Doing Easter in 2006

April 16, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Easter of our hearts, speak to us. Tell us once again, when we need the gift of spring, that spring is here. Tell us once more, when we need to feel new life, that new life is moving, and can move into us if we will but open our hearts.

Tell us again the timeless story of Easter, about that magical bunny that lays brightly colored eggs of spring, and offers them to all who can find them as food for the spiritual journey as we begin our own Easters.

For it is Easter in our own hearts and lives that we need. Otherwise all these ancient stories are a bore and a nuisance. We want the good news that life can conquer death here and now, in our lives, in our relationships, in our society, and in our world. Bring us the flowers and the colored eggs that deliver that message, oh Easter spirit.

For it is again Easter. And once more we gather not to hear the same stories, but to bring the same needs, and to hope there will be stories to feed them, or maybe even a gift to take home with us – a gift, like a flower of spring.

It is Easter again, and we need an Easter. So we will open our minds and hearts to the possibility of the gift of renewed life. Then come to us, our Easter friends. Come. Amen.

SERMON: Doing Easter in 2006

I have a friend who is a professor of New Testament, who tells her classes each year in early spring that the way they can tell when Easter is coming is that the media will run some new and strange stories about who Jesus really was, or suggesting a new shocking story showing that the Christian story shouldn’t be trusted, or just run weird stories about religion in general.

So last week, right on schedule, three different stories appeared. There was the verdict in the plagiarism case against Dan Brown which we’ve all been breathlessly awaiting, in which the jury decided that he did not steal illegally from other authors (who stole from an Australian religion religion scholar named Barbara Thiering) the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married, and had at least two children before Mary moved to southern France.

Then there was the National Geographic story about the newly translated Gospel of Judas, suggesting that Jesus and Judas were good buddies, and Jesus told Judas to turn him over to the authorities, so that the Christian story could play out and God, by God, was in charge of everything. I’ve read it. It’s a boring little gospel, quite late, with a strong dose of homophobia, but nothing at all to offer in understanding Jesus, Judas or anything else that happened in the first century.

Third, an author named James Tabor, in excerpts from his forthcoming book, The Jesus Dynasty, writes in breathless prose about raiding two first-century family tombs enclosed under a Jerusalem apartment complex. He suggests they may be the tombs of Jesus and his family, and wants the authorities to do DNA testing to prove it, however that would work! The authorities have declined.

Here in town, as part of keeping Austin weird, there was a special showing of the 1979 Monty Python movie “The Life of Brian,” the mocking farce about Brian, who happened to be born on Christmas in the stable next door to Jesus and spent his life being mistaken for a messiah. That played Friday night and last night, as run-ups to Easter.

And on the way to church this morning, one of our couples passed a billboard which simply said “Way to go, Jesus. Rock on, Dude!” It’s beginning to look like when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

So. A titillating court cast, a scandalous, goofy gospel, a cemetery raid on the tomb of some hapless first-century Jerusalem family, a farcical movie about baby Jesus’ non-messianic baby neighbor, and a billboard that may have been about Brian rather than Jesus, but which is pretty much off the charts in any case.

That’s how we do Easter in 2006.

But there’s something odd here. Can you think of other holidays that are preceded by media stories mocking them or belittling their importance? I’ve never seen Veterans’ Day preceded by programs and cover stories belittling the sacrifice of veterans or making light of the number of them dying in our current war. You can’t even imagine it. It would offend almost everyone in the country, in the world.

Could you imagine, Mother’s Day being preceded by stories making fun of mothers or motherhood, or making light of the work they do? There are the “Mommy Wars” about the best way to be a mother, but there aren’t any attacks on the idea of motherhood that I know of. If there were, there would be riots demanding the head of the publisher and boycotts of the sponsors. For that matter, can you imagine stories mocking romantic love before Valentine’s Day? Or stories in mid-June ridiculing fathers before Fathers’ Day?

We don’t do this, we don’t allow this, for holidays we really take seriously. There may be some anti-US-policy protests around the 4th of July, but the protestors would say they are doing it because they do believe in all that America can be, but not because they want to make fun of the very idea of America.

When you look at the stories behind some of our holidays, some of them stand out as decidedly different. Almost all are about real things that happen in the real world we’re living in. All but two.

Valentine’s day celebrates romantic love between couples

Mothers’ Day recognizes the work and sacrifice of mothers all over the country.

Fathers’ Day does the same for fathers.

Veterans’ Day expresses appreciation for the sacrifice of our war veterans.

Memorial Day recognizes the ultimate sacrifice of the loss of our soldiers’ lives in our various wars.

The 4th of July celebrates the gaining of independence in 1776 through the bravery and dedication of the soldiers, families and citizens of this country.

Thanksgiving is some people’s favorite holiday, because it’s always appropriate to give thanks for our blessings in life, even for the simple blessing of food – today as much as at the first Thanksgiving.

And we don’t mock those holidays. They’re about real things going on in the real world, and we genuinely value and believe in them.

Now Christmas has two unrelated stories, but only one we seem to care about, judging from our behavior. The religious story says once a baby was born of a woman who had never had sex, whose father was a god up in heaven and who would be what some people in one religion call the savior of everyone, though nobody else believes it. Judging by the advertising and decorations each Christmas, and by the kinds of presents we but and expect, almost nobody believes or cares much about the religious story.

The story we love each December, however, is the story of the real center of Christmas: Santa Claus, who travels all over the world in his sleigh pulled by eight or nine flying reindeer so he can bring presents down everyone’s chimney – even those who don’t have chimneys. He gives a lot of presents to everybody and has children sitting on his lap in every shopping mall. That’s the real story of Christmas; the story of baby Jesus has virtually no effect on the observable behavior of the overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of religion.

Easter is also made up of two unrelated stories. The religious one is the story of a man who died and then three days later came back to life and then went up into heaven. Once again, looking at the advertising, decorations, gifts and cards we buy and send, almost nobody seems to care much about the religious story. But the other story, the real Easter story, is the story about a bunny who lays colored eggs, and about people dressing in spring colors, hunting for colored eggs, buying lots of chocolate, and taking flowers home from church, as we’ll do here today.

The very way we treat the religious stories under Christmas and Easter shows that really, in this world, we don’t believe them. They’re different kinds of holidays about a different and imaginary world. Of course, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny also come from make-believe worlds, and we don’t believe them literally, either. But they’re better stories, and do a better job at communicating with us messages we want and need to hear. The religious story, not so much.

We’re taught that Easter is a Christian holiday, but it isn’t true. It isn’t even close. And the place where you’ll read this in the angriest prose is on a whole host of evangelical and biblical Christian websites. If you go online and consult evangelical and fundamentalist Christian sources, they are clear and unanimous that Easter is a completely pagan holiday with absolutely no relation to Jesus, dating back thousands of years to the Babylonian and Chaldean goddess Ishtar – which, they say, was pronounced “Easter.”

Ishtar was a mythological character of the Babylonian or Sumerian religion which existed thousands of years before Jesus lived. She was the goddess of spring; she had rabbits that laid eggs. The eggs symbolized a new life and the colored eggs signified a wish for a bright new year ahead. Both the rabbit and the egg are pagan symbols of sex and fertility.

Sunrise services go back to these ancient practices of welcoming the spring, too. And some say coloring eggs in bright spring colors is also an ancient practice, and related to wearing bright spring colors today.

Many Christians agree that Easter isn’t Christian, and say people obviously don’t take the Christian story as seriously as stories of spring, life, bunnies, colored eggs and flowers. They say it as though it’s a bad thing.

But it isn’t a bad thing. The story about sunrise, spring, bunnies, colored eggs, flowers and having spring in our hearts – this is the story people prefer to the one about a man who died and came back to life.

What is the Easter message? Ironically, it is very traditional; it just isn’t religious. It’s the natural and psychological story of spring coming back in our world and in our lives, a victory of life over death, spring over winter, tender flowers and colored eggs and magical fertility symbols. It looks like that’s always been the message of Easter.

Why? Because these must have been the symbols of these spring festivals from the first time rabbits and eggs became part of it. And with similar props and symbols, the messages people have heard at this season must have been very similar for thousands of years. Messages of spring, the return of life, symbols of sex and fertility, the gift of life offered free to all of us – these have been the Easter messages since before recorded history. Both preacherly sermons and personal meditations on these symbols must always have run in orbit around these themes, both as natural events outside of us, and as psychological possibilities inside of us. And these are the stories we believe: the real, the original, Easter stories. They’re older than all religions in the world. They’re the stories we’ve always loved, and it looks in 2006 like we still prefer them to the religious stories that have tried to cover them.

Why? Perhaps because the Easter stories are just better stories with more relation to the world we’re living in. We look to religions for good news, life-giving news. We’re not all that fond of getting heavy messages in church, though it’s what all religious prophets have done. But they’re seldom popular until they’re long dead. We come to church, especially on high holy days like Christmas and Easter, to hear good news. And we choose the stories that give it to us, and shrug off stories that don’t, no matter how liturgical or pontifical they pretend to be.

The Easter story has been covered by the stories of a dozen gods and goddesses, maybe more. From Ishtar to Jesus, we have covered the Easter story with all manner of gods and goddesses. But they can’t cover it, can’t match its appeal, and can’t hide it for long, neither Ishtar nor Jesus.

As a society our behavior around this holiday shows that we don’t take the religious story of Jesus very seriously, as so many evangelical websites seem to be screaming too.

And how we do Easter may be a symptom of the fact that our official religions have really lost their power to hold the imaginations of even a majority of our citizens.

After all, only a bit more than 20% of Americans regularly attend religious services of any kind. (See books and essays by Rev. Kirk Hadaway, who has written about a dozen books in this area.) The stories of religion seem to be about such important things: life after death, eternity, a god so powerful he created the whole universe, knows everything we think, and can punish or destroy anything or anybody he chose. If we believed it, these stories would occupy our thoughts nearly all the time. Just think of the amount of time we have spent thinking about AIDS or Bird Flu because we really believe that they might kill us. But perhaps we don’t believe our traditional religious stories in any deep way at all any longer, and the evidence is on display every Christmas and Easter. Perhaps these are just background stories, things we say the way the ancient Romans used to bow to Jupiter and then go about their business like he was just a statue after all.

If a Roman were to just snicker as they passed the statues, or write popular books saying the gods were quite human after all, or put on plays that made the kind of fun of Jupiter that Monty Python’s movie “The Life of Brian” makes fun of the Jesus story, then the pretense would be over, and it would be fair for one Roman to ask another what the heck they were doing pretending to care about those old gods. And eventually, of course, that happened. Now hardly anybody remembers that old Jupiter was the same god the Greeks had earlier called Zeus, because both those gods are pretty much dead, like Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte and a hundred other gods and goddesses that have come and gone. Meanwhile, and throughout all these centuries, our favorite stories, like the Easter story, remain as popular as ever. .

If we were really serious about the stories of our supposedly official religions, I don’t think the media would routinely play off of the holidays with the kind of goofy stories we’ve all become used to, or that movies like “The Life of Brian” would still be played, 27 years after it came out, as Austin’s run-up to yet another Easter.

So I do wonder if the way we treat these two holidays in particular doesn’t really show that the stories have already lost their hold on the vast majority of people in our country, and if we’re watching the very slow-motion decline and death of Christianity as a noble religious – as opposed to merely political – force.

If so, then we should try to reclaim the stories we love and their symbols, from the religions that have been piled on top of them.

And this brings us to the flower communion we celebrate here each Easter. It was created by Unitarian minister Norbert Capek for his church in Czechoslovakia in 1923, when he observed this same antipathy toward traditional religion in his members. They lived in overwhelmingly Catholic surrounding, and most of Capek’s members had no use for the practice or idea of Communion because the idea had been so badly tainted by religions they didn’t respect. Yet at its best, the idea of “communion” is that you are communing, connecting, with the powers of the universe that created us, and bunnies, eggs and flowers and everything else. And that’s a powerful kind of energy to forego communion with. So Capek created the idea of a flower communion. He asked members each to bring a flower to church on a certain day, and the church bought some extras. The children arranged the flowers in baskets during the worship service, just as our children are doing today. Then before people left, they were each given a flower – not the one they brought, but one brought by somebody else. And they knew that there was a link, a communion, between them all, and with the powers of nature that had produced both the fragile flowers, and their own fragile selves.

Capek’s flower communion caught on immediately, and it was brought to this country by his wife in 1940. Our northern churches usually celebrate it in June on the last Sunday before they close their church for the summer – many of the Eastern and northern churches still base their church year on the old academic years. Since we don’t close our church, we do the Flower Communion at Easter, where the flowers can rejoin the other symbols of spring.

Norbert Capek died in a Nazi concentration camp. But the flower communion survives him, and offers us a kind of communion that we need as much as his own church members did.

The good news about Easter is that no religion has ever been able to tame it, claim it or cover it. Because we may not need stories of this or that goddess or god, but we do need to hear that story that life is more powerful than death, that it’s beautiful, and all of nature is offering it to us for free.

The good news about the Easter story is that it seems indestructible. Cover it with stories of Ishtar, Inanna, Eoster or of Jesus and God, but the real Easter story can’t be kept down because it’s true, and because it’s written deep into our own hearts. We need a springtime in our lives, today as much as ever. We need for life to be exuberant with its gifts of new life for old, beauty, spring, sunrises and flowers. We need some of those flowers, for they carry with them the message that life will triumph, in our world and in our hearts, and that if only we can take the spirit of this Easter inside of us, it can grow there, so that we might keep Eastering on our own, so that long after the flowers have faded, their promise of the fragile and beautiful gift of life will still be alive in us, resurrected from the stories into our hearts, where they can live for another year as the good news of the Easter Story.