people.” The church’s task “must be to place truth above any tradition, spirit above any scripture, freedom above authority, and progress above all reaction.”

He defined religious education as “an endeavor to awaken the inner forces of children and teach them how to organize, harmonize and adapt them to the ever-changing influences which come to them from outside.” He identified a list of feelings and abilities which a modern religious education should elicit from a child. They included, in his terms, the ability to have faith and confidence, the ability to hope, the feeling of worship (like Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life), charity or selfless love, and conscientiousness. In the 1920s and 1930s, he thought that a person with these qualities was a truly religious person. In 2001, I think so too. You could say it was a very optimistic faith that Capek had, just before the dark days of the Nazi occupation of Czeckoslovakia from 1939 – 1945.

When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Capek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human being to be – in the words of the Nazi court records – “too dangerous to the Reich [for him] to be allowed to live.” Think about that: believing that people were good made him too dangerous to be allowed to live; what a complete failure of the human spirit that was! Dr. Capek was arrested in 1941 and sent to Dachau. He died in a concentration camp the next year. This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is celebrated in many of our churches today.

Before his life was taken from him, he gave new life for old by creating this beautiful ritual celebrating the interweaving of diversity and community. You will each judge for yourselves this morning where you found more new life for old – in revisiting the Easter stories, or in visiting the Unitarian Flower Communion. But as we prepare for our celebration of Dr. Capek’s Flower Communion, I want to suggest that the Nazi court records, as they often did, had it completely backwards. Because people who believe in, and who teach, the inherent worth and beauty of all people are the only ones whose beliefs equip them to live, and to share in the gifts of life that others bring.

BENEDICTION:

For our benediction this morning, I have adapted some words which Dr. Capek used in his Flower Communions:

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these fragile flowers, which are thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to our most sacred callings. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing with each other. May we cherish friendship as one of the most sacred and precious manifestations of the Infinite Spirit of Life. May we realize that, [as these flowers each contribute their different styles of beauty, every one of us is an embodiment of the gods, and in every one of us the gods struggle for higher expression.

FLOWER COMMUNION:

It is time now for us to share in the Flower Communion. I ask that as you each in turn approach the communion baskets you do so quietly – reverently – with a sense of how important it is for each of us to address our world and one another with gentleness, justice, and love. I ask that you select a flower – different from the one you brought – that particularly appeals to you. If you didn’t bring a flower, don’t worry about it, we have provided plenty of extras for you so that everybody can have one. As you take your chosen flower – noting its particular shape and beauty – please remember to handle it carefully. It is a gift that someone else has brought to you. It represents that person’s unique humanity, and therefore deserves your kindest touch. Let us share quietly in this beautiful ritual of unity, diversity, and love.

As you come up to get your flower, please start with the back row and move row by row from the side aisles to the front. After taking a flower, please exit by the center aisles. We will then leave to recreate this bouquet of harmonized gifts in the world outside these walls, where our diverse gifts are as desperately needed as our ability to blend them into a bouquet. Accompanied by our flowers, let us leave this place of worship with peace, with hope, and with beauty.