Hold it up to the Light

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
Easter Sunday

3/27/05

 

Call to Gather (words of Jay William Hudson)

May we have eyes that see!

Eyes that see the beauty of the earth and the glory of the skies;

That reflect the light of dawns and sunsets and the valiant

Noons, and the stars at night.

Eyes that thrill to the poetry of trees, of grasses, and of flowers.

Eyes that delight in the gladness of the smiles that we can share;

Eyes that mingle their tears with the tears of those who weep.

Eyes whose vision reaches to far horizons and which see there the dim prophecy of what we yet shall be.

May we have eyes that see!

 

Meditation (by First Unitarian Church member Frances Craig)

Suppose that spring—this great awakening—came only once in your lifetime?

Suppose that just this time you’d feel the wind all sweet with pussy willow pollen.

That only once you’d find hepaticas and Dutchmen’s breeches answering the sun through the woodland’s leafless trees…

That only once you’d see the shedding of tree bark and dry husk sheltering the winter’s buds…and watch the blunt red buds of maples turn to flowerets…then wild plum thickets toss their creamy petals on the air…and quince burst into flame…

Suppose this were the only time you’d see the rushing freshets filled with melted snow…or hear the creaking song of blackbirds down at the brimming pond…and then watch the little evolution of wriggling tadpoles turned to hopping things…

Suppose that just this once you could stand on the edge of the world to watch and listen as the sun comes up…

When the stream dances and the bud stirs and the bird sings…

And out of it bursts, like morning, the cry of human life.

Suppose that spring and all new birth happen only once—

And then be glad that it comes on and on, with timeless joy, as old as the earth and as new as your heart’s awakening.

 

Responsive Reading #628  “Rolling Away the Stone” by Sarah York

In the tomb of the soul, we carry secret yearnings, pains, frustrations, loneliness, fears, regrets, worries.

 

In the tomb of the soul, we take refuge from the world and its heaviness.

 

In the tomb of the soul, we wrap ourselves in the security of darkness.

 

Sometimes this is a comfort.  Sometimes it is an escape.

 

Sometimes it prepares us for experience.  Sometimes it insulates us from life.

 

Sometimes this tomb-life gives us time to feel the pain of the world and reach out to heal others.  Sometimes it numbs us and locks us up with our own concerns.

 

In this season where light and dark balance the day, we seek balance for ourselves.

 

Grateful for the darkness that has nourished us, we push away the stone and invite the light to awaken us to the possibilities within us and among us—possibilities for new life in ourselves and in our world.

 

 

Reading “Winter into Spring” by Lynn Ungar

The trees, along their bare limbs,
contemplate green.
A flicker, rising, flashes rust and white
before vanishing into stillness,
and raked leaves crumble imperceptibly
to dirt.

 

On all sides life opens and closes
around you like a mouth.
Will you pretend you are not
caught between its teeth?

The kestrel in its swift dive
and the mouse below,
the first green shoots that
will not wait for spring
are a language constantly forming.

 

Quiet your pride and listen.
There—beneath the rainfall
and the ravens calling you can hear it—

the great tongue constantly enunciating
something that rings through the world
as grace.            

Sermon

So, I’m glad to see you got your invitation and made it to church today.  Oh yes, you were offered an invitation to be here this morning, whether you are aware of it or not.  Now before you begin to wonder what piece of mail you missed or become offended that you were apparently left off the invite list, let me assure you that every one of us had access to this invitation; still do, in fact.  It is an invitation so familiar, so easily taken for granted, that we may have looked past it. It is an invitation to be felt, seen, heard, smelled…an invitation to a promised show of extraordinary detail and overwhelming splendor…an invitation which our minds and senses may have missed, being too preoccupied with other matters to fully acknowledge or appreciate it.

 

Now, I know that for some of you, no invitation was needed for you to be here this morning.  You would never be absent from church on Easter Sunday, your attendance having been programmed from youth or annually requested, if not demanded by another family member.  And there are many of you here because you know what the message will be on Easter Sunday, and it is a message you know you need to hear.

 

But even if you didn’t need to receive the invitation I describe, my hope is that being here today will help you remember to receive it anyway. For we know that right now, perhaps more than any other time of year, the Earth is offering an invitation to us…an invitation as old as the land upon which this church sits and the fossil fuel that enabled us to drive here this morning…an invitation to pay attention to a message more poignant than any hymn we might sing or anything I could possibly say from this pulpit.  Indeed, the earth is inviting us to anticipate and enjoy a production far more compelling than a hundred passion plays and Easter pageants put together…a presentation that I, and probably most of you too, are anxious to experience and to learn from once again.

 

Even as I speak, the stage is being set and the players are moving into their places.  With each passing day of this season, the sun is moving over our heads in a greater arc and hanging in the sky a little later.  Each day, a little more green is being coaxed into our corner of the world.  Even this year, with Easter landing early enough in the calendar so that only the most eager of crocuses have found the means to pull themselves up from their winter tombs, bravely unfolding their tiny petals of yellow to stand out against the soil, the dead leaves and last week’s last few gasps of snowfall, the earth is offering us an invitation once again…an invitation that has been answered throughout human history with rites, rituals, services, and spring festivals…an invitation to gather with fellow humans and rejoice in the ever-revolving cycles of nature, turning yet again to rebirth and renewal…an invitation to acknowledge a simple, redemptive message that is at the heart of both the Easter story and of springtime itself…a message that can be expressed in two words:  Life wins. 

 

If you are like me, this invitation and its promised message of return to life couldn’t have come too soon.  I have been waiting for it for weeks.  Usually March is one of the most challenging times of the year for me, and this year has been no different.  While there are any number of reasons why I feel down in March, including the all-too-real psychological fatigue from the dark days of winter, the frivolous frustration that arises from the inevitable failure of my teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, and the more serious return of seasonal grief as I continue to grapple with the loss of loved ones who have died this time of year, I think most of my distress comes from my late winter tendency to retreat too much into myself, to keep myself tucked away in the tomb of my individual concerns, losses and fears.  That’s why the spring and the invitation it offers have become increasingly important to me.  Every year it seems, as I grow older and my tally of losses and burdens grows, I need the spring-time burst of new life to remind me that, just as the darkness and death of fall and winter are inevitable, so too is the light and rebirth of spring, and that no matter how down or troubled I might feel, life marches on, calling me to roll away the stone of my winter tomb and awaken myself to the possibilities all around me and within me.

 

I should admit that I haven’t always greeted spring and its showy evidence that life marches on with an open heart. I remember, when my mother unexpectedly died seventeen years ago this week, one of the cruelest aspects of the experience for me was the way spring arrived right on time, just as if nothing had happened.  I imagine those of you who have experienced a significant death or other loss this time of year know what I’m talking about. The spring my mother died, I was convinced that everything should be put on hold for a while.  But the sun just kept on rising every day despite all the reasons I could give for it not to, and with it came warm breezes and gardens full of flowers that taunted me with their happy faces. 

 

That year, Easter arrived a week after her death, and I made another quick return visit home to be with my family.  None of us were churchgoers at time, but even if we had been, I doubt I would have wanted any part of a church service that spoke about somebody coming back to life…even if it was Jesus…because I knew in my heart and in my grief that resurrection…at least as I understood it at the time…wasn’t real.  That spring I was caught in a kind of slow motion existence that allowed me no access to deeper understandings of ancient stories or seasonal wisdom. All that seemed real to me then was the loss I had experienced and I needed to wallow in it some more.  I didn’t want color.  I wanted gray.  I was in no position to receive an invitation to new life, no matter how it was offered to me.

 

I imagine the people who were most impacted by Jesus’ death must have experienced similar feelings, if not even more intensely. His disciples and friends were no doubt overwhelmed with grief at the brutal and tragic way his life ended. With his death came the end of their relationship with him as they knew it, the end of the hopes and dreams they shared and the future they hoped to bring about together.  And yet, somehow out of their deep despair, his followers were able to reconnect with a sense of hope; they were able to fill the empty space left by his death with the conviction that his death could have…must have…meant something greater.  His death was not an end after all; it was a beginning. 

 

This new beginning began, I think, not with his supposed rise from the dead, but with the sharing of stories…stories that kept him alive in the hearts and minds of his followers…stories that were told over and over again, no doubt changing over time to fit the needs of the speakers and the audience…stories that would not have persisted were it not for the redemptive power of human community and connection…stories that may have been told simply to make the tellers and their audience feel better but which grew into something more than they may have ever imagined.  Even then, the stories of how Jesus suffered and died, and yet found new life offered a deep and powerful metaphor for what his followers knew they needed to do in order to further spread his teachings and his influence.  But even if the facts remain fuzzy, particularly to our modern sensibilities for which the idea of a man rising from the dead seems to be beyond rational comprehension, the stories have persisted for nearly two thousand years for a good reason:  we need stories of resurrection…of new life emerging from the rubble of despair and suffering. 

 

With all the challenges this unwieldy life can hand us—from the excruciating losses that crack open our hearts, leaving us confused and lonely, to the wrong turns we may follow into addiction and other unhealthy choices…from the battles with illness faced by our loved ones and ourselves that keep us up at nights, to the acknowledgement that we live in an imperfect world of violence and injustice—we need to believe in the possibility of overcoming great odds, of finding life in the midst of death, despite all the forces that seem to be working against us.  When the circumstances of life beat down on us with disappointment, failure and grief, we need to believe that it is possible to reclaim our lives and reinvest them in new ways of living. 

 

We are never promised, nor should we expect, a return to the way things once were.  After all, our very biology insists that we will always be in the midst of some sort of change, either growing or slowing, just as everyone else around us is.  However we do have the opportunity to embrace a new existence and to take the narrative of our lives in new directions…even during what could be our darkest days. 

 

A friend shared with me recently a poignant example of this kind of life reclamation. She had just returned from a few days spent with her father who she helped move to a hospice facility.  While their relationship over the course of her life had been one marked with disappointment, frustration, and unhappiness, the time she spent with him in hospice felt different.  She told me this once perpetually-grumpy man was now smiling more, taking more of an interest in her, being more present, more aware.  She thought for a moment and then told me the ironic twist:  in his death he had become a better father than when he had been healthy.  I told her it sounded like an Easter story to me: new life emerging from death.

 

When those closest to us and those whom we hold most dear do finally succumb to death, as we all one day will, we can’t help but look for ways to think about our loss that remind us that the connections we shared have not been obliterated or made in vain, but could actually serve as the ground for further love and connection, assuming we can open our hearts to the possibility. We need to look for and tell these stories of resurrection—tell them to ourselves, tell them to each other—whether they exist in our human relationships or in the world of nature, because they give us something to hold on to when life seems most tenuous.  They remind us that no matter how tough things get, we are the ones who ultimately must make sense of our circumstances and find in them something redemptive if we are to go on living.  

 

In the gospel of Luke, the women who go to the tomb to prepare the body of Jesus for burial, only to find the stone rolled away and the body missing, are greeted by angels who ask them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”  The question is offered in the story as a means to tell the women that Jesus has risen, but ultimately the question has more meaning that that, for it is a question at the heart of what it means to be human.  We could ask ourselves this question nearly every day of our lives. Why do we seek the living among the dead? 

 

I know I still look for my mother and for my father-in-law.  I look for them in the story of my life…in the decisions that I make which reflect their influence.  I look for them when I look into the faces of my siblings and my wife, and now my daughter, who, even before she has reached the age of two, sometimes flashes glimmers of both of them…a true expression of grace if there ever was one. I look for them in the moving pictures of my memories, seeking understandings of who I once was, who I am, and maybe who I may one day be.  And I look for them in the colorful season of rebirth and renewal ready to emerge all around us…the same season of life in which I said goodbye to them for the last time.

 

To me this looking for the living among the dead is not only the message and challenge of Easter, it is what the earth’s invitation to us this time of year is really all about…
the invitation to not only acknowledge and learn from the earth’s ageless story of resurrection, but to participate in it…
the invitation to hold our lives up to the light of another new day and find there a shimmering web of connection to our companions—past, present and future…
the invitation to embrace our lives and our earthly home enough so that we might say, even in our most challenging and despairing moments, “I can scarcely wait until tomorrow, when a new life begins for me…as it does each day…as it does each day.”[1]