Easter Sunday

Rev. Marilyn Sewell

Sunday, 8 April 2007

Rev. Shana Lynngood:  We seem to be experiencing a lot of synchronicities this Easter morning and it seems to me that on the Sunday morning when I read to you a letter from Rob, it seems appropriate to have one of his foremost mentors with us to preach to us this morning.  As many of you know, my colleague here at All Souls became a Unitarian Universalist in part because of the ministry of Rev. Marilyn Sewell.  He discovered Unitarian Universalism at the First Unitarian Church of Portland, Oregon, which is where Rev. Sewell has served as Senior Minister for quite a long time now.  This is her sixteenth year there.  It will be a testament to her connection with our colleague, Rev. Hardies, that she is here with us, preaching on her own sabbatical.  She’s not in Barcelona eating good food.  [Laughter]  But, in all seriousness, she is a writer and editor and wonderful speaker.  She had dinner last night with several members of our women’s covenant groups because she edited “Cries of the Spirit,” and several other volumes of women’s poetry.  And she is one of the foremost leaders and movers and shakers in our movement, growing the First Unitarian Church of Portland to be one of the largest congregations that Unitarian Universalism has to offer.  We’re delighted to have her here.  Please join me in welcoming Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  [Applause]

Rev. Marilyn Sewell:  What a pleasure to be here.  You know, Rob is just one of my favorite people in the world and I couldn’t be happier that he landed here.  This is the only church where I would be on my sabbatical.  I could not say “no” to Rob and I could not say “no” to this wonderful church.  And then, of course, Shana has a connection with us too because her father is in our church.  So, I’m so pleased to be here with you today.

I’m going to begin today by reading two poems by Lucille Clifton.  The first is called “The Raising of Lazarus.”

            The dead shall rise again.

            Whoever say dust must be dust don’t see the trees,

               smell rain, remember Africa.

            Everything that goes can come.

            Stand up.

            Even the dead shall rise.

The second is “Spring Song.”

            The green of Jesus is raking the ground,

               and the sweet smell of delicious Jesus is opening the house.

            The dance of Jesus music has hold of the air

            And the world is turning in the body of Jesus

            And the future is possible.

Easter has always been a bit problematic for Unitarian Universalists.  [Laughter]  We are uncertain as to what to do with it.  Some of my colleagues have come up with sermon titles that show their discomfort with Easter Sunday, titles such as “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down.”  [Laughter]   Or take the title, “Disappointed Tomb Raiders.”  One of my colleagues, Daniel Budd, remembers that one year at Easter time his church was considering placing an ad in the local newspaper.  A congregant suggested as a headline for their Easter ad, “Join Us; We’re Not Sure What Happened.” [Laughter] 

Well, we’re not sure what happened, but neither is anyone else.  If you read the various scriptural accounts, you will notice that Saturday is kind of left out of the picture.  There is Good Friday, the time of the crucifixion; there is Sunday, the time of the resurrection.  But Saturday is just silent; nobody knows what happened.  Did Jesus literally rise from the dead?  Well, the scripture doesn’t support that.  He was seen by his disciples in various guises.  Sometimes he was not at first recognized.  And he was not in his bodily form; he sort of came and went, so to speak.  In fact, this kind of thing happens much of the time when people lose a loved one.  As many as 45 percent of widows and widowers report seeing their spouses after the spouse dies.

Did Jesus ascend, body intact, into heaven?  Well, you know, since we’ve traveled into space, that calls into question this place called “heaven.”  Is it a real place up there?  Probably not.  And so, what happened?  Who rolled the stone away?  What happened to the body of Jesus?  We don’t know.  And ultimately, it doesn’t really matter.  What is really important is what happened to the followers of Jesus.  That is what the resurrection is about, not Jesus’ new life, but their new life.

Now let’s recount the story.  The various scriptures all tell it differently, but I’m going with Mark, thought to be the first account written.  Jesus had been executed as a common criminal the Friday before and there had been no time to anoint his body for the grave as was the custom in that day.  There had been no rituals of mourning.  The disciples had fled the scene in fear.  Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome, a follower, come early on Sunday morning to the cemetery.  These women are here to do what they can to bring some modicum of respect to this ugly, this devastating event.  I don’t know anything about Salome, but Mary Magdalene, according to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, was Jesus’ favorite disciple.  In fact, Peter was jealous of the loving attention that Jesus paid to Mary, and she to him.

Now, what must she have been feeling that morning?  And then there was Mary, his mother, the woman who had birthed him and raised him and loved him as her very flesh, and had elected to stay at the foot of the cross with him while he suffered in agony and died.  What must have been going on inside that woman?  Now when they got to the tomb it was still dark, but even in the pre-dawn light, they see that the heavy stone that had been placed there by the Roman soldiers in front of the tomb had been rolled aside.  Now there is only one conclusion that they could come to, that this is the final cruelty, the final injustice; they won’t even have a body to anoint.  They won’t even have a way to say goodbye.

They entered the empty tomb, all hope gone, and there they find a young man, clothed in a long, white garment.  Clearly he is not of this world.  He tells them, “But not afraid.  Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.  He is risen; he is not here.  Go and tell his disciples.”  And the women run from the place, trembling and amazed.  Now the angel tells them, “Be not afraid.”  This was the same message that the angel brought to Mary so many years ago when she was told that she was to birth the Messiah.  And of course she was afraid, and of course these three women on this day are afraid.  This is such a very human story.  Of course we are afraid when the hand of God reaches down to us and God says “I am here; I’m with you.  Pay attention.  Things are going to be changing.  You think it’s all over?” God said, “You think you can adjust to this deadness?  Oh no, no, no.  You are called to new life.”  And we look upon this new life with fear and with trembling.  What an amazing story.

It has everything in it.  Let’s back up a little while and get more of the context.  Let’s go back to the garden of Gethsemane.  Now Jesus knows that he’s going to his death soon and he asks his disciples to go and pray with him, but even as he kneels and he prays in his agony, the disciples fall asleep.  Well, they’re tired.  He tells Peter, the one he’s depending on to carry on his work, he says “When the cock crows thrice, you will deny me.”  But Peter is incredulous.  “Me?  Impossible!  I love you, Jesus.”  And yet the prophecy comes true.

Then there is the Passover meal known as the last supper.  This is the last time Jesus will eat and drink with these ones who are his closest supporters.  And he says to the group, “Tonight, one of you will betray me.”  “Is it I?”  “Is it I?” they all say, looking at one another.  And Judas says, “Is it I?”  And Jesus says, “You have said it.”  Jesus tells them that he will no longer be with them and they begin to argue then over who will be the most honored in heaven.  Now they’ve been traveling with Jesus for three years, listening to his message, and they still don’t get it.  The end is here; how must Jesus have felt?  How misunderstood?  How utterly alone as he went to face torture and death.  The chief priests turn him over to the authorities.  Pontius Pilate passes the buck; he asks the crowd, “What will you have me do?”  And the crowd – they don’t really know Jesus; they are angry and fearful and they make Jesus their scapegoat.  The Roman soldiers?  Well, they’re just doing their job.  Another day, another crucifixion.  Let’s role the dice to see who gets the robe.

The story has everything in it:  the agony of a country occupied by a foreign power, religious leaders more interested in keeping the status quo, more interested in protecting themselves and their position than in living out the word of God, or word of liberation, of justice.  A prophet who is filled with the spirit of the divine who has come to say that love is the way, not violence, not coercion, that power is in servanthood, but whose followers think in terms of earthly power.  There are friends just too tired to hang in there, friends who say that they would be with you to the end and then run out when the going gets tough.  And then there’s the betrayal of a close friend for a few shekels of gain.  Violence in the streets, violence by the authorities.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Oh, my friends, we live in a Good Friday kind of world.  How much we need Easter.  How much we need hope; how much we need transformation in these times.  I find the Jesus story fascinating, compelling and tragic.  Jesus is my kind of man, actually.  A carpenter who could work with his hands, a man of the people, and yet, a learned man who studied in the synagogue and knew the law, a man who doted on children, a man who knew how to have a good time, who ate and drank with the poor and the rich alike, a man who didn’t mince words when he was in the presence of hypocrisy.  A man who could talk with tax collectors who were the scum of the earth in those days, [Laughter] – and not now, huh? – and a man who would stop and have conversation with prostitutes, with full respect for their dignity and worth as human beings.  A man who was totally given over to the one he called “Abba,” or Father.

Now the question I’ve always had is why did this good man have to die?  He had only three years of ministry.  Wouldn’t it have been better for him to continue to teach to a ripe old age?  Wouldn’t his movement have gotten off to a better start if the disciples had had more time to mature in their understanding of Jesus’ message, to mature spiritually?  What about all that violence?  Couldn’t we just have skipped the violence of the crucifixion thing?  Why does that have to be part of the story?  What if Jesus had decided, “You know, things are getting a little too hot, politically speaking; I think I’ll just chill out.  You know, I’ve always had a thing for Mary Magdalene, and I know she’s totally in love with me.  I think I’ll just back off this preaching and healing for awhile and get married.  You know, settle down for awhile, start a little carpentry shop, raise a few children.  It would be a good life.  And then on the weekends, maybe I could teach a little in the synagogue.  They’d let me, just as long as I didn’t make any, you know, cutting remarks about the Pharisees.”

You know, it just wouldn’t work out that way, would it?  No death on the cross, no resurrection, and nobody would have ever heard of Jesus.  He would be just one more itinerant preacher, charismatic, to be sure, but just someone who had gifts of healing and who made a splash for a few years, traveling around in Galilee.  Yes, there had to be the death, without which there could be no resurrection.  But given that we’re not talking about a literal resurrection, what do I mean?  Well, as I said, Easter is not primarily about what happened to Jesus; it is primarily about what happened to other people by virtue of his death, about what happened to the lives of those early followers and what can happen, then, in our own lives. 

Good Friday was a horrible day.  The man the disciples thought would be king, would be lifted up above all, was tortured and killed as a common criminal.  All was lost; God did not speak.  Death was just the end, the end of everything.  But then something very strange happened to the followers of Jesus, after Easter Sunday, after the resurrection.  They somehow lost their fear; they became so imbued with love that they could take up their cross, whatever that might be, and follow Jesus.  And many of them went the way of suffering and death.  You know about the early Christians, how they were hunted down and martyred and fed to lions and still they went on bearing witness.  There was a radical, a dramatic, shift; their lives were changed, were transformed.  Faith somehow rose again in the hearts of those whose faith had died.  They found new life and they went on to bear witness to others.  They spoke of something in the human spirit; they spoke of a love that is so powerful that it transcends even death.  There was a transformation from absolute despair to a new sense of hope, from a feeling that Jesus was irrevocably gone to knowing, beyond a doubt, that he was with them still.

Now in various accounts, Jesus appears briefly to different ones of the disciples.  In the account in John, Mary Magdalene sees the risen Christ and, as she moves to embrace him, he says, “Don’t touch me.”  He’s saying, in effect, “Don’t cling to me; this is a new day.  Things are not as they were and you are called into a new kind of being, new kind of responsibility that you have not had before.”  In our own lives we’ve lived through the shock and the pain of our own Good Fridays, all is lost; we live in the silence of Saturday, in the emptiness.  And as we understand that that on which we’ve pinned our hopes and dreams is really gone, we long for what we have lost, for what we miss.  Easter doesn’t change that; things will not be the way they were.  What Easter does bring, though, is the sure knowing that there will be a new day, a new vision.  Easter brings the promise of new life.

And it seems so often true that we have to go through the Good Friday and the empty, silent Saturday in order to get to the Easter Sunday.  It is so hard to die to the old, to change.  Personally, I just had to become so miserable, or so angry or so sad or so scared that I just give up.  I say, “Okay, God, whatever you want.  I don’t like myself this way; I’m miserable.  I’m open to change.  I want new life, can’t stand being the way I am.  Help me, help me, help me, oh God.”  In religious language, this is called relinquishment, and it is hard to come by for Unitarian Universalists, [Laughter] ‘cause we are so smart, so capable and so spiritually stubborn.  Sometimes God just has to pick us up by the scruff of the neck and shake us and say, “Pay attention!”  I think maybe God is trying to say to us, “I want more for you than you have been willing to become.  Come on!  Wake up!”  And we hear this and we run, fearful, from the tomb, trembling at the thought of this new life, afraid of our beauty, afraid of our power.  Yes, we are afraid.  It’s only human.  But hear the echo of those words, “Be not afraid.  Be not afraid.” 

God will not let us go.  On that Easter morning, that first Easter morning, God spoke and God speaks again and again in the same way.  Against all odds, against reason, we are called to new life.  When we think that evil seems to have the upper hand, when peace in our world and in our own hearts seems illusive, when we seem stuck with our same old selves, when death seems to get the last word, love calls us by the name, out of the tomb, out of the tragedy and pain of our lives, saying to each one of us, “You are precious; you are worthy.  Stop your endless searching.  Give up the shame and the strangling doubt.”  Love says, “I am with you; I always have been.  Lift up your eyes.  After the long winter, the light will come.”  So be it, my friends.     Amen.

[Applause]