Alive Again

an Easter sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, March 23, 2008

You may have heard Garrison Keillor talk about Easter morning in his hometown of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children above average.  Garrison says, while all the other churches in town are proclaiming the miracle of Easter, celebrating resurrection, preaching the in-breaking of a new kingdom on earth, Unitarians are over there in their old building talking about bunnies and eggs and trying every way they can think of to keep from mentioning ‘you-know-who.’ 

Well.  Questions concerning bunnies and eggs shouldn’t be off-limits on a fine Easter morning, but neither should be the more difficult questions, such as ‘Who is our neighbor?,’ such as ‘How then shall we live?,’ such as ‘What sort of people are we called to be?,’ such as ‘What difference does all it make?’

But perhaps the question that drives many people from churches, the question that drives a wedge between conservative and liberal Christians, the question that makes some of shrug but drives others of us batty is the Easter question:  Did the bodily resurrection happen?  Did the previously dead corpse of Jesus reanimate and stroll forth from the tomb?  Did God reach down from the heavens, change for a moment the natural laws that lock most of us firmly in their grasp, and in one place on all the earth and at one time in all of human history raise one person physically from the grave? 

It’s a question used by believers and skeptics alike to separate Truth from Fiction;  to separate friend from enemy;  to separate those we think are thoughtful, mature, interesting people with whom we can get along from those with whom we think we have nothing whatsoever in common.  And this darned ol’ Easter morning resurrects the question once again, placing it before us front and center, to be dealt with, explored, and dissected - or as Garrison suggests is our well-known tradition, to be brushed aside, ignored, and left for dead.

As we begin to address the morning’s questions, I want to (shall we say) witness to you about my experience of many people who call themselves Christian.  In my experience, it’s not true that all people who call themselves Christian believe in the physical fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  It’s not true that all people who call themselves Christian believe in the physical fact of the virgin birth.  It’s not true that all people who call themselves Christian believe in the literal truth of the Bible, just as it’s not true that all people who call themselves Jewish believe strictly in the Genesis Creation stories or that all people who call themselves atheist believe in nothing at all.  Sure, there are atheists who say they believe in nothing at all.  Sure, there are Jews who say they believe strictly in the Creation stories from Genesis.  Sure there are Christians who say they believe in the literal truth of the Bible and in the virgin birth and in the bodily resurrection.  But that doesn’t mean that all atheists or all Jews or all Christians believe alike or act alike or think alike, just as not all Unitarian Universalists believe alike or act alike or think alike.  On the contrary, on any given topic before any given group of, say, ten UU’s, one can reasonably expect there to be at least eleven opinions.  And one can reasonably expect most of us to say we celebrate the fact of that diversity of opinion, just as one can reasonably expect most of us to say we are frustrated by it as well.

More seriously, some of us in Unitarian Universalist circles - and I will admit I have been one of them from time to time - some of us have an unfortunate tendency to immediately write off anything that smacks of Christianity.  (Some of us are fine with Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, pagans, atheists, and Shintos, but Christians need not apply…)  By exhibiting such knee-jerk reactions on the liberal end of the spectrum, we make ourselves into exactly the kinds of closed-minded fundamentalists we love to complain about.  So this morning, rather than jumping to conclusions about bunnies or eggs or bodily resurrections, let’s talk about Easter and miracles and celebrations of rebirth, even if we have to mention ‘you-know-who’ once or twice.

 

It’s not as if the Easter story is easy to understand, easy to get at, or easy to preach.  John Buchanan, editor of the magazine “The Christian Century,” admits as much in the piece we read from him earlier.  Oh, sure, there are those preachers who make the facile blanket statements about Christ having risen or God having raised Jesus from the dead, and they expect that nothing more need be said:  “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”  But if we’re going to take issue with a tradition, we should take up the issue with the best practitioners the tradition has to offer rather than the worst.  The best practitioners, such as Rev. Buchanan, will admit the daunting difficulties, the cruel disjunctures, the absolute absurdities of trying to convince us post-Enlightenment post-moderns of the unlikelihood of bodily resurrection myths.  He knows that trying to explain it intellectually again and again is to minimize or trivialize the experience.  He’s heard from people like us before:  We know better, we say.  We’ve seen death, we say.  It’s final, we say.  Once you’ve seen a dead bird in the street, you know something about the absurdity of the Easter story.  Once you’ve lost a friend to death, you know something about the disjunctures between what’s past, present, and future.  Once you’ve buried a loved one in a cemetery plot, you know something about the difficulty of walking away from that place and time.  But you also in that experience find out something about the difficulty of telling the story of such gracious love in precise now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t terms, and you realize in that experience that the story of love is not all that reasonable or clear, you realize in that experience that love does go on after life is over, you realize in that experience that love IS stronger than death.

 

If we can’t by any stretch accept the mythology of bodily resurrection, we join most of post-modern Christianity in that rejection.  When we pick out that one creedal statement in an attempt to separate us from all that is Christian - we don’t believe anything so preposterous as that - then we fail utterly to understand the nuance many believers are able to exercise when it comes to the questions of religion.  We like so much to think we’re different that we don’t often acknowledge that ours is not the only faith tradition to apply reason to matters of religion. 

We may also not be the only faith tradition to make broad claims as to our openness, our tolerance, our acceptance of a diversity of different views and beliefs.  We’re not the only ones to make such claims, but I know I can fail utterly at times to practice openness, tolerance, and acceptance, especially in matters of religion and when it comes to those creedal statements. 

I’ve heard some pretty discouraging words come out of the mouths of UU’s, mine included - facile blanket statements concerning others’ religious beliefs and practices:  ‘there’s no such thing as eternal life’;  ‘all that church stuff is meaningless’;  ‘you’d have to be crazy to believe in such a thing as a virgin birth.’

Of course we need to think critically about the ideas before us.  Of course we need to use reason whenever and however we can.  Of course we need to rely on our own human experience and understanding to help us navigate the tricky shoals of religious discourse.  But we should be wary of attempts to apply the limits of our human experience and understanding to the vastness of the possibilities inherent in the vastness of the universe - the universe out there, and the universe in here.  Just having mountains of knowledge at our fingertips doesn’t give us the wisdom required to ascend to the heavens.  As rock theologian Don Henley sings in one of my favorite songs, “The more I know, the less I understand.  All the things I thought I’d figured, I have to learn again.”

So a few of our neighbors express certainty in the bodily resurrection of Jesus this fine Easter morning.  So many more of our neighbors use the myth as metaphor, as symbol, as a pointer to some larger truth than can be spoken in everyday, non-religious language.  So where does that leave us?  Stuck with the shallowness and simplicity of bunnies and eggs? 

I doubt it.  I doubt it.  I think we are people who can use reason and rationality to explore the questions posed by Easter.  I think we are people who can find hope in the cycles of nature and a cool spring day.  I think we are people who can admit the failings of our past and move on to become more open and tolerant and accepting of religious diversity and difference.

 

With so many questions, and with so few answers, with your indulgence I want to turn to my journal entry for this morning.

Easter morning, 6 a.m.  I’m standing at the highest point of a small bridge in Tower Grove Park.  It smells like rain, but it’s snowing.  On Easter.  I remember the time when I was a little boy that my parents told me I would have to go to an Easter sunrise service with my Sunday school class.  I remember being upset.  I didn’t see any point in getting up that early - why couldn’t I just sleep through Easter morning like all the other mornings of the world?  But that wasn’t really what bothered me about a sunrise service.  No.  What really bothered me was that they told me the service was to be held at the edge of a cemetery - a cemetery, at sunrise, on Easter morning.  As a young person reared in a Christian tradition, this presented something of a conundrum.  On the one hand, I was afraid of being present at that cemetery at sunrise on Easter morning and having all those graves burst open and all those lost souls fly out of the ground and head for God knows where.  Children can lean toward the macabre in their imaginations.  On the other hand, what if I stood there in a cemetery on Easter morning, and nothing happened?  What if, on Easter morning, nothing happened?

The conundrum was averted, the cup removed from me:  maybe my parents saw how afraid I was, maybe my father overslept, but I ended up not going to that Easter sunrise service.  At this point in my life, I am no longer afraid of a cemetery at sunrise on Easter, what with the number of people I’ve said words over as their bodies were buried in plots, their remains placed in urns, or their ashes spread in gardens, fields, or woods.  I may be afraid of other things now, but not cemeteries or sunrises or death or Easter - fear is not my companion this morning.

As my own little sunrise service progresses, I look up at the sky, wishing for sun, getting only snowflakes and reflections of the streetlights from the clouds.  I turn to look down at the water flowing gently underneath the little bridge, and I am reminded of two things:  the first, the people - our neighbors, really - who were pushed out of their homes by the rising floodwaters this week;  and second, a scene in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, where the protagonist Ada is told to look down a well in a certain way so she can see her future.  As I peer down at the surface of the water below me, a shimmering image appears, but it’s apparently only a reflection of what is - the trees above, spread out across the sky, bordering my own face looking down.  I remember seeing this image before, on other mornings, in other streams, and it occurs to me that I may see it again, as if the past, the present, and the future flow together in gentle streams of reflection and memory.

As the snow lets up, the birds begin to sing.  The squirrels and the bunnies come out of their homes - I watch to see if they are hiding Easter eggs for their little ones, but no -  some seem to be struggling to find breakfast, others playing and having a grand time.

6:30.  Some sunrise service this, alone on a bridge, in the snow, the barest hint of day behind the clouds.  The benediction I offer:  simply a list of my hopes:  I hope it warms up today.  I hope the snow doesn’t make it hard for people to come to church.  I hope those who need to believe in a particular set of miracles find what they’re looking for at the edge of a cemetery this morning.  I hope those who need to believe there are no such things as miracles are not challenged overmuch by the mysteries of life today.  I hope those searching for definite answers somehow find what they need in the reflections and conundrums of existence.

My benediction ends, my journal entry ends, with those hopes for others.

 

For the rest of us, may we open our eyes and ears to the doorways that mystery offers.  May we open our hearts to the miracles that have happened before, are happening now, and will happen again.  And may a morning be all the proof we need to know that Easter comes and we are alive again.

So may it be.

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