Sacred Palimpsest: the Rites of Spring

Ron Phares

April 12, 2009

Mark 16

1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Gilgamesh; a verse narrative

Friendship is vowing toward immortality and does not know the passing away of beauty… You have known, oh Gilgamesh, what interests me, to drink from the well of immortality. Which means to make the dead rise from their graves and the prisoners from their cells and the sinners from their sins. I think love’s kiss kills the heart of flesh. It is the only way to eternal life.

Song of Myself

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.

Prayer

We come here today in the midst of a loss, a loss of trust, and of community and of direction within our congregation. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of global ecological and political turmoil. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. As our spiritual disenchantment festers, our financial philanthropy dwindles. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We are here in the midst of a global economic crisis. Which touches not only our friends and neighbors, but also those we may not have met; our global brothers and sisters. These are troubled times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

But as the winter becomes the spring, so shall the troubled past become the promising future.

We come here to understand that the investment of our energies into our community lead to a greater personal and communal spiritual growth. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here to understand that a commitment to political and ecological non-violence will help us to change the world. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that good life is giving life and that is accomplished through compassion, respect and interest in eachother. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light. We come here and recognize that in supporting all of the earth’s creatures we support ourselves. These are hopeful times. Congregation: Let us be a light.

Amen.

Sermon

Isn’t it delightful that there’s the whiff of iconoclasm in reading the Bible in a UU church? I’m going to actually take it step further and make a confession. This will be a sermon of sentiment. It is sentimental. And I’ll own that and confess that as long as you all understand that a confession is not an apology. Because I feel today drawn between two ordeals. I feel it in myself. I feel it in our community. I feel it in the nation. I feel it in the land. I feel today drawn between beauty and ruin. The feeling took root two mornings past. It just so happened to be Good Friday. You’ll remember because it was probably the same for you, I walked out into the crisp, bright morning and inhaled… the scent of burning. And as I drove to Mayfield park that day, I could see the smoke, come down from the fires far, far north of us, fuzzing out the horizon of hills. So there was that tension, of beauty and ruin, right there in the day. You could see it. You could smell it.

It did occur to me that the day was significant. Perhaps not as much for our community, but for our greater heritage and the culture at large and certainly for many of my classmates at seminary, Good Friday is a momentous notch in the year. It is the day Jesus is put on the cross. And so, it was the day a hero died and a god was born. Beauty and ruin.

Now, this was a couple of days after Passover, which celebrates the freedom of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Pharo granted this beloved freedom after the breath of the Hebrew God killed the first born of every non-Jewish house. Beauty and ruin.

And this morning we have seen a fine piece of theatre about Brother Capek, who, like Jesus, spread his gospel of life while in the belly of a system of death, meeting a similar fate and producing a resonant faith. This is not to mention the performance of the play itself, which appropriately had its own share of beauty and ruin. It’s meta-theatre here at the UU church. Very avante garde. And here we have our flowers, which represent our own flowering and our willingness to give ourselves to others and to receive and recognize the loveliness of our fellows. These flowers are gorgeous. But these flowers are dead. Or dying. Beauty and ruin.

Meanwhile, pulling the lens back to wide angle once again, our economy continues to molt. One has the sense that the system wants to die or is, for all purposes already dead, except for one last mission; for there is a persistent will to not die to nothing, but instead to create another vessel for life, a similar but changed system for the energy of the dieing system to inhabit and invigorate. So that seems ruinous. But there is beauty there too. It’s quite a time to be alive.

So this tension felt, feels, very personal. But maybe you feel it too. Because the personal was just one plane upon which the tension arose. It was in the land, in the economy. It was on the calendar, in the significance of this time of year to our culture, to our practice of Unitarian Universalism, to Christians, to Jews, and, given that not for nothing does this all occur around the vernal equinox, it is significant as well to our pagan forbearers and contemporaries. It’s loaded. It is, and here I get to use the ten-cent word of the sermon title, a palimpsest.

That’s a mighty fine word. As a word, you’d think it might be good for ten dollars, not just cents. But while the economy is cracking, inflation has remained stable, so it’s still ten cents. And worthless in Europe. At any rate, a palimpsest is, first definition, “a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible,” and, second definition, “an object, place, or area that reflects its history.”

And so here, with this beauty and ruin in this calendrical space, we a have a sacred palimpsest. Humans throughout time have responded to this period of year, with the deepest method at their disposal: the art of mythmaking. Particularly in the west there is a sense of pairing, not of opposites necessarily, but of a pairing of beauty and ruin, which are perhaps only a prettier gloss for the clearly oppositional words: life and death. But I don’t want to make this binary. It is more subtle than a play of opposites. And so I will use, rather than life and death, beauty and ruin. I think it more accurately captures the nuance and desperation that culture after culture have felt, crafted stories around, and then placed and recalled for good reason at this time of year.

This palimpsest reminds me of a story in a book I read for class, though now I can’t recall which book or even which class. At any rate, an astrologist or physicist or some such was lecturing about the earth’s place in the solar system, it’s orbit and the implications thereof. At the end of his lecture there was a question and answer period. An elderly woman stood and reprimanded the lecturer. She told him that his words were wrong, that everyone knew that the earth was flat and that it was held up by the back of a turtle. The clever scientist saw quickly how to outflank the woman. Sure that the logic of a simple question would startle her out of her superstition, he asked her, “Well, what’s the turtle standing on?” But she was entirely unphased and replied conclusively, “It’s turtles! All the way down.”

I’m not agreeing with her science, but taken as a testimony to something like a sociology of spirituality, it rings true. What I mean is that, given the sacred palimpsest of this day, right now, and maybe always, maybe everyday, its beauty and ruin – all the way up, all the way down. I don’t think the theme is limited to this time of year necessarily, but its prominence is heightened by the earth’s current alignment, the cyclical flowering of life out of death and back, no doubt.

So here is this stack of turtle-backs of beauty and ruin, running through culture and time, through me, through us, through economy and ecology, from the concept of God through to the concept of Nature. And since these last two seem to meet, we may have a circle rather than an ascending line. So its stacked turtle backs, all the way around. Beauty and ruin, all the way around. It is not likely that we are left out of this great change taking place in our ecosystem, and by that I simply mean spring. We are of the ecosystem, after all. And so maybe this theme is biological, at its root. And if that’s the case, and I tend to think it is at least that, then we as individuals and as culture are, by our very hope and discomfort, expressions of something, articulations of something that is deep within ecological and, by extension, cosmic processes.

So what’s the message? Why is God, the universe, ecology, the pagans, the Jews, the Christians, and Norbert Capeck (in conjunction with whoever moved the flower communion from early summer to the equinox… I think I’ve just gone deterministically from God to a committee, which is true.) At any rate, what are they trying to tell me with this undercurrent of beauty and ruin? What am I trying to tell myself? And quite to the point, what in the name of beauty and ruin am I trying to tell you? What are we supposed to learn or be reminded of? How do we apply it?

For me, the answer has something to do with the notion that creation is a product of tension. Tension is what occurs between a writer and an empty page, between sculptor and clay, between lovers, between the promise of life and an empty tomb.

Recall the readings. The women find the tomb of Jesus empty. This is from the book of Mark, which is incidentally, the first gospel to be written. In Mark’s tale of the resurrection, we don’t ever see Jesus. We see this odd little dude in white, which may very likely be a later edition to the text, but we don’t see Jesus. We just know that his corpse is gone. We are told by this avatar narrator in white that he is risen. But the main thing to understand is that the tomb is empty. This is how Jesus becomes the Christ. His particular, locational absence makes possible his ubiquitous presence. The fact that he is not there, means he can be everywhere, incarnate now in us. The emptiness of the tomb begs questions, calls to our religious imaginations, leads us into that emptiness, so that we too might be everywhere in our reckoning and Christ-like in our compassion. The ruin of the tomb is the beauty of resurrection. It is a new life in the mold of the hero Jesus and therein a kind immortality.

This was also the quest of Gilgamesh and the meditation of its authors. The ancients who carved this tale into stone understood that immortality was not found in the conquest of time but in the timeless act of love. For though friends pass out of our lives, it is acts of true friendship, they tell us, where life is unbound.

So what of beauty and ruin? What of that tension? What are we to do with that sensation? Well, for one, take heart. Celebrate. Savor. The tension between beauty and ruin, gives us hope amidst the rubble of our lives. And when we are feeling high and fine and light, it reminds us to revel in every drop of light, every sweet breath because it is fleeting and will pass. But its passing makes it’s apprehension all the more exquisite. Beauty and ruin, but… beauty and ruin. It plants hope in horror, seeds forgiveness in evil, and from dry boredom, despair and lonliness, coaxes life and worth and laughter. It will come again. And more than that it is here now. Beauty is not permanent, but neither is it permanently suppressible. It is erupting and dying all about us all the time, even in our sorrow, even in our sin, even in our suffering and struggle. It is there. We find it. We nurture it. We savor its every sensation because we know beauty will pass and in that we are sustained. We are nurtured ourselves. We are found. We are given the great gift of unsustainable satisfaction. Beauty and ruin.

So here I am tempted, in response to our congregational episodes of beauty and ruin, to cajole you all into recommitting to this church and to each other, to finding that immortal sensation in friendship, to find life in the empty tomb of this building. But, alas, I see that I am too late. You guys are way ahead of me. I look around and I see the vibrancy of the children’s religious education program. I see book groups and philosophical discussion forums. I see the dedication of our church staff. I see covenant groups and adult education programs. I see, and usually smell, the men’s group breakfast (I smell the breakfast. I see the group.) I hear the talented voices of our congregation lifted and crafted in song and sermon. I see hours and effort put in by caring people in countless committees and positions of leadership and volunteerism. I see an updated web page listing these and many other ways to get involved. I see the senior luncheon and the Voyagers and the FuucYaa’s, a brave few of which are set to do a little evangelizing as they participate in the Hill Country ride for aids very soon. I see an active social action committee inviting our engagement. I see hands on housing and freeze night. I see you. I see you here today holding your flowers and sharing this moment with each other. We are here to refine our best nature. And I gotta say, on the whole, you guys are great. You’re doing it. You’re doing it.

I mean, we’re a little bit all over the map. We make mistakes. And where our mission ought to be, where our purpose ought to be, there is instead a big empty tomb. And that is alarming. But don’t run away. Run in. That’s where we will find life, that’s where we will find each other, if only our attitude is of life, or rather of beauty. Because beauty implies ruin, and that will make compassion the rule, and the key to unlocking immortality in each other. The Navajo have a benediction, or a parting wish classically given; “Walk in beauty.” But I say walk in beauty and ruin and be thereby compelled into a resurrection, into life. Not just life but life unbound. Original energy. And here, because I am a sentimental fool and willingly blind when I know I can get away with it, I have brought a little resurrection of my own. The flower communion is a meaningful event that affirms our principles, our compassion and interconnection. It is beautiful. But, as we noted before, it’s beauty in-folds ruin, as we have sacrificed some life by exchanging it. So I have brought something magical with which we can rejuvenate life. I have brought seeds. We’ll have them for you in the lobby as you leave. What you do is find a little spot of ruin, throw a few bits of good intention into it. Cover it so that it is protected from birds. Give it water and light, watch it grow. Invite your soul. Plant it. Nurture it. Savor it.

Consider the flowers in your hand the seeds of our community. Plant their image and significance in your mind. See it’s beauty and ruin in the hearts of your fellow seekers. Attend to that, protect it and watch it grow. Plant it. Nuture it. Savor it. It is all around you. It is you, every atom.