We need this celebration. We are ready for a spring-inspired word of hope. It feels like we have been wintering for so long.
We are ready for tulips and blue skies after so much gray…
Like bulbs sending green shoots out of the earth, reaching up to the sun, opening to bloom…we are ready to crack open our winter shells…
We, too, are ready to rise.
Hallelujah! We come here ready to sing it.
Hallelujah!
Praise. God.
That’s what it means. Hallelujah. Praise to God.
We liberal religious folks…many of us…we get to that spring inspired energy, we get to that place where hope lives in us…ready to burst forth…we get here to church ready to sing, and we bump up against all of the theology, that imposing edifice of belief and of doubt about God and about Jesus…
We encounter all of the stories that surround this holiday and that dusty, itinerant Jewish rabbi and rabble rouser from long ago. So many different stories are believed about him…
Was he a revolutionary…? Was the Kingdom of God he spoke of a kingdom here on earth or somehow in another world, another life?
Was he a mystic, with secret knowledge? Did he speak to his Jewish people or to all people? What does it mean that he did not return? He lived so long ago…what meaning does his life and his death have for us here and now?
What we know is that after his death, his followers found a way to believe that love was real and that freedom could come…was here somehow…despite his death. And that he would return.
So many stories…
We bump up against all those stories told about Jesus…all of the hope that people have found in him…
We folks for whom reason is so important…we bump up against those stories and we want proof, we want reasonableness…
Why do we have to speak of resurrection…we rational folks who love his ethical teachings but reject most of the miracle stories about Jesus.
Why do we have to speak about resurrection?
Can’t we just be about the business of building that Beloved Community…what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, the reign of God?
Spring has come again. It does every year. Can’t we just accept that?
Spring has come again. We did not need to work for it. We only had to wait for it.
We want hope to come that easy, too. We want Easter without the Good Friday’s of our lives.
We want hope to come easy.
But you see the problem with that, don’t you? The problem for reasonable folks like us?
We reasonable folks should be the first to acknowledge the presence of suffering, of evil, of oppression…
We should be the first to question how our lives play a part in this system that makes life so hard for so many.
We reasonable folks should be the first to acknowledge how far down we are all being held.
We should be the first to know and the first to name how much we all need to rise.
It is our need for resurrection. Our need to rise. I think that is why we come ready to sing hallelujah.
We should be the first to acknowledge that need to rise.
What holds us back?
Is it our need to pretend that we don’t need it? That we are self-contained. Self-sufficient? Good to go?
Are we so committed to the front we present that we can’t even accept what our mind knows and what our heart feels?
It is not just that we like Easter, not just that we enjoy the spring…
We NEED Easter…because our hearts are broken, our relationships are strained, we are lonely and we are deeply afraid…that this may be as good as it gets.
We need Easter because we have such a hard time believing in Easter…such a hard time trusting that the goodness in creation might just be real…trusting that we might possibly rise above the greed and violence…trusting that our losses are somehow not the last word.
I think that is why we return again and again to the stories of hope. And to these stories of faith, even when we question them so.
I think it is why so many of us come here on this Sunday to sing hallelujahs.
Why do we talk about resurrection in this liberal religious church?
We talk about resurrection…because we need it…all of us…
We talk about resurrection because we all yearn to rise.
Hymn: Grace and Mercy
Reading: Psalmsong by Barbara Pescan (adapted) (Mira)
Anthem: Mathew 28
Reflection: To Rise (Part 2)
I’ll rise. I’ll rise. Again.
Hallelujah!
The Easter message is a message of hope.
We’ll rise again.
The gospel message of Easter proclaims hope in that promise of resurrection, that promise of rising up…that promise of return…that promise that the way things are is not the way things have to be…
We’ve been pressed down in so many ways…we’ve been held down so long…
We’ve known sorrow and loss…even the most privileged of us…
Those heavy stones have been pressing down on us in the tombs of safety we have tried to create…
We are ready for the coming of the kingdom. We are ready to have those stones rolled away.
The gospel message is that the empty tomb is not the final word, not the last scene in the human drama…
The gospel message is that sorrow and loss is not our final sentence…
That absence will be replaced by presence…
That our broken hearts can be made whole and our spirits made new.
We will rise. Hallelujah.
The Easter message is a promise.
What does the promise mean for us? What does that promise mean for religious people who value reason…religious people who want to question claims of truth…religious people who are inclined to want to see the fine print before we sign on or sign up…?
We may be moved by the music…most of us…
But what does that promise…that we will rise…what does that promise mean to us and for us?
There are just three things I want you to think about…three things I want you to remember about that promise this morning.
Somehow, for Unitarians, there are always three things…
First, whatever promise there may be is for everyone…every-body…not some of us but all of us. Each and every one.
“God is inside me and everyone else
that was or ever will be.”
That’s the way Celie described it in the Color Purple.
“God is inside me and everyone else
That was or ever will be.”
However you name the Holy, the Spirit of Life, that power of possibility that moves within us and among us…
However you name it or don’t name it…
Here is what I want you to remember:
That spark is in you but it is in everyone else too…
everyone and everything…
That spark is there.
But it needs to be struck. It needs to be seen.
So if you can’t see that spark in other folks…
Or if you somehow think their spark doesn’t shine quite as brightly as your own…
How can you expect that spark within you to grow and to warm your life if you keep it small?
How can you ever rise unless you help and hope others will rise too?
That’s the first thing I want you to think about.
Here is the second.
The Beloved Community…or the Reign of God as Jesus spoke of it…
The Reign of God is a process…not a conclusion. The Beloved Community is an aspiration, not a particular destination.
The Reign of God, the Beloved Community is not …for most of us…it is for many people, but not for us…
The Beloved Community is not some happy ending, some perfect and final chapter of human history.
Oh, we want to get to some final and perfect life…to have all our hurts healed…all our hopes fulfilled…all injustices made right…
We, too, want some perfect and permanent salvation…
But that promise is not what we have been given.
We have been promised…we have been provided…we have been given not salvation…but mercy.
Not some final salvation, but mercy.
Life is always a work in process…truth is always being created…
Truth and justice…salvation…these are not the kinds of things that you can finish…check off your list…
These are not “one and done.”
That is not the way it works. That is not the promise we have been given.
Jane Rzepka writes: The kingdom of God is with us—has been with us—radically, mercifully…all along…in such forms as kindness, fairness, and wonder. We don’t have to wait for Judgment Day, we don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to be afraid.”
We go on wanting and hoping and sometimes we find that we are blessed.
We may not get what we think we want…that final salvation…
The tomb remains empty.
But given that hard truth…every act of mercy is a cause for rejoicing. And every act of mercy moves us toward liberation.
“One stalk of asperagus, a kiss, stirring music…a good laugh [every movement toward justice]…each kind touch…we have all that and all of it…all of it…is holy.”
Not salvation. Not perfection. Grace and Mercy. That is the promise we are given. And we can rejoice in that.
Hallelujah.
That is the second thing.
There is just one final thing I want you to remember.
It is easy to mistake Easter for a kind of anniversary celebration of something that happened in the past. It is easy to misunderstand it. After all, Easter comes around every year…just like a birthday. I get that.
But resurrection…whatever it was 2000 years ago…the resurrection is not the property of the past.
People have debated what happened back then…ever since. We are still debating what happened…looking for new evidence in ancient texts…trying to pin it down, contain it…trying to understand what happened so that we do not have to confront what it means for us…today…in this place and this time.
The promise of resurrection belongs to all times and all seasons and all peoples. The promise of resurrection belongs to this time and this place…it belongs to us.
Because the things that are killing us…the injustice, the violence, the greed, the attempt to own the earth and to despoil creation…
The things that are killing us exert a powerful gravity on our spirits…a powerful gravity pulling us toward meaninglessness and despair.
The role of the church…on Easter Sunday…is not to argue the evidence for a resurrection that may have occurred long ago…
Our role is not to debate the evidence for that resurrection. To weigh the pros and the cons.
Our task is to help one another become the evidence for resurrection…today…in our time and in our world.
Our task is to become the evidence for the truth of resurrection in our own lives.
Resurrection is about the healing and restoration of wounded and severed relationships…it is about ending violence and liberating our bodies and our spirits…it is about restoring presence and fanning that spark within each one of us.
Resurrection is now…not just back then. It is about us…not just about him…not just about Jesus…whoever he was.
The promise of resurrection is that love can be real…if we open our hearts and make it so.
The promise of resurrection…is that we, too, can rise again.
Remember that. And rejoice.
Hallelujah
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Mystery of new life growing out of the earth. Promise of new life growing in our lives.
Help us remember, on this Easter morning, that we are loved…just as we are…but also as we may become.
Help us open your eyes to see all those around us as lovable too…just as we are. Help us to see that we all can rise.
Let this day…this day of days…be the day when we accept the promise we have been given…
That resurrection can be real. That new life can become the truth of our lives.
Spirit of Life and of Love. May this Easter Day work its magic in our hearts…
Help us find the courage….
To rise again.
Amen.
Topics: Atonement