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Easter, April 8, 2007 Michael Anderson and The Rev. Ms. Barbara J. Pescan Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois
Reading – by Michael Anderson
Today we celebrate Easter. Of the many great gifts of Christianity to this world, certainly Easter hope is one of the greatest. Easter hope is not some weak thing, some wistful wishing for a better world. No, Easter hope is a defiant hope. It is rooted in the conviction that Jesus defied Death.
Now in the Easter story, death really stands for the unbeatable enemy, the one enemy we cannot control, the one enemy we can’t bargain with or beg off, or evade or elude, or hide from. As an enemy, Death is 100% successful.
But Christians believe that one day all that changed. Christians believe that one morning, Easter morning—Death died. And out of that death of death a new and powerful hope was born. Because if the one unbeatable foe has been beaten—there are a whole host of lesser foes—what’s to stop us from taking them on?
The power of Easter hope is this rash defiance: We do not accept the way things are. Period. We do not accept this limiting situation, this unjust situation. We do not accept the hegemony of death.
The other day I was reading Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech. I’ve heard the speech so many times, but when I saw it in writing, I was surprised at how short it is, just 3 pages long. I was even more surprised to find that the word “dream” doesn’t appear until page 3. But then as I read the speech, I saw the reason why. Rev. King’s dream is rooted in defiance. And it takes fully 2/3 of his speech to give vent to that defiance.
He says, “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, When will you be satisfied?” He says, “We can never be satisfied as long as…” and then he starts listing things, the police brutality, the lack of right to vote, all the things he refuses to accept. He concludes: “No, no we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
That’s what he tells us on page two. Then on page 3, he starts telling us his dream. It’s a dream we know so well—I don’t need to read it now—it’s the dream of a Baptist pastor with a Lutheran name who refused to accept the hegemony of death.
So on this Easter Sunday, we say thank you to our Christian brothers and sisters. Thank you for Reverend King and for all the followers of Christ who have worked for a better world. Thank you for the gift of hope, the defiant hope of Easter morning.
Sermon by Barbara Pescan
Two things happen to me at Easter. At first, they seem to conflict, and I feel pulled in separate directions. The first is a lyrical, almost giddy response to the changing and changeable weather – warm to cold and back again. I say a silent prayer that the daffodils and magnolias will not cook or freeze. I tell everyone I know that I hope the weather will stay cool enough to keep them for a long time. Oh, I like the long, cool spring.
When I hear the birds, I try to identify them: there’s that loud- mouthed robin who has so many songs. There’s that cardinal: he is such a show off! I want to sing with him, and I try it, imperfectly, but with gusto. It is such an impertinent and lusty song…
It makes me ridiculously happy, in March, to see the yellow-green on the willow wands, even before there are leaves.
The first purple crocus… the snow drops… the daffodils growing out of the junk pile of detritus at the end of our cul de sac: tree branches, leaves, some trash…I wonder who planted the bulbs there, who cared enough. And, now, there are more each year. I wonder how they survive in the salt snow that the plows push there in the winter. I wonder.
And, that brings me to begin to feel the pull from another source. I hear the echoes of my immigrant grandparents’ generation, speaking in Romanian, saying to each other on Easter morning: Christ is Risen! He is risen, indeed! And they were so happy. My mother, deep in memory loss at this point, gets tears in her eyes when I ask her to remember and say the Romanian words for me. Cristos a inviat. Adeverat. A inviat! Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed.
Remembering that, hearing my mother say the words and seeing her tears, I feel that other pull. It is the pull of a religious sensibility that includes a belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection and in eternal life. It is the pull to acknowledge how it seems to me that the telling of the story, the mining of the metaphors of Easter are so separate from what individuals see as possible in their own lives. I feel a pull to pay attention to how the religious is so scandalously at odds with what the world does about the suffering of others, the deaths, like Jesus’ death, the lonely deaths with no one witnessing, no one telling the stories, no one remembering.
And something in me wants to join these two together into some kind of possibility for a different way to inhabit this holiday and this season, this holiday that Unitarian Universalists pause at, want to acknowledge in some way, but do not have a reliable ritual to, well, resurrect each year ---
I want to do something that gives muscle to our hopes I want us to say and sing something into which we might lean And learn, and Some ritual, words and, yes, actions born out of the words, To help us wear again the bright garments of hopefulness The whole colorful spectrum of our religious and cultural histories That might honor our loving ancestors hopes and struggles The quiet, stubbornly faithful believers that the power of love Survives suffering and death, survives even the grave, because, because we insist that suffering and brutality and war will not always hold the trump card will not always take the day will not always have the last word
I want us to grasp something bigger than The absolutely true but sometimes sterile knowledge That the body does not live again after death. I want us to reach for something that lasts more than the few days Of ephemeral spring flowers.
* * * * *
I look at the beautiful faces of the children in Nalusheke, Zambia. In a color photo on the front page of the New York Times, they are eating wheat from America and split peas from Canada, provided by the World Food Program. The headline reads: “As Africa Hungers, U. S. Policy Slows the Delivery of Food Aid.” It is economic policy involving costs and timing and the awarding of contracts to agribusiness and shippers, and then distribution by nonprofit groups.
In a bumper crop year in Zambia, the World Food Program wants the aid in cash to buy local Zambian surplus grain and deliver it. U.S. agribusiness and shipping groups oppose the administration’s proposal to buy goods in developing countries with cash, and defend the idea that federal spending should benefit American business and farming interests as well as the hungry.
Here’s the thing: in the six months it takes to contract, process, ship and distribute the food from America, thousands more will die – AIDS orphans as well as AIDS sufferers whose treatment with U.S. supplied drugs makes them healthier and therefore hungrier.
I look at the picture of the children eating, and it is the Last Supper.
So, in addition to the spring break from classes, the half a day off on Good Friday, the leg of lamb, and the colorful candies and fun egg hunts, I’d like to add other cultural rituals to welcome this season. They would do for both hemispheres – we could eat our Easter dinner here, and share it with others far away. At dinner we could fill an extra bowl with money – a little or a lot, it doesn’t matter the amount, what matters is doing it. And, then, we could send it to where it will do the most good. And, we might send a letter to the people who make U.S. policy. We could find that out, and write them a letter, encouraging them to think some more.
We could all send a letter to the American Maritime Congress, an association of United States-flag ship owners, whose immediate past president, Gloria Tosi, has said, “There is no constituency for cash.” We could ask them which of their owners will die of hunger for shipping a little less grain in an African year of surplus. We could send a letter to the pretty good Zambian democratic government and ask them to work with the nonprofit World Food Program to create the means by which Zambian-grown food gets to hungry Zambian children and men and women.
This is the source of hopeful living: to see the truth of your life reflected in the response of the world around you – your life in all its contingency and beauty. This, too, is the source of hopeful living, the source of being able to live in the face of the human suffering and the human beauty that, here in our cul de sac, we are aware of every day: to do the thing that presents itself to be done to alleviate suffering and to acknowledge the beauty of each life.
To go to school in Nalusheke, Zambia, the children need a pair of flip flops and a metal bowl. They carry the bowl with them to school. The children in the school eat their meal of boiled bulgur wheat mush from America, topped with split peas from Canada. Most of the children scrape their bowls clean; they savor each bite. Sisi Negenda, a six-year old with little braids, hardly touches hers. She shyly explains that at home she has a younger sister, 3, and several orphaned relatives. “She [says] she [wants] to share with them. She [carries] off the bowl, still heavy with porridge, as though it were a precious, breakable object.” [Information and quotes from an article by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 4-7-07]
This ritual of sharing the food is as ancient as our human lives. In the lean times, all would have some. In the times of plenty, all celebrate the bounty.
We are one people, everywhere and everywhen. We may have lost touch with the myths of regeneration, with the giddy, relief that the sun returns and makes the grain grow again, and the animals abundant for hunting. We may turn away from the myth of death and resurrection, that cycle of being of which spring and Easter remind us once again. But, the primal urge to celebrate is in us, I swear it is still in us. The myths about being together on this earth are still the same.
The sages showed that the myth “would not reveal its full significance unless it led to the exercise of practical compassion and justice in daily life.” [Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, Canongate, 2005] This is where the separation happens – the story stays static, relegated to a religious ritual outside of real time and real events. And this is the place where we can reenter the story, where a stone rolls away.
Like a daffodil blooming out of trash and salted soil, Sisi Negenda carries off her bowl, still heavy with porridge, as though it were a precious, breakable object. She goes to share it with the others. Amen. Closing Words by Adrienne Rich My heart is moved by all I cannot save: So much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world Rouse us from tiredness, self-pity, Restore in us the love of living, and Bind us to hope again. Clarke Dewey Wells, adapted Unitarian Church of Evanston
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