Easter sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, March 31, 2024.
“Holy mother, life bestowing, bid our was and warfare cease.
Fill us all with grace o’er flowing. Teach us how to live in peace.”
This Easter, and every Easter I suppose, I feel this tug between the churchy, theological Easter with its story of the empty tomb and its promise of resurrection, and the earthy, natural Easter that celebrates the coming of spring, and our earth awakening again. Which is also a resurrection story, isn’t it?
In our UU tradition, we cover a wide range of understandings and theologies. And this diversity is a blessing, isn’t it? We learn from each other, we expand our understandings of what is good and true. Which helps us to be open to the mystery that’s all around us. This month we’ve been exploring images of the Divine, different ways of apprehending that Mystery. This invites us to enter the conversation with open hearts, with a spirit of both/and rather than either/or.
If someone asked me how we celebrate Easter here, I’d probably say, “It’s complicated.” And it is, isn’t it? There’s not one right way. I wonder how you approach Easter, and can imagine some of you thinking right now, “Well I certainly don’t take it literally!”
Well I hope not! Why would you? Why would anyone?
I wonder how you heard that reading from John’s gospel, telling one version of the Easter story. John is the last of the four gospels, and the most mystical. It’s a symbolic story, not a factual one.
The Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan says this plainly. “My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
It’s important to remember that the context of these stories is so different from the world we inhabit today. This is one reason that taking the Bible literally makes no sense—unless you’re intending to us it as a weapon, or as a means of control. Which is still happening, as you know.
After his death, these stories about Jesus spread among the people because they brought good news to those at the margins. But over the centuries the church became increasingly hierarchal, patriarchal, and exclusive—“ours is the only way.” But this is a betrayal of the good news Jesus brought.
I had a lovely theological conversation the other night, down the road at the Islamic Center, where we were invited for dinner. The man next to me was telling me that Allah doesn’t want Muslims to coerce anyone into joining the faith. “We just invite people to come,” he said. I felt compelled to say that my Christian tradition hasn’t done so well with this, has too often claimed that it’s the only way, even using force to convert unbelievers. I understand the problems with Christianity, but still, find the story compelling, and I can’t give up on this tradition that formed me, and our Universalist and Unitarian traditions. And I love that we have this openness and spaciousness here that allows us room to engage in ways that are life giving.
In the Easter passage Abbe read a few minutes ago, it’s Mary Magdalene who came to the tomb first, before sunrise, and she’s the one who fetched Peter and John. They look into the tomb, and then they go home. But Mary, the one with the deepest heart connection to Jesus, hangs around. And then comes this openhearted encounter.
Mary is weeping outside the tomb, an angel appears and asks her why. “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
Then she turns around and sees a man she supposes to be the gardener, who then asks, “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?” She says, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
Jesus says, “Mary!” And she replies, “Teacher.”
What a difference between these parts of the story. The men, we’re told, “see and believe.” But the encounter with Mary is so human—tender, loving, heartbreaking. Might this reflect the feminine side of the tradition that has been suppressed for the last two thousand years? I love that Mary assumes that Jesus is the gardener. There’s a life giving-image for you: the one who nurtures, and is nurtured by, the earth; tending plants and delighting in creation all. Which reminds me of this gardener’s blessing:
“The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.”
This week I’ve been carrying around this big book by Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock: Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire. These two theologians make the astounding claim that, as they say, “it took a thousand years for Jesus to die.” They discovered that the church didn’t have any images of a dead Jesus for its first thousand years. Most of us have seen pictures or statues of a suffering Jesus hanging on a cross. But for ten centuries, these simply did not exist. Instead, there were images of Jesus in a green field, surrounded by plants and animals. Jesus as shepherd, tending his flock of sheep. Jesus as teacher, or healer. When he does appear with the cross, he stands in front of it, serene, resurrected.
Brock and Parker believe that Christian theology only turned to become more about suffering and death when war and plagues across Europe caused widespread suffering. They explore how violence came to be seen as redemptive, as in the concept of “holy” wars, and how the New World, “discovered” through conquest and colonization, is haunted by the destruction of the paradise that was already here.
I haven’t read much of this book yet, but I intend to, because it offers a life-affirming, and earth-affirming theology that is needed these days. Isn’t this the invitation of Easter? As Brock and Parker write, “We can come to know the world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the arduous and tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth. (This comes) from a profound embrace of this world.”
Many of you are doing this embracing already. This month, as we’ve explored images and experiences of the Divine, you’ve shared the ways you find the Sacred out in the world, and this is good and necessary. The next step, I believe, is to connect your love for the natural world more deeply with your spirituality; to let it inform and change how you see church and how we practice religion.
Mary Oliver names this in one of her poems; addressing God, she says, “Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart.” I hope we will conversations like this, both in our hearts and with one another!
A word about resurrection: there are, of course, any number of ways to respond to the faith claim that Jesus rose from the dead. I take this claim, and this faith, seriously, but not literally. Jesus was a man with great spiritual presence. And he died. But the people who loved him would, at times, still sense his presence in their midst. And they told symbolic stories of him appearing in their lives. Some of you have told me how you have felt the presence of your loved ones, after they died.
I need to believe in resurrection in the same way I need to trust that the spring will come. In our broken and beautiful world, I do believe that resurrection is happening all the time, if we will only see it. A person under the grip of alcohol or drugs gets the help they need; faces their addiction, embraces sobriety, and finds new life. “I who have died am alive today,” the poet proclaims. Some of you know something about that.
A beloved adult child, estranged from his parents and feared dead, one day shows up at their door, where he’s welcomed with open arms. The patriarchal church lets down its need for control and embraces the holy spirit of change. Our nation begins to repent for its sins of slavery and genocide, and embraces a new ethos of diversity and democracy. Yes, I believe in, and continue to hope for resurrection.
We are living in fearful and anxious times. It would be easy to miss the goodness, the little miracles that are happening all around. This is why I need Easter, and I expect you do too—this day and this season that calls us to see beyond the shadows, to look up and around, to have hearts and minds open to the mysteries and wonder around us: these lives, these companions, this blessed planet earth.
A line in one of our hymns describes this vision of a healed world—“All earth a blessed garden, and God the god of peace.” On this Easter day, and in the days ahead, can we live into this hope and this vision?
Where is that garden? Where is paradise? Can you see that it is right here, right under our feet? That it is everywhere?
Every garden needs a gardener, helping to care and tend and encourage more abundant life. Is the gardener God? Is it the spirit of the Holy? Is it our friend Jesus? Is it you, and is it me?
The answer is yes. That’s what Easter is telling us: yes and yes and yes!
Happy Easter, friends, Alleluia and Amen.