Easter. Rebirth. Redemption. Where should this sermon begin? Where should the message start? What needs to be said when what we want is some deep rebirth and renewal, when what we need is not more words but new life.

I was inspired by Victoria Safford, in a piece titled, “Did the Sun Come Up This Morning” and by the Sweet Gum tree outside my kitchen window from which I often receive wisdom:

Have you seen the trees? The white and pink blossoms on the shoulder of the hills? The magnolia’s swelling? The cascades of camelias? The buds, within days of bursting open, on that Sweet Gum tree?

Easter is so early this year. Not everything is yet in bloom. But it is on the way.

“…have you smelled the muddy, ready earth and the musty, lusty moldy piles of leaves and underneath, the moist and living earthworms, wide awake.

Is it safe, I wonder, to presume that we have all seen the dead resurrected? Can we presume, just quietly among us…? Can we admit, however carefully at first, however foolish it may sound, that one or twice in our lives or perhaps over and over and tumbling over, we have seen the miracle of rebirth?

The dead shall rise again.

We know, because we have seen it.”

Halleluiah!

Have you seen the trees? The miracle of rebirth, the greening earth around us cannot be denied. And there is in that new life an invitation to new life in us.

For some of us, that is probably sermon enough…right there. The flowering trees preach a powerful enough sermon for some of us.

Or it might be enough to point to some of the powerful signs of new life and new hope out in the world. Thankfully there are some. The March for Our Lives, the clarity and competence of the youth (who those of us in my generation are so happy to follow and support.) There is hope that some of the messes we have left might actually be redeemed. Those signs in the world are enough for some.

And for others of us, just being present in this community, just singing together the halleluiah songs offers renewal a-plenty, is redemption enough, is salvation in and of itself. That is all we need, some of us.

So Halleluiah! Thanks and praise for the return of spring, for the signs of hope in the world and for this community of faithful folks who companion us and hold us in their hearts. Halleluiah!

But even those of us who would be happy enough with that halleluiah…even those of us know that there is more needed in this particular season of the soul.

Redemption enough for us? I’m not sure.

Redemption, our spiritual theme this month, calls us to go deeper in our understanding than simple praise… though praise we must.

The term redemption is the act of buying something back, of trading something, of paying a price or ransom to get something or get something back. You redeem coupons for merchandise. Some of us remember S&H Green Stamps…any of you here?…and those redemption centers where you could exchange those books of stamps for blenders and toasters. That was a big deal for my mother when I was young. I’m dating myself, I know.

Redemption. The word comes to us through Latin, but is the translation of a Greek term…agorazo…which meant to purchase in the marketplace.

In ancient times, it often referred to the act of buying a slave. Remember that as many as 40% of the people of Italy and 70% of the city of Rome, in the 1st century, were slaves. Ancient Greece was a slave society. The entire early Mediterranean world, from which so much of our art and our attitudes come in the west, was built on slavery.

The term redemption carried the meaning of freeing someone from chains, or prison…or slavery. Purchasing their freedom.

What’s not to like about that?

Freeing someone from chains…Oh, freedom over me. Amen!

But what chains are we talking about?

The redemption promised in the Easter story is not freedom from chains…at least chains in the literal sense.

Mary Magdalene and the women in the Gospel of Mark left the tomb terrified. That is the way that Gospel originally ended, just as Tom read it.

The stone had been rolled away, the body of Jesus was somehow gone and that terrified them.

No meaning was made of his mysterious absence…at least originally.

Mark was the first of the Gospels written…but that was almost 40 years after Jesus’s death, about the year 70.

By the turn of the 2nd century new endings were written for that Gospel. A short one and a longer one. Both point to the same meaning that had, by that time, been made of his death.

The longer ending tells of Jesus appearing first to Mary, and finally to all 11 of the remaining disciples.

The re-appeared Jesus tells the disciples to proclaim the Good News “to the whole of creation.” Eternal salvation is available. Jesus’s death ransomed and redeemed our sins, at least for those who would be baptized and believe. Here is the text: “The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned.”

It is a long way from that first very human terror, to such a confident claim of salvation. A long way from that initial absence to the promise of eternal presence. A long way to redemption.

That later confident meaning is what our Unitarian religious ancestors rejected. They refused to believe that those miracle stories were true. They still considered themselves Christian, but the privileged Unitarians placed their faith in themselves and a more rational way of being religious.

For the early Universalists, it was the distinction between the believers and the non-believers that they could not accept.

They knew a God whose love was not contingent on belief or non-belief. They lived it out imperfectly but their theology told them that each and every one of us was worthy and loved.

Unitarians and Universalists have had problems with the Easter story for a long time. And you understand these points of theology. We mention them often.

Most of us also resonate with more contemporary feminist theologies that question any understanding that would require the sacrifice of a child, a son of god, in order to save us. Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock describe that understanding as a kind of divine child abuse which works to make suffering salvific.

Salvific. That is a fancy theological word that just means “what saves us.”

Womanist theologies, by women of color, also argue that making suffering somehow sacred, making it salvific, has done great harm.

Elizabeth Nguyen writes: “Many of us have been harmed by theology that told us that suffering was a sacrifice that would bring us closer to god. Many of us were told that our own suffering would redeem us. Even when we knew that actual redemption would have been to be free from the suffering to begin with.”

It is important to reject that part of the theology. No. It is essential to reject a theology that requires suffering for salvation.

But I do not believe that that rejection is enough. I do not believe that rejection should be the final word.

Suffering is not redemptive. Suffering does not save. But suffering is real.

Let me be clear. We are an optimistic people who believe in our agency, our ability to impact the world. We believe that we can help that arc of the universe bend toward justice. Our optimism is one of our strengths as a religious people.

But we must have a theology that recognizes suffering, that has a place for suffering. Because suffering is real. A theology that recognizes only hope works to erase too much human experience. A theology that recognizes only hope will never be strong enough to hold or help with our honest response to the suffering in our lives and in our world.

Victoria Safford writes: “We have known despair, some of us, and deep disappointment, some of us, and deep discouragement, some of us, and discord of the mind and heart, or disasters in the body or the spirit or in both.”

We need a theology that recognizes more than our agency. We need a theology that recognizes our lives…our whole lives…the ups and the downs, the triumphs and the losses.

The biblical story is not just about Easter morning.

The biblical story is a narrative that begins with that dove descending on Jesus in the River Jordan…but almost immediately the spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness to contend with Satan…for 40 days. I spoke about this last month when we focused on evil.

The biblical story is about the love that Jesus shared with the community that gathered around him, the community that shared his last Passover in that upper room, that community to whom he would give a new commandment…love one another as I have loved you.

And the biblical story is about his betrayal and…centrally…his suffering on that Roman cross.

In the biblical story, you cannot get to Easter morning without first moving through Good Friday. Rebirth can only follow death. Salvation follows the suffering.

How do we deal with suffering? How do we recognize the reality of suffering without making suffering into a virtue? How can we understand the reality of suffering without making suffering into a source of salvation? Without making suffering salvific?

How do we do that?

Author, poet and prophet, bell hooks points toward an answer:

“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and un-chosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.”

Suffering wounds us…unnecessary and un-chosen suffering wounds us…but need not scar us for life.

Stay with me.

Because we have all known suffering, all known loss. We have all lost hope, lost courage, lost caring and lost faith. We have all been at the end of our rope at times…perhaps some of you are right now.

Perhaps you are here today not to celebrate the spring but to find some reason to believe that suffering is not the last word. That fear is not the final chapter. That the chains that bind us can be broken and rebirth can begin.

Suffering need not scar us for life. But it does mark us.

bell hooks is offering a life line here. It is a life line that begins with recognizing that suffering is real. It begins with seeing our lives with as much honesty as we can muster.

Whether your suffering is a loss…whether your suffering comes from the way the world presses down on you…whether your suffering comes from personal failure or disappointment in or from others…

That suffering is real.

Your suffering cannot be unlived. But that suffering need not scar you for life.

There is hope.

That suffering will mark you but what we allow that mark to become…bell hooks says…is in our hands.

Because we can choose. We can choose to tell our story. We can choose to reach out.

As my mother told me…”Don’t give them the satisfaction of believing they have beaten you. Get up.” We can choose. “And,” she said, “if the reason you get up is to ask for help…ask for help.”

There was a strain of stubbornness in my mother. There were plenty of reasons for her to throw up her hands. She buried two husbands. Raised a son alone. Sold encyclopedias door to door when no other work could be found. She sacrificed much for me.

I do not want to glorify that sacrifice and that suffering, but I am and each of you are here because of sacrifices that our ancestors made to keep going, to not allow that suffering to be the last word.

Elizabeth Nguyen again: “I can’t un-know the sacrifices that my parents and my grandparents and my ancestors made for me. I can wish they weren’t necessary or that there had been another way, but that is an alternate world [not this world].”

We live in this world. And the miracle and the mystery that we celebrate today is not some promise of the elimination of suffering…though any vision for the Beloved Community would involve a commitment to reduce unnecessary and unchosen suffering. That is what bending the arc of the universe means…in very practical terms…removing unneeded and unchosen suffering from our lives.

But the miracle and mystery that we celebrate today is that …sometimes, perhaps this time…I’m quoting Safford again…”we [can feel], perhaps when we least expect to feel anything at all, our own slow blood begin to stir in the vein like maple sap, and something small and tight within begin to swell and open up, urgent, imperceptible, then undeniable—love lives again that with the dead has been.”

We are reborn.

Missy Nicholas describes this in a poem titled “Easter.”

“The true story of Easter,” she writes, “is in the stone itself
Rolling back from the dark of the sepulcher
To burn the light of life eternal
Into the eyes of the gathered.
Watching for a stone to move
Seems like a fool’s errand
Stones move in geological time
Immeasurable in our own brief emergency.
Moving the stone by our own power
Is a task with no end
Like Sisyphus we are destined to push
But powerless to keep the stone from rolling back.
And yet we have come here again
Awake in this day
Not to see an angel roll back a stone
But in our knowing this:
Sometimes the stone just moves.”

Sometimes the stone just moves.

Did the sun come up this morning, no thanks to us and all for us, and did the earth awake again, or did it not.

We are born again and again. Our lives testify to resurrection.

Halleluiah!

Prayer:

Spirit of Life and of Love. Mystery and miracle of the greening earth.

God of Easter and infrequent spring.

We celebrate the new life around us
And open our hearts to the hope of new life within.
We search in stories old and new for hope.
This living of a life of integrity and joy
Takes all we have and all we are.
We sometimes reach the end of ropes we did
Not even know we clung to.
And yet, on this Easter morning,
As we search for new energy and new life
Within us,
Our first and most honest prayer
Is a prayer of gratitude.
We give thanks for all that we have received,
For the many blessings of our lives
And thanks for all the opportunities we have found
To give.
On this Easter day, help us know our blessings
And help us live our lives filled with thanks and praise.
Halleluiah and Amen.

 

Topics: Redemption