Easter 2012

READING BEFORE SERMON, EASTER SUNDAY 2012
taken from an essay by the late Rev. Suzanne Meyer, from when she was serving First UU Church, New Orleans

Lover of the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

This Easter I encourage you to practice resurrection. Note, I did not say, “believe in resurrection,” I said practice it! For the poet Wendell Berry, practicing resurrection doesn't refer to a metaphysical act or a theological proposition. For Berry, the art and science of resurrection is found in those countless disciplined acts of resistance to all of the forces in modern life that dehumanize, oppress, and reduce precious individuals to robots. Don’t let your mind be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer -- wage a guerilla campaign on behalf of love, justice, and joy. Practice resurrection!

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit, they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.

In the springtime, in the greening time, as life is renewed, we must renew our opposition to all the forces that crush the spirit, erode the soul, stifle freedom. We must place our hope in the things that endure. For this is eternal life. Berry says: “Invest in the millennium -- plant sequoias.” In what he calls his “Manifesto,” Berry encourages us to

Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.

Practicing resurrection means expanding the sense of self outward from the rather arbitrary borders of our own skins, becoming so large and expansive that death no longer has any dominion. Buddhist Joanna Macy writes: “The way we define and delimit the self is arbitrary.”

Berry shares Macy’s expanded sense of the self. His theology is juicy, erotic, rebellious, some would say mad. He is a heretic because he refuses to believe that resurrection was a one time only, one-person only event. We are the living dead buried under all of the flotsam and jetsam of modern living, seduced by the false promises of secular materialism. We are cut off from the earth, the soil, the humus, the natural cycles of life and death. Life is an innately spiritual experience; and we have lost touch with that. Much of Western religion has been necrophilic -- death loving, world renouncing. But we have it within ourselves to rise, to become biophilic -- life loving, world embracing. Resist! Refuse! Recycle! Resurrection happens! So practice resurrection. So ends the reading.

“Coming Back from the Dead” A Homily for Easter
by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, April 8, 2012

There is a rather famous Easter story that is supposed to have occurred in a New England Universalist church some 60-odd years ago. One Easter Sunday, the choir was processing down the center aisle, singing an old Universalist hymn entitled, “Up From the Grave He Rose.” There was a hot air register in the middle of the aisle and the last soprano got her high heel caught in the grating. She kept on singing, stepped out of her shoe, and kept on walking. The man behind her, thinking he was doing her a favor, picked up the shoe -- and the whole grate came with it.

Nobody missed a beat. The man walked on with the shoe and the grate in his hand, and, still in tune and still in step, the man right behind him fell into the open register and dropped from sight. As the choir sang the final “Allelulia! He arose!” the congregation was startled -- to say the least -- when a shout came from the hole in the floor: “You'd better all be out of the way, because I'm coming up!”

I’m told that the man emerged from the netherworld of the crawl space, as the choir burst into the second Easter hymn, and the whole congregation cheered. Resurrection took place in a Universalist church that Easter, and everyone shared in it.

One of the biggest differences between Unitarian Universalists and our sisters and brothers of more traditional faiths, as Suzanne Meyer points out, is that most of them believe that resurrection was a one-time-only event for one-person-only, with the rest of us promised resurrection only after we die and only if we're good enough, while we religious liberals realize how often such events as rebirth and resurrection occur in each and every one of our lives. We all share in them.

The story of Jesus is not the earliest one we have of a godlike figure dying and rising again. It seems that humans have always needed to be reminded of the possibility and hope of renewal and that is why Easter-type stories of rebirth and resurrection are part of human religious history. (Interestingly, the majority of these early figures are female.) The first deity to die, enter the underworld, and return to the living was the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who was seeking answers and more power. The second was likely the Egyptian goddess Isis, who was seeking her lost love, Osiris. The ancient Greeks had Persephone, who either went willingly or was kidnapped, depending on which version of the myth you choose to go by. Our own name for this holiday, Easter, comes from the name of the Indo-European dawn goddess of the east whose special celebrations always took place at the vernal equinox. In different regions, she was known as Eostre, Astarte, Ashera, Aurora. (Another item of interest is the fact that many scholars believe the Jewish heroine-queen Esther whose holiday, Purim, is also celebrated at the spring equinox, is a manifestation of the Canaanite version of this same goddess.)

The rituals of the springtime dawn goddess varied with the culture and region, but usually included baskets of flowers and spring greenery, a dawn service, and baby animals such as lambs, goats, rabbits. Eggs, symbols of the goddess's sacred womb of rebirth and of the fertility of the spring season, were also part of the holiday in many places. Children were honored as embodiments of new life. (Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.)

Whether ancient peoples believed in the stories told about their various goddesses literally or metaphorically we will never really know, and it doesn't matter. We religious liberals in the 21st century are free to view them as useful and beautiful symbols, without fretting over historic or scientific accuracy, which is not the point anyway. Rebirth and resurrection are necessary to being human; they are needs from deep within us. We especially seem to feel it at this time of year.

Spring itself feels like a rebirth and resurrection of our earth, the Japanese magnolias and redbuds and forsythias and all the soft new green, lifting our spirits with their beauty and their scent (even when they also irritate our sinuses).

•There's the rebirth and resurrection of finding a religious home where you can be yourself, with all your doubts and questions and life experiences, after you had given up hope that there could be a church for you.
•There's the rebirth and resurrection of finding love when you feel you didn't “earn” it or that you don't “deserve” it. (It's lucky for all of us that love isn’t apportioned that way, because so few of us would get any.)
•There's the rebirth and resurrection of rising again after dealing with addictions and substance abuse, and discovering you can go, one day at a time, into a life of sobriety.
•There’s the rebirth and resurrection of finding a way to keep on keeping on after a tragedy or disaster. (Now, there’s a resurrection First Churchers and other New Orleanians know about first-hand!)
•There's the rebirth and resurrection of finding friends when you need them the most, when an illness or a death or a catastrophe has put you in the tomb-like darkness of despair and alienation. All of these rebirths and resurrections can be celebrated as signs that renewal is always possible, even in a world like ours, dominated by death and tragedy and cynicism and pain.

In Rev. Suzanne’s essay, poet Wendell Berry reminds us that the forces of the tomb are always out there, ready to lay to rest all the mystery and juice and beauty of life in exchange for the mess of pottage that is secular materialism. Believing in rebirth and resurrection means placing our hopes in what endures: love, compassion, the things of the earth, the natural cycles of loss and return.

My colleague Maureen Killoran of our church in Asheville, North Carolina, writes that

[r]esurrection literally means "to rise again," to rise up from the ashes of destruction and, like the phoenix, set forth anew upon the path of life. Each of us, by virtue of being alive, has fallen. Resurrection means to come back from those deaths both large and small, our times of imprisonment in the tomb of the soul. Resurrection means to triumph over opposition, and each of us has, at one time or another, faced [our] fear and moved beyond.

For us as religious liberals, coming back from the dead does not occur when an angel, or some other supernatural being, appears after 3 days or 3 weeks or 3 years to roll away the stones upon our hearts. We come back from the dead when courage and hope reach through our despair and pain; we come back from the dead when we engage the world not as a threat, not as a monster, not even as a necessary evil, but as a delightful challenge. We come back from the dead when we are realistic about what we can accomplish and yet let our sense of mirth and play help us to determine where to draw the line.

On this beautiful Easter day, I invite you to take a moment to reflect on the times in your life when you have been in the dark of the tomb of the soul. It may have been a disappointment so great that you tried to insulate yourself from the world. Or it may have been a loss of someone or something so beloved that you felt abandoned and alone. Whatever it was, each one of us has felt it -- that feeling of fear, dark and cold, like being shut away in a tomb.

From there, I ask you to remember what it was that brought you "back from the dead" -- the person or community that supported, comforted, and encouraged you, who made you feel alive once more. Something or someone came to us when we were locked in a cave in our souls and rolled away the stone, revealing a deeper dimension of hope and connection. This Easter, I encourage you to practice rebirth and resurrection by recalling to mind your own times of hopeful renewal.

Rebirth and resurrection -- they're not unique, legendary, supernatural events, but the stuff of life, your life and mine. And there may be no better time to contemplate all that renews and returns than glorious Springtime. May this Eastertide find us heartened and challenged by our own times of rebirth and resurrection in the midst of the darkness of our times: deception, meaningless, materialism, despair. May we daily find the miracles of hope we need to truly live, instead of merely surviving. So might this be! AMEN –ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE.