Not Over Yet
--a service for Easter Weekend--
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
4/15 and 4/16/06

 

“I can scarcely wait until tomorrow, when a new life begins for me…as it does each day…as it does each day.”—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Round”

 

Meditation

A Quiz on How to Tell If You’re Dead (by Clarke Dewey Wells)

(check by each number if you agree with the sentiment expressed)

 

___ 1) I don’t like the city.

___ 2) I don’t care what happens as long as I’m left alone.

___ 3) I don’t get angry.

___ 4) I don’t get excited by beautiful women/men

___ 5) I don’t like conflict.

___ 6) I don’t judge other people, no matter what.

___ 7) I don’t feel guilty.

___ 8) I don’t feed birds.

___ 9) I don’t like children.

___ 10) I don’t feel overwhelmed by anything.

___ 11) I don’t like the country.

___ 12) I don’t sing.

 

If you checked all 12, or more than 7, Congratulations!  You’re dead!  And without all the added fuss and expense of going to a mortuary.

 

If you checked between 3 and 7, Congratulations anyway!  You’re comatose, on the way!

 

If you checked 2 or less, sorry.  I offer condolences. You’re alive, with all the inconvenience that entails. To improve your score you might try hanging around doornails or sleeping in a refrigerator.[1]

 

Responsive Reading

by Janet H. Bowering

 

The human spirit has its winter but it also has its spring.

 

This is the truth that must be retold each time the earth renews itself and restores our souls.

 

We know that impetuous green shoots and fragile blossoms do not alter the fact of sorrow and loss, and yet—

 

And yet we are uplifted again by the vitality and hope in the beauty of the awakening earth.

 

Only as we recognize the winter-like bonds which bind us and separate us from life—

 

Only as we open ourselves to light and warmth and growth can we set ourselves free.

 

Our intellect tells us that we are mortal and that we shall die later or sooner,

 

But our spirits tell us that we are one with the infinite, that some part of us will never cease to be.

 

Reading         “My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker

 

My friend Yeshi

One of the finest

Midwives

Anywhere

Spent a whole

Season

Toward

The middle

Of her life

Wondering

What to do

With herself.

 

I could not

Understand

Or even

Believe

Her quandary.

 

Now

Thank goodness

She is over it.

Women come to her

Full

Babies drop

To her

Hand.

It is all

Just the way

It is.

 

Sometimes

Life seizes

Up

Nothing stirs

Nothing flows

We think:

Climbing

This rough

Tree

&

all the time

the rope looped

over

a rotten

branch!

 

We think:

Why did I choose

This path

Anyway?

Nothing at

The end

But sheer cliff

& rock-filled

sea.

 

We do not know

Have no clue

What more

Might come.

 

It is the same

Though

With earth:

Every day

She makes

All she can

It is all

She knows it is all

She can possibly

Do.

 

And then, empty, the only

Time she is flat, she thinks: I am

Used up.  It is winter all the time

Now.  Nothing much to do

But self-destruct.

 

But then,

In the night, in

The darkness

We love so much

She lies down

Like the rest of us

To sleep

& angels come

as they do

to us

& give her

Fresh dreams.

(They are really always the old ones, blooming further.)

 

She rises, rolls over, gives herself a couple of new kinds of

grain, a few dozen unusual flowers, a playful spin on the

spider’s web call the internet.

 

Who knows

Where the newness to old life

Comes from?

Suddenly

It appears.

Babies are caught by hands they assumed were always

waiting.

Ink streaks

From the

Pen

Left dusty

On

The shelf.

 

This is the true wine of astonishment:

 

We are not

Over

When we think

We are.[2]

 

Sermon    

 

I was sitting at my computer this week, staring at a blank screen, wondering why I was having trouble writing today’s sermon.  I had lots of ideas floating around in my head.  I liked the liturgy I had chosen: the crafty, poignant and hopefully funny quiz, the Alice Walker poem that reflects the dark nights of the soul we all encounter from time to time and how, just when we hit bottom, we can somehow find ourselves rising from the ashes of our despair to face another day…to realize, much to our surprise, “we are not over when we think we are.”  “Both of these readings are Easter sermons themselves,” I told myself.  “Just keep it simple, Mark.” 

 

I reminded myself that despite my doubts about the literal truth of the Gospel stories that claim a man named Jesus rose from the dead 2000 years ago to visit his followers, I love this weekend...this Easter weekend…especially in a UU church…because I believe the underlying message of Easter…that something new can arise from death…even painful, tragic death… is much too important to ignore or to assume it only belongs in the hands of literalists who maintain that one must believe the Bible as fact, who refuse to consider the Bible as the unwieldy, multi-authored, and multi-purposed literature most scholars believe it to be.

 

Even if I doubt the literal truth of the Gospel’s resurrections stories, I still find meaning in them because I have seen their metaphorical truth.  I personally have experienced new life and new understandings after the death of loved ones, as I cannot help but carry their images with me through the empty spaces created by their absence and allow their wisdom and influence to continue to inform my living…much like how the influence of Jesus obviously remained with his disciples and followers, even after his death…especially after his death.  And I know that many of you have experienced the same, eventually finding in your losses, the resilience to reconnect with your lives and to discover new insights about what it means to be human and how to keep living despite all that has been lost. Just a few short weeks ago, in fact, at the memorial service for member Joe Graham, I was reminded again of the influence that one’s life can have on others, even after death.  We held the service in Milo, and filled the Catholic Church there with hundreds of people, many of whom took their turns standing in front of the microphone at the front of the sanctuary to share how much Joe had meant to them.  It was obvious to everyone present that morning, that Joe had left a great deal to those who knew and loved him…and that his spirit would live on.  Keeping him alive in our memories this way made him present in the room…a resurrection of sorts that happens anytime we honor the life we have shared with a loved one who has died.

 

The metaphorical truth I have found in the Gospel resurrection stories leads me to see them as appropriate companion pieces to the springtime rites and festivals celebrated by humans throughout history in all cultures…celebrations of the new life that emerges each spring and the hope expressed in this new life…what we might call nature’s yearly resurrections…which remind us that despite all our human blunders, misdeeds and unyielding fallibility, our penchant for violence and war, our tendency to forget that we are all connected in one magnificent interdependent web of existence, still, life goes on.  Glorious, complicated, and heartbreaking all the same, life goes on.

 

Certainly nature gives us ample evidence of these resurrections…of life renewing itself…every year at this time: the sun floating in a higher arc in the sky each day, bright green leaves springing from dry branches that seemed lifeless just a few days before, animal life (both human and otherwise) coaxed out of winter hiding places by warmer weather, fiery forsythia, daffodils, and tulips splashing their color in yards as if a child has been scribbling on the landscape with a bright yellow crayon.  How can we not believe in resurrection…in new life emerging from the old…when we merely look around at the springtime world we share, a world suddenly and beautifully alive again after an autumn of death and a winter of sleep?

 

My sermon was starting to take shape in my mind.  I would celebrate that our world is resurrected once again, bringing with it the symbolic possibility that we could be, too. The traditional Easter cry of “He lives!” might be better stated as “We live!”  An uplifting message indeed…a message that says new life can be available to us all…no matter our despair, no matter our theology. Not the same life we had before…but vibrant and real all the same if we can just hang in there long enough to find it. Isn’t that a message we all need to hear? Yes, of course it is.  Hallelujah! I was ready to write. 

 

And then the mail came.

 

I got a card from my uncle.  An Easter card…with, as is my uncle’s custom, a religious tract inside….a colorful little pamphlet with the title “What if it’s True?”  I knew right away what the “It” stood for.

 

I winced as I opened the pamphlet and began reading its “facts”…which included claims that Christianity is the only religion based on historical evidence…and that hundreds of people “saw” Jesus after his resurrection.

 

I’m not going to belabor the theological differences held by my loving, well-meaning uncle and me and I certainly don’t mean to imply that all Christians would appreciate or even agree with the tract my uncle sent…to his nephew…the minister. 

 

In fact, I know several ministers in town who would grimace at this stuff the same way I did.  But I will confess, getting this card kind of put a damper on my excitement about writing this sermon…at least for a while.  I started to doubt my purpose.  My negative voice…my inner censor started taunting me: “How dare you mangle Christian concepts to fit your own agnostic perspective?” it prodded.  “Why do you insist on trying to have it both ways: utilizing Christian stories and symbols even as you suggest that they be reinterpreted?” it poked.

 

I wondered what my uncle would think, if he were sitting in our church, hearing me question his truth as though I were any closer to the truth than he is.

 

I felt that familiar pang of wishing that I too could believe as my uncle does. Having certainty about matters of faith would sure make my life a lot easier…or so it would seem in the midst of writing an Easter sermon. 

 

Then my thoughts turned to a lengthy conversation I had this week with one of my Christian colleagues in town…a bright, charismatic guy who serves what he describes as a Bible-based church…a church where the Bible holds all the answers…so much so, in fact, that at any board meeting, comments cannot be made by board members unless they reference a Bible passage to back up their point.  Fascinated with this practice, which probably isn’t unusual in evangelical circles, I asked him an honest question:  “What happens when two people are quoting passages that contradict each other?”

 

He brushed past my question, claiming that it never happens…which may of course be true.  I suppose I’m just too used to hanging around Unitarian Universalists.  After all, if we tried this practice in our church, some people would go out of their way to find contradictory passages…just to stir the pot, right?  Still, I wondered what it would be like to firmly believe we can hold the truth in our hands and nothing but the truth…particularly since, in my life at least, truth has been constantly changing…constantly out of reach.

 

As our conversation wore on and my new friend continued to rattle off his theology…his piece of the Truth with a capital T, I longed for something similar to be able to rattle off to him…something other than my agnosticism.  Oh sure, I could have given him my quick summation of creative interchange as God, but I don’t think he would have cared all that much.  As satirist Dave Barry has observed, “People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.”

 

Still staring into my computer screen (I’m back at home now…) thinking about that conversation, it was easy to remember how much I don’t believe and how much nerve those with more orthodox views would suggest I have to stand in front of you and even mention the word “Easter.”  I was reminded of a story board president Greg Nichols told me a couple of years ago, before he and his wife Dawn officially joined the church. Greg told me that the week before Easter, some neighbors had invited his daughter to go with them and their kids to Sunday church services.  This neighbor’s church, apparently, was offering a concert or something glitzy for the kids. Dawn told the mother that she appreciated the offer, but reminded her that the family had been attending services at the Unitarian Universalist church and planned to do so that Sunday.  The neighbor’s reply was “Yes, I know, but that doesn’t really count as church.”

 

My inner censor was blurting something similar out to me.  My Easter sermon doesn’t really count…so why bother?  Of course, I know it counts that I try to work with these concepts…these concepts that are so prevalent this weekend all over town.  But our negative voices rarely care about what we know or understand in our hearts.

 

And then, as if on cue, I got an e-mail from another friend, a self-described free thinker from New York who sent me a link to his website, and an article on Easter that offered an important reminder.

It read:

As a strictly religious holiday, Easter has no relevance for freethinkers.

The day is named after a spring goddess, Eastre. Pagan practices included the exchange of gifts, such as Easter-eggs, and by generous hospitality to friends and the poor.

Christians, starting at the end of the second century, began celebrating the feast of the resurrection of Christ on an Easter Sunday…[a date eventually set] by the Council of Nicaea in 325 as the first Sunday following upon the spring equinox. Today, the event is generally held on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

 

My favorite part came at the end of the article when the author offered an example of the awkward meshing of the pagan and the Christian by sharing an excerpt from a church bulletin, which read:

This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Johnson to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.[3]

 

I am grateful to my friend for sending that passage…particularly the part about an egg being laid on the altar…because it made me laugh and reminded me to not take today’s service so seriously.  After all, I remembered, no matter what I would say (or not say) about Easter, I would probably offend or annoy someone.  Indeed, maybe the most important thing we could do today…and most days, in fact, is to laugh at ourselves…and by ourselves I mean all of humanity…all of us…sisters and brothers who, outside of a gaggle of fanatics, are mostly just doing our best to make sense of this life…to find stories and metaphors that can help us get ourselves through our days…and our nights…especially those dark nights of the soul that Alice Walker wrote about in today’s reading.

 

No matter how much I may want to understand and convey to you easy answers to life’s big questions, the reality is, I don’t think they will be available to me any time soon.  My brain just doesn’t seem to be wired to buy into dogma that can’t be changed…or to accept revelation as something that is limited to things that happened 2000 years ago.  I don’t think revelation can solely be found in a single book, for I believe revelation is ongoing…it is not over even when we think it is.   Indeed, the story of Jesus’ resurrection is a revelation that had a significant impact on those who knew him…and those who came after.  If we can believe that this revelation (whether true or metaphoric) took place, why should we believe that these kinds of revelations could only happen once?  Haven’t we experienced them in our own lives…twists of fate or circumstance that have caught us off-guard and changed the way we live even when we may have thought we had nothing left to live for?  I want to be open to these stories…these Easter stories, I call them…whether they invoke the name of Jesus or not…because these, too, are human stories and they have much to teach us.

 

I recently came across one such story.  It is an excerpt from a book by UU minister Rebecca Parker in which she describes what happened to her when she discovered a resurrection of sorts during a winter of her soul…a time when the closest thing to truth that may have been available to her was that “Life really stinks and isn’t worth living.”  This story is not funny, really. But there is an unexpected twist…an almost ridiculous flipping of what she thought was happening that makes for what I think is a story in the true spirit of Easter…at least as I have come to understand and appreciate it.  The story takes place during a truly terrible time in her life.  She had chosen to abort a longed for pregnancy when her husband decided that he would not be able to cope with being a parent, only to soon thereafter have the marriage fall apart anyway.  Talk about losing what one loves…and finding oneself in the depths of despair.  I share now this lengthy passage in her words.  She writes:

“Everything I most loved had slipped out of my hands.  I felt there was nothing left to hold on to—not my marriage, not my child, not my faith.

 

I spiraled into grief and self-directed anger.  One night I came to the end of my will to live.  I just wanted the anguish to stop.  It was a cold, clear night.  I lived at the top of a hill above a lake and sometime after midnight I left my house and started walking down the hill.  The water would be cold enough.  I could walk into it, then swim, then let go, sink down into the darkness and go home to God.  The thought was comforting.  I had no second thoughts.  I was set on my course.

 

At the bottom of the hill, I had only a small grassy rise to cross before I came to the water’s edge.  I crested the familiar rise and began the descent to the welcoming water when I was caught short by a barrier that hadn’t been there before.  It looked like a long line of oddly shaped sawhorses, laid out to the left and to the right, the width of the grassy field.  In the dark, I couldn’t see a way to get around either end, but it looked like I could climb over the middle.  I quickened my pace, impelled by the grief that wouldn’t let go of me.  As I got closer, the dark forms before my eyes seemed to be moving.  I squinted to understand what I was seeing.

 

The odd bunchy shapes were a line of human beings bundled up in parkas and hats.  The stick shapes weren’t sawhorses.  They were telescopes.  It was the Seattle Astronomy Club.  Before I could make my way through the line, one of them looked up from his eyeglass and, presuming me to be an astronomer, said with enthusiasm, “I’ve got it focused perfectly on Jupiter.  Come, take a look.” 

 

I didn’t want to be rude or give away my reason for being there, so I bent down and looked through the telescope.  There was Jupiter, banded red and glowing!  “Isn’t it great?” he said.  It was great.  Jupiter was beautiful through the telescope.

 

I couldn’t kill myself in the presence of these people who had gotten up in the middle of a cold night, with their home-built Radio Shack telescopes, to look at the planets and the stars.

 

The beauty of the night sky, the dew wet grass at my feet, and the Seattle Astronomy Club kept me in this world.

 

It would be wrong to think of this moment as one in which joy triumphed over despair, good came out of bad, or love of life defeated desire for death.  I did not defeat negative feelings of anguish and despair because I saw something more lovely and good.  My heart was still breaking with grief, but I became able to feel more.  I was able to place that grief within a larger heart, within a wider embrace that could hold sorrow and joy, loss and illumination, death and life.[4]

 

And that to me, that placing of one’s grief within a larger heart, that finding oneself surprisingly held in a wider embrace of living that can hold not only unbearable sorrow but also unexpected joy…that to me is the message of springtime, the message of Easter, the message conveyed in the stories we all carry within our memories and our hearts that remind us we are not over yet…even when we may think we are. 

Hallelujah!

We are not over yet.

 

Closing Words  (Words of Goethe, adapted by Bruce Southworth)

Whatever we can do, or dream we can do, let us begin it this day.  Boldness has genius and power and magic in it. And may we be bold in our living and in our loving, in our giving and our forgiving so that the world awaited becomes more nearly the world attained.  Amen.