Hallelujah! A Celebration

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.

Rev. Jonalu Johnstone
April 9, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Easter, Passover and Ramadan all come together this year. We’ll consider these holidays and break into the full life of the Spring.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

BLESSED ARE WE
By Andrea Hawkins-Kamper

Blessed are we who gather with open hearts, together, in this space, today.
Blessed are we: the chalice-lighters of resistance, justice, love, and faith.
Blessed are we: the heretics, the outcasts, the walkers of our own way.
Blessed are we: the border-crossers, the refugees, the immigrants, the poor, the wanders who are not lost.

Blessed are we: the transgressors, the trespassers, the passers-by, the cause-takers, the defiant, the compliant.
Blessed are we: the hand-extenders, the sign-makers, the protestors, the protectors.
Blessed are we: the trans women, the trans men, the non-binary, the cisgender, the multigender, the no gender.

Blessed are we: the friend, the stranger, the lonely, the hidden, the visible, the authentic.
Blessed are we who rise in solidarity,
blessed are we who cannot, blessed are we who do not.
Blessed are we for this is our Beloved Community, and this is who we are.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Centering and Meditation

As we move into a time of centering and meditation, I recall the tension that can exist in these times between birth and death, Easter in many ways bringing them together. My heart also turns to the Middle, East where the intersections of the holidays have created dangerous clashes. I offer words of prayer from one of my mentors, Rev. Jane Rzepka, who grew up UU appreciating nature in so many ways. She offers words written many years ago that seem apt for this year and this time of the year:

o Spirit of Life and Renewal,

We have wintered enough, mourned enough, oppressed ourselves enough.

Our souls are too long cold and buried, our dreams all but forgotten, our hopes unheard.

We are waiting to rise from the dead.

In this, the season of steady rebirth, we awaken to the power so abundant, so holy, that returns each year through earth and sky.

We will find our hearts again and our good spirits. We will love, and believe, and give and wonder, and feel again the eternal powers.

The flow of life moves ever onward through one faithful spring and another and now another.

May we be forever grateful.

Alleluia.

Amen.

Readings

EARTH SONG
by Langston Hughes

It’s an earth songÑ
And I’ve been waiting long
For an earth song.
It’s a spring song!
I’ve been waiting long For a spring song:
Strong as the bursting of young buds,
Strong as the shoots of a new plant,
Strong as the coming of the first child From its mother’s wombÑ
An earth song!
A body song!
A spring song!
And I’ve been waiting long
For an earth song.

THE TREES
Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old”
No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.<

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Sermon

We have fully entered the spring season, and all these holidays come along. Past spring equinox, the light is stronger and longer. Last week Rev. Anthony Jenkins helped us see how paganism influenced Easter. And how the role of women – and goddesses – of color has been buried.

Really, though, what do any of these holidays have to do with us? Unitarian Universalism descends directly from Christianity, and some of us even call ourselves Jewish or Christian or Muslim UU’s, though we may have set aside some of the practices, ideas, maybe even the stories. We don’t quite believe them. We are the religious skeptics, right? We’re like the kid who described the Exodus to his mom when she asked what they learned in Sunday School.

He said, “Moses helped his people leave slavery in Egypt.”

His mother nodded.

He went on, “He released the frogs and bugs he’d been saving up, and poured dye in the river to make them think it was blood. Then, he let out chemical warfare that gave them boils. Plus a bunch of other stuff.” By now, his mother was frowning.

And he went on, “Until the Egyptians told them – just get out. So, all the Hebrews left with their half-baked bread. They had to stop at the Red Sea, so Moses built a pontoon bridge across it. But the Egyptians came after them, so Moses radioed for air cover that came and bombed the bridge while the Egyptians crossed over and they fell in the sea.”

“That’s not how your teacher told it,” said the mom. “No, but if I told you what they said, you’d never believe it.”

It’s really important to recognize the differences among the three holidays, especially Passover and Easter. They sometimes get a little mushed together because Christians believe that Jesus, who was a Jew, was arrested during Passover. So, Easter, this distinctly Christian holiday, celebrates the resurrection of Jesus following his murder by Roman authorities. Passover celebrates the escape of the Hebrews – or Jews – from slavery in Egypt. And Ramadan – which doesn’t always come in the spring — celebrates the first appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mohammad. Gabriel recited the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book to Muhammad.

All different holidays with different practices and different stories. Even different food! But there is one thing all these holidays have in common! They do not have a particular date on the calendar that we use every day. Now, this makes a certain amount of sense for both Jewish and Muslim holidays that use calendars based on the cycles of the moon. So, they use a different calendars and the holidays move around a little or a lot.

Easter, though, is not based on a lunar calendar. It’s based on the calendar we use every day of our lives – a solar calendar. Most holidays stay on the same date each year, or the same Monday or Thursday of the month.

Except Easter.

When I was a child, the unpredictability of Easter frustrated me. I never knew when it would come. I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe it was in March, maybe April. Maybe it would feel like spring. Maybe I’d freeze in my new spring outfit. Do you know the formula for setting the date of Easter? It’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. So, spring equinox, full moon, Sunday. Fully tied into earth-based customs, just like the name is.

Yes! The name Easter is not from the Christian tradition – it’s a pagan name, as we learned last week.

Anyway, Easter comes as a bit of a surprise, like spring does. Spring seems to come suddenly. One morning you wake up, and the trees are in bud. A poet once wrote (Max Picard in 1948, translated by Stanley Goodman, and found by Annie Dillard as “The Child in Spring):

Suddenly, the green appears on the trees – as if The green passed silently from one tree to another.

Suddenly. Suddenly, something turns and despair is replaced by joy. I don’t know what turns it, but I know that I don’t.

Of course, spring also comes at different times in different places. My first year serving in Madison, WI, I scheduled a flower ceremony way too early. Turns out spring doesn’t really come there until June. Here on the other hand, we’re well into spring by the time Easter comes around.

When I was living in rural West Virginia in the 1980’s, I knew it was spring each year when I drove past the herds of sheep that dotted the hillsides and noticed the little lambs with their mothers. I started to look in February, scanning each herd I would pass, hoping to sight the very first lamb of spring. Somehow, it was tied in with the cake my mother used to bake shaped as a lamb, with coconut on top. Somehow, it connected to the feel of dirt unfrozen from the ground and taking tank tops out of boxes in the closet. Spring came each year when the lambs appeared; and the world changed. That reassured me of the predictability of the world.

The lambs were tiny and fuzzy, on trembling legs. The depth of the beauty I felt was in the fragility of those creatures. Fragile, yet ever so real. So alive. So precious. That moment when I saw the first lamb of spring became more profound and joyful with each year that passed.

My colleagues in divinity school used to make fun of my “little lambie” theology of Easter. I don’t think those people have been around farms much, though, or they wouldn’t find it quite so simplistic. These are the connections that give rise to all the great and simple stories of spring.

Poet John Soos, about whom I know very little, has written:

To be of the Earth is to know
the restlessness of being a seed
the darkness of being planted
the struggle toward the light
the joy of bursting and bearing fruit
the love of being food for someone
the scattering of your seeds
the decay of the seasons
the mystery of death
and the miracle of birth.

In that short verse, Soos tells us that every part of the process is legitimate and real. We can only be where we are in that moment, whether a restless seed, lying fallow waiting, or struggling and bearing fruit, whether engaged in being birthed or dying.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it is the time of year for resurrection. No matter how much scientific knowledge we have about the growth patterns of plants and animals, no matter how confident we are that dead things do not come back to life, this time of year is a season of miracles. Easter persists as the time of resurrection and rebirth.

Eggs are a symbol of birth. Out of something that looks lifeless and dead, like a stone, comes a living being.

And the Easter bunny? Rabbits, of course, are known for their fertility because they breed quickly. There’s more to the story, though. Rabbits or hares connected life and death in ancient societies like Greece and Rome, Mesopotamia and Syria. And in Asia, there are stories of the hare living in the moon, associated with immortality, as the moon lives forever, yet dies and is reborn each month.

The lamb comes originally from the Passover, when lamb was central to the Seder celebration, and Jesus became known as “the lamb of God.” Though I prefer my interpretations of the lamb of spring that I explained earlier.

And just as I celebrated those lambs in West Virginia, it’s a good time to celebrate the human babies we welcomed this morning in the baby parade. Of course, each is their individual self, yet, in their fresh newbornness, they remind us of new starts and the persistence of the human spirit. That’s why we sing Hallelujah, or Alleluia.

Hallelujah isn’t always easy to sing. The words can catch in one’s throat when we aren’t inspired. Canadian Jewish Buddhist poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s famous song of that name has such a catchy tune that people sing it almost lightly, but, my goodness, what heavy, heavy lyrics – it is a Leonard Cohen song, after all. Let me quote just a tiny piece of it:

even if it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah Hallelujah!

Even if it all went wrong. Even if it all went wrong. That’s faith. To keep singing Hallelujah even when you don’t feel it. When you’re at the place on the journey that is buried beneath the ground. Somehow, even in that, knowing that the spring will come again, but with no inkling of when, you can keep on and even croak out a Hallelujah.

Out of the depths and darkness of winter comes the light of spring.
Out of the deeply buried dead-looking bulb comes the daffodil.
From the aging sheep comes the newborn lamb.
From our own serious personal losses and wounds comes our growth and rebirth.
Out of the death of one comes life-giving freedom for many.
Out of the darkness of Good Friday there comes the triumphant light of Easter.

May we notice the changing of the seasons in the world and in our lives and may those changes be a source of blessing.

I invite you to join in an Affirmation of Life, I adapted from words by Max A. Coots, 20th century UU minister, poet and sculptor, and Alla Renee Bozarth, one of the first women ordained as an Episcopal minister in 1974. Rev. Bozarth is still alive, and Rev. Coots died in 2009; both white. You have a response that is printed in your order of service:

Let’s try it!

We need a celebration that speaks the Spring-inspired word about life and death, (about slavery and freedom, about the revelation of the divine,) … through all the cycling seasons, days, and years.