Easter 2004

and Hannah Wells

11 April 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sheri Goodwin

Good morning, my name is Sheri Goodwin and I consider myself a Contemplative Christian, otherwise known as a Christian that meditates. Like most of us, I have grown up a seeker, yearning to understand the Truths of this world. I grew up in a devout Christian family and have gone to church all of my life and I thank my parents for giving me that strong foundation.

Like many, I began to question my beliefs in college and thereafter. Most of my experiences with church were very positive, yet the religion was something that was given to me, not a discovery that I experienced on my own. So, I set out to get to some NOs as Davidson puts it, before I could get to some YESes.

Within the last several years, I have sought understanding through Buddhist teachings, esoteric Christian teachers, and other spiritual books. I have had two very special guides in my life, Pamela and Lisa, who are my teachers and spiritual supporters.

The Dalai Lama says that we can’t choose our religion. What I understand him to mean is that all major world religions have one common belief – that Love is the way to overcome our suffering and that sacred scriptures from different religions can lead us to discover God or that love or oneness or light that is in us all. I believe that, and have chosen to continue my understanding based on my Christian foundation.

I have also studied and been influenced by the Enneagram which is a study of nine personality types and how our personalities, when unhealthy, keep us from knowing that essence of God that is in us. Since I’ve discovered the Enneagram, there is literally not a day that goes by that I do not think about it. It’s not a religion, but it is a tool for transformation.

There are three triads of personalities based on body, mind and soul centers. My personality type, the Nine, is in the body triad and is known as the Peacemaker. I’m always searching for peace and comfort in my life. Sometimes that peace seeking is demonstrated in healthy ways and sometimes in ways that gives me just the opposite.

So, that summarizes my background, but why the topic of resurrection? When the worship associates met, I proposed the topic as a challenge to myself because it is central to Christianity.

As part of my preparation, I observed Lent. This year, I gave up the chief fixation of the nine: laziness. Nines are not lazy in the sense that we know it. In fact I’m quite active. Laziness in this sense is not engaging in life, kind of numbing out when things get stressful.

With Lent, I have gotten up earlier than usual in the mornings to do yoga, meditate and read. I’ve consciously tried to engage fully in life. Part of my reading included The Gospel of Luke who, among the four Gospels represents the body, the sacrifice.

I hadn’t really been back to the Bible in many years and this was a truly wonderful experience for me. In Luke, there are three passages that jumped out to me; all things that Jesus said:

1) The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you. – Luke 17:21

2) Those who seek to save their life, will loose it; and those who lose their life will keep it. – Luke 17:33

3) For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive. – Luke 20:38

To paraphrase, God is within me. I have to lose my life to have life. It is not a God of the dead, but of the living. God, to me, is a force, energy, the good virtues that can be found in us. Simply, God is Love.

I found those words in Luke especially important because I believe that I can choose a resurrection. It’s an internal choice. To me, suffering or non-life, is all the things in our human condition that aren’t Love – like anger, resentment, not forgiving, fear – all those things that cause me to churn. The things that make me lose sleep. Going through the process of dying to those things, is as Jesus says, losing MY life and seeking God within me in order to have a better life. One that is truly alive! To me, that is choosing resurrection. That is choosing Love.

Making that choice moment by moment is not easy and I fail more than not. I think it involves a conscious choice of forgiveness. Forgiveness of ourselves and forgiveness of others. I find the Enneagram a helpful tool in guiding me to this forgiveness. The Enneagram sheds light on the essence that we really are, not the personality that drives us. It helps me identify what to die to to create a transformation. It’s in our everyday life that we are given the opportunity to resurrect.

Jesus’ teachings and his resurrection are about choosing Life. Choosing the Love that I have in me if can die to the things that keep me from it. That’s when I experience resurrection. That’s when I experience God within me.

PRAYER:

We pray for the spiritual resurrection of ourselves and those we love.

To be born again, born of a Spirit that can be called Holy – we pray for that.

If the glory of God is a human being fully alive, then we pray this Easter that the glory of God may become incarnate in all those people who are open to and eager for it, all those people with “eyes to see and ears to hear” this good news. And we pray that we may be one of those people.

It does us no good if Jesus was the son of God, unless we also may become the sons and daughters of God.

It is Easter, the time of becomings, the springtime season of hope, of life, and of all things filled with light, wonder and trust.

Let us be creatures of Easter, hosts of the new birth and new life sung by all the bright, greenly spirits of things.

Let us become co-conspirators in this vast cosmic plan to replace death with life, fear with trust, and despair with hope.

It is Easter. Let us prepare for our resurrection: here and now. Let us welcome into our hearts the exuberant gifts of another spiritual springtime, another precious resurrection of the spirit.

Amen.

HOMILY: The Easter of Nature: Life Over Death

Hannah Wells

Among my colleagues in Seminary school, it is in vogue to criticize the popular method of celebrating Easter in the UU faith. They lament, “Easter is about MORE than bunnies!” Or as one told me recently, “I am SO disappointed that my church is having a FLOWER communion for Easter AGAIN this year.” Apparently talking about Jesus on Easter has become much more cool.

One of the best stories from my UU upbringing that my parents like to tell was when my Mother prepared a very nice meal for Easter one year, I looked at all the food and asked my parents with genuine curiosity, “Is Easter some kind of religious holiday?” I was about 10. They were amused, but my Mother also said, “thank God she didn’t ask us that question in front of my Mother.”

It’s true that when I went to Seminary I had a Jesus Renaissance – mostly because I didn’t know a thing about him. Meeting Jesus late in the game has its perks; I got to know him with no beef against him. I love referring to Jesus in my sermons now and I consider his teachings an important influence on who I try to be. However, the popular UU interpretation of Easter has always held a great deal of meaning for me, too.

I grew up in a part of the country where it is cold and mostly gray for at least 7 months out of the year. Chicago-land, that is. Usually toward the end of every winter, I was depressed and suffering from seasonal affective disorder from not getting enough sunshine. So when the first crocuses poked their little green heads out among the snow patches, it was cause for great excitement. All the signs of Spring were a great relief . . . The pink cherry blossoms on the trees that reminded me of fluffy scoops of raspberry frozen yogurt. The tulips and snap dragons in my Mother’s garden. The first murmurs of cicadas and crickets through the screens of open windows at night. The first hints of humidity and warmth in the air. It really felt like a process of something frozen in me thawing out each year.

Easter was always around this time, and so it came to symbolize the survival of another winter. Longer days, even the buzz of a lawn mower was a welcome sign of Spring. Soon I could walk barefoot around the yard, ride my bike to the public pool, collect bugs and fire flies with my neighborhood friends.

I remember I tried to start a “nature club” once in my basement. I instructed my friends to draw pictures of trees, flowers, and rainbows to hang on the walls, and the pinnacle of excitement would be to catch a butterfly or a fat shiny beetle. One year we had a flood and there were thousands of centipedes we saved and put into a plastic box. Anything we ever caught died the next day – which taught me that in order to live, things in nature had to be free.

Perhaps I was destined to have an appreciation for nature and the outdoors as an adult, regardless. But I think an emphasis on revering nature in the UU church I grew up in played a role. Every year we had a flower communion for Easter. It took me a while to understand that the flowers represented the ecological resurrection we were paying homage to. As simple or even as clumsy such a ritual is, it always struck me as a beautiful and passionate expression of gratitude for the coming of Spring.

The minister instructed the church to smell deeply of the blossoms’ scent. Even if the aroma wasn’t strong, it still smelled like the earth. Smelling fresh flowers was as good as drinking the blood of Jesus to me; it was a communion – because the flowers symbolized Spring and Spring always saved me.

When framed well, the message of Jesus and the metaphor of his resurrection is very powerful. But I think the flowers and bunnies approach to Easter can be powerful too. Because it’s about taking note of what we seem to take for granted – that every year Spring faithfully returns. If we had to choose between photosynthesis and theology, I think the trees would win – that’s how we breathe. The miracle of life on this planet! Being just the right distance from just the right-sized star, a planet that has just the right balance of gases and elements to support such a variety of life forms. Isn’t that story rather marvelous? And true beyond a doubt?

What’s important is that we take time to be dazzled by the arrival of Spring, the turning of the seasons, by life’s constant surge forward. Everything in nature – including us – goes through cycles. If parts of us didn’t die, new parts of us couldn’t be born. A year is a long time – it takes that long for a typical tree to bear fruit. All the important things we cultivate in our lives take a long time, too.

And then there are the flowers and the bugs – they don’t live very long at all. There are many spectacular things about life that happen very quickly, and if we don’t take time to see them, we miss the small ways that life moves forward.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I got to visit with my youngest niece who is still a toddler. I hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving, and in these few months she has learned how to walk. In this time, she has also become her own little person with her own personality! She’s not even quite two years old, and I couldn’t believe how feisty and tough she was. As I was spinning her and her big sister in circles on their tire swing in the back yard, she’s so little I was afraid she might fly off. But she just held on tight, closed her eyes, and squealed with delight. I spinned the tire faster and faster and the expression of joy on her face just deepened. She held on, no problem. I had to squeal with delight myself because there is nothing like watching a young child discover joy, discover LIFE.

That’s what Easter can be about – noticing how life moves forward. Gratitude in the form of delight, just for the blossoms, just for the light, just for joy.

What would Jesus do? I think he’d smile to see God’s children delight in the Kingdom.

SO enjoy the Easter egg hunt! Enjoy the chocolate bunnies! Hippity, hoppity, these symbols are sacred. Happy Easter

HOMILY: The Nature of Easter: Choosing Resurrection

Davidson Loehr

I don’t think of Easter as a Christian holiday, but as the Christian variation on themes older than recorded history. There is a whole range of ideas that have clustered around the vernal equinox, the beginning of spring, the start of the planting season for agricultural societies. It’s always been about the victory of life over death, light over darkness, spring over winter, hope over despair. Those are the themes that arise from the human soul, turning the change of seasons into a metaphor for hoped-for psychological changes – just as Christmas is another “cover” of the winter solstice, the rebirth of the sun.

Then I’m interested in how the different traditions handle these timeless themes, and how useful their efforts are for us today.

In looking at the messages of Jesus and Paul on the subject of resurrection, there is really a quite surprising lesson to be learned. This might be the first time you’ve heard it, even if you grew up in a Christian church. (If it is the first time you’ve heard it, shame on your ministers!) The lesson is that both Jesus and Paul are quite clear that nothing about their message involves the bodily resurrection of Jesus or anyone else.

Both Jesus and Paul taught on two different levels. They said things that sounded literal and supernatural, but also said the deeper meanings were hidden from the simple or unworthy, and were available only to those with “eyes to see and ears to hear” as Jesus liked to put it.

People asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was coming – they understood it as a supernatural thing, like special effects in a movie where a large powerful creature changes the world around right before your eyes. His answer could hardly have been more clear. He said No; this kingdom isn’t something you can point to, it is not coming; it is within or among you, or it’s nowhere. The kingdom of God and the point of religion, to Jesus, were not supernatural, and not postponed until somewhere else and later. They were spiritual, psychological, and were available here and now or nowhere and never.

In the Gospel of Thomas, he said the kingdom of God is already spread out on the earth, and people don’t see it. It is not supernatural. We have everything we need, and only we can bring about the kingdom of God, through our actions. He thought we should know that we are loved, that all others are equally loved, even those we can’t stand, and that when we treat ourselves and others like brothers, sisters and children of God, the kingdom of God will be here, because that is what the kingdom of God is. Period, Amen, end of sermon, end of religion.

Also in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said that whoever drank from his mouth became like him: in other words, anyone who understood what he said had everything he had. He was no more or less a son of God than we were, if only we would open our eyes.

In another saying from the Gospel of Thomas – one of my very favorites from any time or place – Jesus said “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (#70) This is good modern depth psychology, and great ancient wisdom. Salvation, wholeness, being “born again, born of the Spirit,” is a spiritual – what today we would call psychological – reality that happens here and now or nowhere and never, if we are to believe Jesus.

And while St. Paul has earned a lot of bad press, sometimes he too was pretty clear about this fact that salvation and resurrection were spiritual or psychological, but never physical, never involving bodies, either ours or Jesus’s. I’ve picked a few passages from his letter to the Corinthians – a small contentious church of about 65 members that he founded. In the third chapter (I Cor. 3: 1-3a) Paul explains that he could not address them as “spiritual” people, but as men of the flesh, as what he called “babes in Christ.” “I fed you with milk, not solid food;” he wrote, “for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready?.” So he’s warning them before he begins that he’s only given them pap, not the deeper and harder religious lessons for which they are not ready.

The difference between “people of the flesh” and “spiritual people” for Paul is the difference between literalists who can only understand things magically, supernaturally, and those who understand that the riches of religion are spiritual or psychological, riches of personal transformation.

In I Corinthians 2:14-16, Paul writes “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man [on the other hand] judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we, Paul said, have the mind of Christ.

Paul echoes Jesus’ teaching that those who understand him become like him, and gain “the mind of Christ.” This isn’t blasphemy, it’s St. Paul. It can’t be blasphemy if Paul said it: it’s a sort of rule.

And “so it is,” he says, “with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body?. (50): I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (I Cor. 15:42ff)

Reading Paul, like reading the New Testament, is frustrating because he does write on two levels. He is writing to the “babes in Christ,” and has already told them he is feeding them milk rather than solid food. So yes, you can make either a literal or a spiritual, psychological, interpretation of Paul’s writings. And since he wrote it for the “babes in Christ,” it’s not surprising that it has been read literally. But he, like Jesus, gives enough hints that resurrection can not involve anyone’s body, that it is a kind of spiritual thing, a kind of persistence of the spirit of this powerful man Jesus.

This notion of a “spiritual persistence,” the sense that someone who has died is still powerfully “present,” is neither supernatural nor unusual. We still react this way to powerful and charismatic people; maybe you have, too. The last count I saw said that Elvis Presley has been “sighted” since his death over 250,000 times by people who won’t believe he isn’t still here in some way. Martin Luther King Jr’s spirit have remained powerful for many of us, 36 after his murder. Marilyn Monroe still lives as a cultural icon, people still buy photos and poster of her and put them in their rooms.

I saw an example of this that took my breath away a few years ago, and heard of another one after the first service this morning.

A few years ago, I was driving north through Indiana on Interstate 69 when I saw a billboard advertising the town of Fairmount, hometown of the 1950s movie actor James Dean. Dean made only three movies, all of which became classics (Giant, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause) and became a kind of cult figure after his tragic death in a 1955 highway accident.

I went to the museum and souvenir shop devoted entirely to James Dean, where the owner discovered – to his disgust, I thought – that I really didn’t know a lot about Dean. At one point, he said in a very serious voice “You must go up the hill and see his grave!” This wasn’t high on my list of things I’d like to do, so I asked him why. “To understand,” he said, “to understand his power!”

OK, I was hooked. I drove to the cemetery to look for the grave – people kept stealing his gravestone, I’d been told, but they’d just replaced it again a month or so ago. Up at the top of the hill, I found it. It was small, a regular dark red granite grave stone maybe a foot high and two feet wide. Then I saw what the man at the museum and gift shop had meant: the entire grave stone was covered in lipstick kisses! I imagine most of them had been planted there, and recently, by young women who hadn’t even been born in 1955. That’s spiritual persistence, the feeling that someone long dead is still very much here.

And this morning a church member said he visited Paris again a few weeks ago, and finally decided to find rock guitarist Jim Morrison’s grave there. It was nearly a shrine, covered with personal notes written to Morrison’s spirit, covered with burning candles and burned-out candles. To a lot of people, something about Jim Morrison is very much alive, thirty three years after his death in 1971.

It isn’t unusual. It seems to be how we react to the loss of powerful people, and Jesus would have fit into this category. So it’s no wonder that the sense of his “persistence” would have been described in supernatural or quasi-supernatural terms. But there was nothing supernatural in that sense, as Jesus preached and Paul indicated in his coded introduction to his church at Corinth.

Christianity has continued to be taught to the babes in Christ, as supernatural, magical, involving a resurrection of the body. But from the very beginning, its most powerful teachers said otherwise.

Much of this is would take too long to go into here, which is why I’m leading an eight-hour Jesus Seminar program here May 14th and 15th. I strongly urge you to make a place for this Friday night and Saturday program in your calendar. We need to understand what the man Jesus was really about, especially since Christianity is the dominant religion of our culture, and it is almost always taught at the level of “babes in Christ” rather than as Jesus taught it.

For here, I’ll stick to what the Easter message really is. Finding it is like an Easter egg hunt. You have to look through history for those few great Christian writers who did have the eyes to see and ears to hear. There, you’ll hear the same kind of message that Jesus delivered, and that Paul alluded to when he said those who understand have the mind of Christ.

Irenaeus, a 2nd century Christian was one of these. One of the things he wrote was this remarkable and wonderful statement: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Here was a 2nd century Christian who thought the real message of Christianity is not about supernatural magic, but about becoming fully alive.

And in the 16th century, another great Christian writer named Meister Eckhart, whose books are still available wrote of the incarnation of God in Jesus, that “God became man, so that man might become God.”

“It would be of little value for me,” he wrote, “that ‘the Word was made flesh’ for man in Christ as a person distinct from me unless he was also made flesh in me personally so that I too might be God’s son.”

Jesus would have said “Amen.” This was not a “babe in Christ,” but a mature believer writing about a mature belief grounded in the empowering teachings of Jesus. He wanted to become like Jesus, as Jesus intended.

And this Easter, I want to add my voice to these other voices and say that the Easter message for “babes” is not worth giving, neither now nor then. There is nothing supernatural going on, either in the 21st century or in the 1st century, because the world isn’t built that way. Jesus made this clear. Paul tried to say it in his coded way, as have first-rate Christian thinkers like Irenaeus in the 2nd century, Eckhart in the 16th century, and many others in all centuries.

Nor do you have to plow through dusty libraries for seldom-read words of some of the geniuses of Christian history. In all times and places, there are people who get it and who say so. I’m reminded of a passage from Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, where she writes, “Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you’re looking for.” There was a modern woman with eyes to see and ears to hear the real Easter message.

The supernatural religion for Paul’s “babes in Christ” is a religion of fear, trying to make believers feel safe. Jesus’ religion was a religion of trust, trying to help us come alive. Jesus taught that, as Shug put it, God is inside of us and everybody else. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” But first, we must choose to become fully alive.

It’s Easter, so in the most ancient traditions of this vernal equinox, Passover, beginning of spring and Easter, we have put brightly colored clues, symbols of life – locally known as Easter eggs – all over the place outside, which the children will be hunting for in a few minutes.

And for you, the clues are, I hope, just as brightly colored, scattered around in the air, in your imaginations, in the words of this morning’s service, and in the depths where you too seek new life for old. That’s the free gift of Easter, and it is available any day, any day at all. Because any day we choose resurrection is Easter. Today is Easter; let’s choose resurrection.