Unitarian Easter

We Unitarians get our name from saying that God is one, not three, as the Trinitarians say. This raises questions about the status of Jesus. Was Unitarianism a reversion to Judaism? The early Unitarians identified as Christians. For them, Jesus was divine in a special way no one else has ever been. But Jesus wasn't God — only God was God.

Unitarians, going back to Faustus Socinus, in Poland in the late 1500s, emphasized Jesus' teachings and the moral example of Jesus life. The first Unitarians were Christians who emphasized Jesus' life, not his death. A couple hundred years later, Unitarians in New England in the early 1800s began describing themselves with the phrase, "the religion OF Jesus, rather than the religion ABOUT Jesus." It's not the magic trick of resurrection that is the important matter. It is the presence Jesus had, his compassion and his genius for parables and teaching.

By 1841, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was saying that none of the miracles attributed to Jesus had any importance. We are the people who, for almost 500 years, have been putting Jesus' life, not his death, at the center. But Easter is all about his death. So, instead, Unitarian Universalist ministers like me at Easter have been wont to talk about Easter as a springtime celebration. The resurrection is the resurrection of life after the death represented by winter, we like to say. These basic UU Easter themes are so well enough established that it occurred to me that even an Artificial Intelligence program like ChatGPT could competently identify them. To test this, I went to ChatGPT and typed: "Compose an Easter sermon for a Unitarian Universalist congregation." It cogitated upon my request for about one second and then scrolled out this:

Dear friends, Happy Easter to all of you!

As Unitarian Universalists, we gather today to celebrate the renewal of spring and the resurrection of hope. This is a time of year when we witness the beauty of nature and the rebirth of life all around us. And as we gather on this special day, we also take time to reflect on the meaning of Easter and what it means for us as a community.

Now, I know that Easter is traditionally celebrated in the Christian faith as a day to commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, as Unitarian Universalists, we come from a wide range of spiritual backgrounds and beliefs. So, today, I invite us all to explore the meaning of Easter in a way that is personal and meaningful to each of us.

For me, Easter is a time to celebrate the human spirit and the power of hope. It is a time to acknowledge the struggles and hardships that we face in our lives, and to remember that we have the strength and resilience to overcome them. It is a time to embrace the beauty and wonder of the world around us, and to find joy in the small things that make life worth living.

As we look around us today, we see the signs of spring all around us – the flowers blooming, the birds singing, the sun shining. These are the signs of hope and renewal that we celebrate at Easter. And as we celebrate them, we also remember that hope is not just a fleeting feeling, but a powerful force that can inspire us to create positive change in our lives and in the world around us.

So, let us all take a moment to reflect on the hope and renewal that Easter brings. Let us celebrate the beauty and wonder of the world around us, and let us find strength and inspiration in the knowledge that we are capable of overcoming even the greatest challenges. And let us go forth from this place with renewed hope and a commitment to making the world a better place for all. Happy Easter, my friends. May this day be filled with joy, hope, and renewal for each and every one of us.

ChatGPT Al has never experienced hope, or renewal — beauty or rebirth or celebration or joy. It has simply been fed billions of words of text and extracted the ones that statistically go with Easter and Unitarian Universalist sermon, and arranged them according to principles of grammar — and produced this bland but essentially accurate summary of how our tradition regards Easter. Today, let's dig deeper than that.

There's a story here — several stories -- that have something to tell us, whatever we hold the status of Jesus to be. An insightful and compassionate teacher was put to death. He died on a Friday, too late in the day to bury him. The next day, Saturday, was the Jewish Sabbath. Jesus and all his followers were good, observing Jews, so the body could not be properly prepared and buried on the Sabbath. They had to wait until Sunday for the burial. Until then, the body was placed in a temporary tomb — a small cave cut into the side of the hill. The door was a heavy stone disk that rolled on a track. What happened next is a matter of some disagreement among the writers of the four gospels.

READING

[Four READERS come up and on stage. Each goes to a separate microphone. One reader is labeled “JOHN,” another “MATTHEW,” another “LUKE,” and another “MARK.”]

JOHN: On Sunday morning Mary Magdalene went by herself.
MATTHEW: No. Two women, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” went to the tomb.
MARK: No. Three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salomé went.
LUKE: It was at least four women: Mary Magdalene, who we all agree on; Mary the mother of James, as Mark said and maybe who Matthew means as “the other Mary.” There was also Joanna, and other women.
JOHN: She . . .
MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .
JOHN: took spices to prepare the body for burial.
MATTHEW: Yes.
MARK: Right.
LUKE: Just so.
JOHN: Mary went in the pre-dawn darkness.
MATTHEW: The women went when the day was dawning.
MARK: No. The sun had already risen.
LUKE: I’m with Matthew. They went when the day was dawning.
JOHN: When Mary . . .
MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: The women . . .
JOHN: Got there, she . . .
MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE: They . . .
MATTHEW: They arrived just in time to see that “an angel of the lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.”
MARK: No, they found the stone already rolled back.
LUKE: I’m with Mark on this one. It was already rolled back.
JOHN: Me, too. It was already rolled back before Mary got there.
MATTHEW: The two women saw one angel, the one who rolled back and sat on the stone, and also some guards.
MARK: The three women entered the tomb and saw “a young man dressed in a white robe.” No mention of any guards.
LUKE: The group of four or more women entered the tomb, and did not find the body. “While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.” No guards.
MATTHEW: “The angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised.’”
MARK: It was the young man dressed in a white robe who said essentially those words.
LUKE: I’ve got that the two men in dazzling clothes said it.
MATTHEW: So the two women left the tomb and ran to tell the disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings! Go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
MARK: The three women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Some indeterminate time later, Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene, then to the disciples.
LUKE: The four or more women returned from the tomb and told the eleven disciples “and all the rest” what had happened. Later that day, Jesus appeared to two other women who weren’t in the group that went to the tomb, and these women didn’t recognize who he was at first.
JOHN: No, no. Mary Magdalene, alone, saw no one at all until after she returned from the tomb, and told two of the disciples that the body was missing. Mary and the two disciples returned again to the tomb. They still saw nothing but linen wrappings. The disciples left. Mary stayed, alone and crying. Only then did she look into the tomb and see "two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying." Then she turned around, and there was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. She supposed him to be the gardener until he called her name.

[READERS depart]

Different numbers of women, different numbers of young men in white or angels, different encounters between Jesus and his followers. They were written by different authors at different times, to different audiences, for different purposes.

Mark's story is about encountering fear. Three women approach the tomb.When they see the stone rolled back, they are nervous. Is this some kind of trap? "As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed." (16:5) Is he secret police? Is he a Roman agent?
"But he said to them, 'Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here."' (16:6) These words do not reassure the three women. They turn and flee from this creepy guy.

"So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." (16:8) Mark's gospel represents the continuing fear of political repression faced by Jesus' followers.

John's story is about discerning our true nature and true place. Mary goes in solitude to see the empty tomb. No one is there. She returns from the tomb; speaks to some trusted others. Some of them went back with her to the tomb again, but then left her alone there, crying. Then she turns around, and there's the truth, right in front her, but she still doesn't get it. She thinks it's the gardener. But it is the truth, and it calls her name and in that moment she realizes it, realizes herself.

Matthew's story is about the courage to live into your truth in the face of enemies who oppose it. Some of Jerusalem's rulers catch wind of the news that Jesus' body has gone missing. They concoct a story, which they bribe the guards to affirm, that some of Jesus' followers came in the middle of the night and took the body away. People will tell you that there is no new life, no new truth for you to discover. "There is no transformation, no greater wholeness," they will say. But Mary knew better — and so do we, in our hearts.

Luke's story is not about our enemies but our friends. Mary goes to speak to the apostles about this frightening yet promising new reality she has discovered. "These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." Says Luke (24:11). Liberation? Wholeness? It is an idle tale, our friends may think. But the truth of your life is not for your enemies to define, nor is it determined by your friends.

Four gospels, four quite different stories, all about a truth, this reality which you are prone to overlook, to mistake for the gardener, but which comes to you when you are alone — this truth that your enemies discredit and your friends find idle — this truth that might even make you persecuted — was personified as a man, Jesus of Nazareth — a teacher, a healer a prophet within the Jewish tradition -- a mystic, and a social radical. He taught a message of transformation — that we have the ability to transform our lives — by loving one another, by loving even our enemies, by living simply and not placing faith in money, material things, status, and power.

Following his model and his teachings is transformative. Jesus lived and taught about a new social order — what he called "the Kingdom of God" — what we might call the Kin-dom of God, or Beloved Community — a society based on love and compassion. People thus transformed become agents of transformation of their communities and of the world, realizing the Kindom of God on earth.

This, then, is a Unitarian Universalist Easter message: Our community can be a community of transformation. That's how we realize the Kindom.

The caption of the cartoon on the front of your Order of Service reads, "As Leon unfurled the piece of paper, he knew he would never again play charades with ministers." On the paper, for him to try to find some way to act out, are the words, "substitutionary atonement."

Because I am a minister, I found this hilarious. And then I began to notice a really good point here: You can't act out substitutionary atonement! It's an unlivable theology. What is "substitutionary atonement"? It's the account of Easter that, somewhere along the line, you probably learned. It goes roughly like this:

The Easter story tells us that Jesus' suffering on the cross is redemptive. He suffered and died that we might have life (i.e., he substituted for us in order to atone for us). Real love manifests as complete submission and selfsacrifice. God required of Jesus -- and may sometimes require of us -- passive acceptance of violence.

That's a very common interpretation of the Easter story. I don't think this is really the message of that story. In charades, as in life, you need to show something -- be active. Easter is about transformation, not passivity; self-realization, not self-sacrifice.

I don't believe people come to church to stay the same. I don't think that anyone joins a faith community and enters into congregational life as a conservative strategy for maintaining their status quo. If we wanted to stay the same, we could just stay home — just stay in that, well, tomb. The Easter message is to be risen, to be resurrected, to be transformed.

A congregation must be about facilitating and bearing witness to one another's personal transformations. A congregation must be about transforming its members, transforming itself, and transforming the world around it. I don't believe you're here to stay the same. Of course, you're not here to deny who you are, either. The transformation is not about rejecting yourself. The transformation — or call it the resurrection — is about becoming more fully who you are: you transforming into you.

At work in this process is the interplay between what you have in common with the others of your community and what is unique to you. We have shared Unitarian values, and we encourage each other in living up to them. Becoming who you are is, in part, a matter of getting better at exemplifying the values we share. It's also, in part, recognizing and living into the truth that only you see — as, in the Gospel of John, Mary, in her aloneness, comes to recognize Jesus.

This is no easy thing, becoming who you are. But why isn't it easy? Why should it be hard? Nurtured by learned and shared values, supported by the love of family, friends, community, should not becoming who we are be a flourishing as natural and abundant as the flowers in spring? It's hard because we carry shame. We are afraid. We have, in various ways and in varying degrees, been silenced from the full expression of who we are.

You want to know what Easter is really all about? Here's what Easter is really all about: it's about making the courageous choice to break the silence, tell your truth, rise up out of shame. It's about bearing witness to the stories of others as they seek to break silence imposed by perhaps greater fear and shame. This, finally, is where the Easter story takes us. The death from which we may rise, from which we can help others rise, is specifically an entombment in fear and shame.

Look, crucifixion was designed to inflict optimal physical pain, dragged out over many hours. The executioners sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the victim, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer. More than that, crucifixion was designed to humiliate. The person was stripped naked — lifted up to public view, gasping, fully exposed, utterly powerless. At the moment of death, his bowels would loosen, for all to see. It was violence, as extreme as the Roman imagination could conceive, designed to instill fear, and to make anyone associated with the victim feel ashamed of themselves. For some of Jesus' followers, it worked. Theologian Ron Rolheiser writes:

"Many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn't connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph."

In their fear and their shame, they fell silent about the promise of a new social order, a Kindom of God. Others, though — women, at first — broke silence. They broke silence first to simply lament what had happened. Giving voice to our lamentation is the beginning of reclaiming our own dignity and worthiness in the face of our loss. They broke silence to remember, to say a name, against all the shaming, fear, and humiliation that would bury it in silence. They broke silence to begin to tell stories that represented that the hope found in this man's teachings lived on. They broke silence to transcend fear and affirm community, to overcome violence by sustaining hope.

Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock write in Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire:

Crucifixion was used against the underclasses and slaves and was regarded as so shameful that even victims’ families would not speak of it. It functioned to fragment communities, tearing the fabric of even the strongest bonds of connection and commitment. The Passion narratives broke silence about the shame and fear that crucifixion instilled. To lament was to claim powers that crucifixion was designed to destroy: dignity, courage, love, creativity, and truth-telling. In telling his story, his community remembered his name and claimed the death-defying power of saying his name aloud....

The Passion stories brought testimony before a higher court of appeals than the bogus trial of Jesus they indict. The purpose of such writing is assuredly not to valorize victims, to praise their suffering as redemptive, to reveal ‘true love’ as submission and self-sacrifice, or to say that God requires the passive acceptance of violence. Such interpretations mistakenly answer the abusive use of power with an abnegation of power. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, in marked contrast, asserted that the answer to abusive power is the courageous and decisive employment of the powers of life – to do deeds in Jesus’ name....

To break silence whenever violence is used to shame, instill fear, fragment human community, or suppress those who advocate for justice is life-giving. Just as Jesus, in John’s Gospel, stood before Pilate and said, ‘you have no power over me,’ the Passion narratives defied the power of crucifixion to silence Jesus’ movement. In doing so, they placed before his movement the choice to tell the truth and live by ethical grace. They said life is found in surviving the worst a community can imagine, in lamenting the consequences of imperialism, and in holding fast to the core goodness of this world, blessed by divine justice and abundant life.

They transformed humiliation into the strength of connection and in so doing resurrected life from death. Against all violence to body or to spirit, against all fear and shame endured by us and by others, against all the protective strategies we ourselves devise to be safe, there is rising to accept and affirm and speak who we are.

There is yet the possibility of transformation into who we are, unobscured by fear or shame. There is yet the possibility of justice, an end to violence, a new social order, a Kindom of God. Here is a livable theology, a teaching that we can act out. Here is the message and the hope of Easter. Someday, maybe A.I. will say that. But only we can mean it.

Easter! Passover! Ramadan! Liberation! part 2

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Two ideas in the Passover festival are central:

1. It is a celebration of freedom. Passover is known as “The Season of our Liberation.” It commemorates the escape from enslavement in Egypt.
2. It is a call to hospitality.

The two phrases that echo most loudly through the Passover Seder Haggadah are: (1) "In every generation let each one feel as if he or she came forth out of Egypt"; and (2) “Let any who are hungry come and eat.”

These are interrelated and intertwined. The human psyche has three basic categories: ME, US, and THEM. Exodus tells about the liberation of an US. As a story initially and primarily told by Jewish people to Jewish people, it’s the story of how WE were enslaved. Physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, or sleep were often inadequately met. Worse, human needs for respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression were systematically and extremely denied – through regular use and constant threat of inflicting great pain and humiliation, typically the lash, applied in a way sometimes punitive and sometimes simply random, though always ostensibly punitive. It was an utterly miserable existence.

That’s the miserable existence WE were stuck in. But WE got out of it. WE, as a people, as an US, achieved political liberation – a system of some modicum, at least, of rights and liberties. It was not at all a democracy, and a read through the books of the prophets illustrates how the Israelites struggled constantly for centuries with issues of oppressing each other. But the oppressors were US now – we shared a bond of culture and of worship -- and their cruelties were less systematic, less extensive, and usually less extreme. So we were free. Or at least, "free."

When political liberation happens – when a people enjoy some rights and liberties, when physical needs can be met and those human needs -- respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression – are not systematically denied, people become susceptible to different kind of bondage. We are likely to want to guard what we have. We can become, essentially, enslaved to self-protective habits and desires of the moment. Life can come to feel bereft of meaning, even though we have autonomy.

The tradition of liberation that begins with political liberation from external oppressors must then turn to personal liberation from our own internal oppressors. When US is no longer oppressed by THEM, ME may still be oppressed by ME-self. The internal voices of self-protection and of satisfying desires of the moment drown out the voices that want our life to mean something more than its own security and gratification.

Thus the Passover Seder tradition, the Haggadah text, addresses this liberation, too. “Let any who are hungry come and eat” is as central a message as “we escaped our enslavement in Egypt.” To liberate US, we get away from the THEM that oppresses. But then, to liberate ME – that is, liberation from internal voices of self-protection and desire – we must turn toward THEM, turn toward those who are other, turn with an open heart toward those, whatever their culture, who we can help. We make our lives meaningful – liberated from the abyss of meaninglessness – by reaching out to help, to share with, any THEM that is need.

Rabbi Hillel said it succinctly: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” Yet another way to say it is that gratitude and generosity are intrinsically linked. The Seder exercise of imagining yourself as personally coming forth out of Egypt is an exercise in gratitude. It fills us with thanksgiving for the freedoms we enjoy. And the concomitant of gratitude – the action that confirms and solidifies and sustains gratitude – is generosity. So the gratitude of escaping slavery very naturally segues into the generosity of “let any who are hungry come and eat.”

Inspect your own experience. What does being ungenerous – being stingy – feel like? Does it not feel like a kind of ungratefulness Isn’t the miser necessarily also an ingrate (whether in the form of your own inner miser, or someone else)? To turn toward generosity, toward radical hospitality, toward open-heartedness toward THEM who are not US – this gives our lives richness and meaning. It is liberating.

Political liberation without radical hospitality becomes personal bondage. Hospitality to the other is what you can do right now for collective liberation. And the Passover message is that what you do for collective liberation serves also your personal liberation.

It’s a message also found in Ramadan, to which we now turn. For Muslims, all scripture was revealed during Ramadan, and it is to the celebration of scripture, or Mohammed’s revelation of that scripture, that this holy month is dedicated. It’s a time of fasting and prayers – which highlights the personal liberation of connecting to the ultimate. It’s also a time of community and heightened charity – which highlights the linkage of individual liberation to engagement with the welfare of others.

During the 30 days of Ramadan, Muslims are enjoined to read the entire Quran, which is divided into 30 parts – so, one part per day. Believers are called to stand up for justice and bear witness to the truth, as the Quran says, “even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or your close relatives.” The Quran says to never allow “hatred of others to lead you away from justice.” It tell us to “be a community that calls for what is good, urges what is right, and forbids what is wrong.” It tells us “to free the slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those believe and urge one another to steadfastness [in doing good] and compassion.” It prescribes almsgiving for the poor and needy (9:60) and an ethic of charity that affirms and restores the dignity of socially neglected people (2:261—274). It tells us to defend the oppressed even if it means putting our own lives at risk.

This is the social justice message of the Qur’an. The Quran also includes prohibition of usurious loans, giving short measure in one’s business dealings, exploiting orphans, acting like tyrants, or spreading corruption. There’s a recognition here, as in Judaism and Christianity, that our own liberation is tied up with the liberation of others.

Emma Lazarus, writing in 1883, said: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Fannie Lou Hamer put the point a tad more pithily: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Our own personal liberation is bound up with ending all systems of domination.

We come again to what would appear to be the Catch-22 alluded to earlier: You can’t be free unless you free others. Yet you can’t free others unless you yourself are free. But this conundrum dissolves when we simply observe that liberation is not all or nothing. We are part-way liberated.

We are part-way liberated as individuals – though still held in some thrall to our addictions, attachments, habits, fears. We are part-way liberated as a society – we have come a long way from the absolute monarchies in which no one had rights or a vote but the king – though still held in some thrall to white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, generational wealth, meritocracy.

Such personal liberation as we have can be used to advance collective liberation. Such collective liberation as our society has lays the groundwork for us to take the next steps on our personal liberation journey. So bring out that festal bread and sing songs of freedom. And may we, along with the Earth in springtime, awake again.

To part 1

Easter! Passover! Ramadan! Liberation! part 1

To part 2

Today is a holy day in the Christian tradition. It’s Easter.

This week is a holy week in the Jewish tradition. Passover began last Friday evening and lasts until next Saturday evening.

And this month is a holy month in the Islamic tradition. It’s the month of Ramadan.

We have three great traditions overlapping, and each tradition offers us a story, redolent with meaning and possibility whether we are adherents of the faith tradition from which it comes or not.

At Community UU, our theme of the month for April is liberation, and our journey groups are exploring this issue, and looking at what sorts of things from which a person might need to be liberated.

• There have been and are groups that are oppressed, beaten down. Liberation is about ending forms of enslavement, oppression and injustice. Liberation calls for dismantling the systems of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
• There’s also the issue of personal liberation – liberation from our own irrationalities, fears, bad habits, preoccupations, cravings, and ego defenses. These constraints may constitute a kind of prison -- though sometimes quite a comfortable prison -- even when there are no iron bars.

Let’s look today at how those two sides of liberation are addressed in the three stories: the Easter story, the Passover story, and the Ramadan story.

The Easter story has often been presented as a story of personal liberation – liberation from, in the Christian argot, the bondage of sin. In other words: we aren’t always our best selves. Heedless pursuit of passing desires can feel like a kind of bondage. Or our habits of self-protection constrain us from a more fulfilling joy -- and may lead us make moral mistakes. According to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, Jesus' suffering on the cross redeems us from all of that. Jesus suffered and died that we might have life (i.e., he substituted for us in order to atone for us).

Unitarians have been rejecting substitutionary atonement for centuries. As our UU Minute segments have noted, Fausto Sozzini in the 16th-century, Joseph Priestley in the 18th-century, and William Ellery Channing in the 19th-century were among prominent Unitarian thinkers to critically examine the doctrine of substitutionary atonement and find it unsupported by either the Bible or reason. The implication of substitutionary atonement is that real love manifests as complete submission and self-sacrifice. God required of Jesus -- and may sometimes require of us -- passive acceptance of violence. If that sounds to you like a dangerous and harmful theology, I agree.

The message of Jesus’ ministry was not an exclusive attention to individual bondage to sin. He speaks often of something generally translated as “Kingdom of heaven” or “Kingdom of God.” In Matthew, the phrase is usually "kingdom of heaven," while in Mark and Luke it's usually "Kingdom of God." (Neither phrase appears in John.) Jesus spoke Aramaic, and we have no records of his actual Aramaic words. What we have is the Greek in which the Gospels were written. The Greek word typically translated as “kingdom” is basileia. The basileia Jesus is talking about – the kingdom of God, or, better, the kin-dom of God -- is a siblinghood of radical acceptance, a social arrangement based on our universal kinship and oriented toward justice. Theologian Robert Goss writes of:

"the basileia, the reign of God which signified the political transformation of his society into a radically egalitarian, new age, where sexual, religious, and political distinctions would be irrelevant. Jesus acted out his basileia message by standing with the oppressed and outcasts of society and by forming a society of equals."

For Goss, the resurrection represents God’s endorsement and confirmation of Jesus’ basileia message. The resurrection reveals God’s orientation toward the excluded.

In Luke 17, verses 20-21, we read:

“Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (NRSV)

Other translations give, “the kingdom of God is within you,” and in this translational difference we have the two sides of liberation. If liberation is within you, the emphasis is on personal liberation from the psychological constraints of our irrationality, anxiety, ego defensive habits – bondage to sin; Jesus is saying you have it within you to break free from patterns that disconnect you from joy. If liberation is among you, the emphasis is on social liberation from forms of inequality; Jesus is saying that the liberation we seek is to be found in our togetherness, in the relationships of beloved community.

In fact, the original Greek preposition here is entos (“in the midst of”), which might suggest either within or among. A translator might reasonably go either way. In truth, it is both at once. The basileia is both within you and among you: within us each, individually, and among us, collectively. It must be both at once – neither the personal nor the social by itself will suffice. It’s our psychological bondage to counterproductive strategies of self-protection that creates and sustains structures of inequality. At the same time, it’s the sociopolitical structures of domination that create and sustain the bondage of irrational self-protection strategies. Reversing that feedback loop will require working on both sides at once. It will require doing what we can to liberate ourselves from clinging fears and attachments. At the same time, it will require doing what we can to dismantle the structures of social domination that engender individual self-constraining thinking.

A picture of the two sides of liberation at work is presented in the Passover story. We'll look at that in part 2.

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Palm to Palm, part 2

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In this part, we'll look at two further matters in the Palm Sunday story: the acquisition of the colt, or donkey, and the bit about the stones shouting out.

So, what about that stolen colt (donkey)? Jesus sends his disciples off to fetch him a ride, telling them “If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’” It’s possible Jesus has made the consensual arrangements in advance to borrow the animal, though none of the Gospels suggests any such thing. To all appearances, they steal the colt.

We know this Jesus is not above crime. He acts illegally when he overturns the tables outside the temple. The Jewish and Christian scriptures include many examples of law-breaking for the sake of a higher justice.

“Moses also begins his leadership with crime, dispatching the Egyptian overseer to protect an enslaved person. Rahab begins her leadership with the crime of harboring fugitives. Daniel begins his leadership with the crime of refusing to eat the king’s diet. Esther commits the exact opposite of the king’s decree by appearing before him. Mary begins her leadership with the crime of getting pregnant by someone other than her betrothed.” (Casey Overton)

Property laws primarily protect the interests of the propertied. In many cases the wealth was acquired through injustice, and property law enshrines and preserves that injustice.

Jesus throws his lot in with the vulnerable, and declines to be constrained by laws that serve only the interests of the rich. Remember Anatole France’s ironic line. Writing in the 19th century, he said:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.” (The Red Lily, 1894)

Yes, the law is framed to be irrespective of class, but it’s written to forbid only what the downtrodden need to do. Casey Overton’s Palm Sunday reflection asks us:

“What would it mean if, instead of chastising rule-breakers among us, we press charges against the rules themselves which have made liberation untenable? What would it mean if we began to hallow not just the political prisoner but the disenfranchised dealer benefiting from an alternative economy and heterodox heretics and other revolutionaries who dare to hold the law in the lowest regard? So here’s to the misfits and miscreants. Here’s to all the people who break the rules because they know those rules break the people. May we reject the colonial category of the 'criminal' in governments as well as our interpersonal dealings with the 'outlaws' in our communities. May we begin to honor you misunderstood messengers for the wells of wisdom that you are. May our houses of worship be a refuge for you when the empire retaliates.”

I am not calling for lawlessness. I am calling for critical examiniation of how many of our laws really have anything to do with public safety. How much of our legal system is devoted to incarcerating the poor and people of color, while the wealthy whites who commit crimes that really do endanger public safety consistently do so with impunity?

Finally, in our exploration of the Palm Sunday story, let us consider those stones mentioned at the end of the passage. Jesus’ procession is evidently noisy. The disciples are being loud. Then, as Luke reports:

“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’”

At one level, he’s saying this is a party that cannot be stopped. It’s also a reminder to us that the Earth bears witness. A story from another tradition tells of Siddhartha Gotama, known as the Buddha, being challenged: on what authority do you teach as you do? Gotama – the Buddha – simply reaches out and touches the ground. The Earth is his authority. The Earth bears witness. The stones shout out the story.

What story do the stones tell? The Hebrew Bible, too, includes references to the Earth itself, the stones, speaking for Justice. In the book of Habakkuk, one of the twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet cries:

“Alas for you who get evil gain for your house, setting your nest on high to be safe from the reach of harm! You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples. You have forfeited your life. The very stones will cry out from the wall, and the plaster will respond from the woodwork.” (Habakkuk 2: 9-11)

Today the Earth cries out the story of our desecration. Casey Overton says:

“In response to the colonizers’ disregard for consent, Earth has been in escalating protest against her ongoing enslavement and alienation from her indigenous caregivers. We can gratefully receive this passage as a reminder that the prophetic tradition includes conversation with the earth and concern for her perspective.”

And at yet another level, Jesus is telling us what we can hear if we get quiet. After the noisy party-revolution of which I spoke in part 1, the Palm Sunday story now invites us into a quiet time – a time of listening, of attending. "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out," says Jesus. That is, in the silence, the shouting of stones may be heard. We often do not hear them over the noise of our chatter – the chatter of our tongues or the chatter that goes on in our minds when our tongues are still.

If we quiet our minds from the preoccupations of ego, we can hear the stones speak. They are shouting their existence. They are shouting continuously the glory of creation of which they partake. We have to be silent to hear it. In the silence we hear the Earth and all her creatures – the abundance and profligacy of life, yet also the groaning of pain from the damage being done to the climate, the destruction of habitat, the loss of species diversity.

We are called to a revolution of liberation from all that oppresses and discriminates. It is not a revolution of soldiers in military hierarchy inflicting violence and death. What does this revolution look like? There is no single look.

It looks like hands reaching out to help, to provide for – hands connecting, palm to palm, in compassion. It looks like a party, a raucous celebration. And it looks like being very quiet and listening, listening.

This is the message of Palm Sunday. Amen.

To part 1

Palm to Palm, part 1

To part 2

Reflections Upon Palm Sunday

The Palm Sunday story of entrance into Jerusalem is mentioned in all four gospels. Here's the version from Luke 19: 28-40

After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’” So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They said, “The Lord needs it.” Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (NRSV)

Today is Palm Sunday. What is that to us? What are we – we 21st century Unitarian Universalists who may or may not identify as Christian – to make of Palm Sunday?

Not a lot, usually. In past years, we have merely acknowledged that it was Palm Sunday, but said nothing more about it. We have not looked into what significance the story of which today is, by convention, the anniversary, might have for our own spiritual lives.

Scholars are divided on whether Jesus of Nazareth died in the year 30 or the year 33. We know essentially nothing of what he taught or did other than what was recorded in Gospel accounts the earliest of which were written over a generation after he died, and the Gospel of John not until 80 or 90 years after he died. In those gospels there’s a story about a prophet, on the Sunday before spring’s first full moon, entering a capital city in apparent triumph.

Maybe Jesus knew the danger. We know that after this entrance, as the story unfolds, things will quickly go badly for him. He’ll be arrested on Thursday, and by Friday evening he will be dead, killed in a gruesome and agonizing execution designed not merely to kill a person but to humiliate anyone associated with that person.

But at the time of his entrance, he seemed to be well received. The people welcome him enthusiastically. Jerusalem was swelled with pilgrims, in town for the Passover festival. The gospel of John reports,

“the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, 'Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord — the King of Israel!'” (John 12:12-13, NRSV)

Only John, of the four gospels, actually mentions Palm trees in this connection. In many Christian churches today, palm fronds, or other leafy branches will be passed out to worshipers. There may be a procession in which palm fronds are carried. The palm fronds, or other tree branches, are blessed and then taken home and kept in the icon corner or next to a a cross or crucifix until the following Mardi Gras – Shrove Tuesday – when the branches are brought back to church where they are ritually burned for ashes used in Ash Wednesday rituals.

But what of the story at the base of all this? For one thing, what do we make of the monarchical references – the proclamation of being a king, the language of superiority, and ruling over -- the apparent privilege of being able to take some one else’s colt (or a donkey, depending on the gospel), without payment or compensation, but simply because “the Lord needs it.”

In the New Testament, Jesus is called, by gentiles, King of the Jews. He’s called that by the Magi who visit the nativity scene, and called that again at the end of his life – by Roman soldiers and Pontius Pilate. By his Jewish followers, he’s called Christ, which means messiah, which means anointed one, where anointing with oil is the ritual of coronating: a king. For us WEIRD folk – meaning those of us in Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies -- the idea of a King hardly seems progressive.

But there’s a different way to see this entrance. Some commentators see Jesus’ mode of entry as a subversion – not an appropriation or imitation of a royal procession, but a parody of royalty. Robert Brawley, for instance, writes that:

“Riding a donkey over his disciples clothes, Jesus parodies royal parades. . . . [He] caricatures military acclamations.” (Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The New Testament)

After all, consider what else the Gospel writers tell us about this prophet, Jesus. Jesus’ ministry has emphasized good news for the poor and oppressed.

This is the prophet who preached:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God....But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” (Luke 6:20,24)

This is the prophet who emphatically teaches that the kindom of God opens for those who give food to the hungry, who give something to drink to the thirsty, who welcome the stranger, who give clothing to the naked, who take care of the sick, who visit the imprisoned. (Matt 25:35-36). I don’t read him as saying there’s a heavenly reward later – bye and bye in the sky when you die, if you spend your days now “being good.” I read him as saying that at the very moment you reach out in kindness to meet another’s need, that IS the kindom of God. The very act of feeding the hungry IS stepping into the kindom of God. The moment you give drink to the thirsty, you are, in that moment, in the kindom of God. In welcoming the stranger, you are, right then, also welcomed into the kindom of God. Clothing the naked doesn’t earn you a ticket in – it IS being in. Caring for the sick, visiting the imprisoned doesn’t get you some reward extrinsically – it IS it’s own reward intrinsically. The kindom of God IS people helping each other. Being of service to others IS the treasure in heaven.

This is the prophet who tells his followers,

“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matt 25:40)

This is the prophet who teaches,

“If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me. . . . Truly I tell you, . . . it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kindom of God.” (Matt 19: 21-24)

Given what Jesus’ life and teachings have been all about – at least, according to the Gospel writers – his entry into Jerusalem cannot be a claiming of Kingly prerogative. That’s not what this guy is about. That grandiose entrance can only be a subversion – an undermining of the very idea of Kingly prerogatives. As spiritual activist Casey Overton delightfully puts it, Jesus is trolling the class power structure by riding into town in mock triumph. Casey is drawing on the online usage of “troll,” meaning to post “inflammatory, inappropriate, controversial, or polarizing messages online for the purpose of cultivating animosity, upsetting others, or provoking a response.” Jesus, in other words, is being deliberately provocative.

That’s why the people are cheering, Casey suggests. Jesus’ inversion of norms is wildly entertaining – in a way not completely unlike the way, today, a drag queen’s performance inverts and subverts norms in a captivating and entertaining way. Fenton Bailey, co-executive producer of RuPaul’s Drag Race, says:

“To be a drag queen is to fly your freak flag, to live your life out loud, to not let other people dictate normal or to not edit yourself so that you fit in with other people.”

The drag queen assumes an exalted, larger-than-life pose, ostentatiously parades with dazzling plumage and fanfare to the uproarious encouragement of the audience.

The drag queen’s reign lasts a few minutes, or maybe an hour, and then she returns to being “a regular dude.” Ordinary. As vulnerable as “those who cheered so loudly for her.” Perhaps more vulnerable -- because in our cisheteronormative society his transgressive alter ego makes him hated, feared, marked, targeted.

Jesus, too, in a different way, as he parades into Jerusalem, with a crowd shouting encouragement, is putting on a transgressive alter ego that subverts the very thing that it presents. Casey Overton writes:

“In the same way that transness in all its forms prefigures a world where gender is mutable, Jesus’ trolling transgression of class norms prefigures a classless world for and by the people.”

The message for today? Today, as in Jesus’ time, we are a long way from justice, equality, and peace. Getting there will take a revolution. But this cannot be joyless work. Emma Goldman did not exactly say what has been oft attributed to her, but it does summarize a point she did make: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”

We have a revolution to foment. We are called to overturn the structures that generate inequality, injustice, and violence. But let us not forget joy. Let us not neglect to have fun.

Sometimes the revolution IS a party. The party is the revolution and the liberation. Raucous drag performances are one way that partying, revolution, and liberation come together. Jesus also brings noisy celebration together with revolution and liberation.

That’s the way to see the message of the Palm Sunday story.

To part 2

Ordinary Easter, part 2

Go to part 1

Mark is the earliest Gospel – written around 70 CE, say most scholars. It’s also the shortest gospel: at under 15,000 words, it’s less than two-thirds the length of the average of the other three gospels. There’s no miraculous birth in Mark – in fact, no birth story at all – and no doctrine of divine pre-existence. No Christmas story, and a truncated Easter story. It begins with Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist – and it ends, like this:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.
And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.
They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”
When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.
As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed.
But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”
So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (NRSV)

The end. "They were afraid." That’s it. That’s the end of the whole Gospel of Mark. At least, let us say, the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of Mark end at that point: Women fleeing in fear from the empty tomb. Most scholars today believe this to be the original ending of Mark’s gospel. Statements from the early Church Fathers Eusebius and Jerome support that this is the original ending. Evidently, this didn’t feel like a satisfactory conclusion, so later manuscripts add a little more. But the original ended right there: “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Silence and fear. That’s what we’re left with. That’s our Easter story. Silence and fear. Where’s the gospel – the good news – in that?

One scholar, Richard Burridge, argues that Mark’s picture of discipleship involves not knowing whether things will come right in the end. The way Mark’s Gospel ends certainly leaves open the question of whether it all comes right in the end. Burridge compares the ending of Mark to its beginning:

“Mark's narrative as we have it now ends as abruptly as it began. There was no introduction or background to Jesus' arrival, and none for his departure. No one knew where he came from; no one knows where he has gone; and not many understood him when he was here.”

Mark leaves us with silence and fear. Yet the very fact that he’s telling the story tells us that it didn’t end there. Someone broke that silence – the fact of the story lets us know – or there wouldn’t be the story.

I have spoken before of the women who courageously broke silence. First to lament, and in lamenting reclaim dignity and worthiness in the face of loss. And further to remember, to say a name, against all the shaming, fear, and humiliation that would bury it in silence. They broke silence to say his name, as we are today enjoined to say the names of George Floyd, Walter Scott, Breanna Taylor, Philando Castile, Eric Garner and all the others. There is a power to breaking silence, to saying their names.

Further, they broke silence to tell stories that represented that the hope found in this man lived on – stories to transcend fear and affirm community, stories to overcome violence by sustaining hope – stories to transform humiliation into the strength of connection and in so doing resurrect life from death.

Mark leaves us with silence and fear, yet he also leaves us knowing that the silence will be broken, that the fear will be overcome – for the fact that he’s telling the story tells us that the story, and the hope, does live on. And what is that hope? The three women encounter a “young man dressed in a white robe” who tells them Jesus has been raised. And that Jesus “is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.”

Galilee: the place on the margins of Israel where Jesus was born, began his ministry, and where the first 9 chapters of Mark’s gospel take place. In other words, to find your hope, go back to the beginning. And go back out to the margins. If Jerusalem, the capital, the urban center of Ancient Near East society, represents the center of what society deems important, then our renewal lies in going to the margins.

Mark’s gospel ends so abruptly. You are left to write the end of the story. Even ancient sources couldn’t resist writing an ending, but never mind their ending, patched in from snippets of Matthew and Luke. What’s your ending? From the fear that has silenced you, what is your path back to the beginning, back out to the margins of what society centers?

What will we do with our fear? Go to Galilee, says Mark. Return to where you came from, on the margins. There you will see Jesus – see your own Christ-Nature, your Buddha-nature, the Moses of your heart. There you will meet the others with whom you may join in the ongoing work of resurrection – of bringing forth new life.

I believe that you know what I’m talking about, and know it from experience. I’m not saying, do this thing that’s nothing like anything you’ve ever done before. I think you have had moments in your life where you did this: broke from what was silencing you, answered your fear, returned to Galilee and touched what we Unitarians call your inherent worth and dignity. You’ve taken action with others to rebuild your life – to build the life we share together -- after a loss or setback. You are not, I think, a complete stranger to the work of resurrection. You got this.

The invitation that is always open, and that Easter is an occasion for remembering, is to ask in what ways, now, and again, are you called back to where you came from to see – now, and again – your true self – and in what ways – now, and again – to take up the work of resurrection?

There may be personal resurrections for you. There is also the social and political rebuilding to be done – the collective liberation that is at the heart of the Passover story, and was the original hope of the Jesus movement.

The testimony of the George Floyd trial this week has made many of us acutely conscious of the fact that we’ve created a police force so insulated from accountability that officers can commit murder at will. It has reminded us of the many ways our society oppresses people of color – and thereby oppresses all of us. Whatever our race, we are all precluded from the Beloved Community for which our hearts yearn.

Building beloved community will require going to the margins – going out to the places where people are marginalized – and going back to our origins – the values of fair treatment, of radical hospitality, of loving all our neighbors as ourselves – the values we embody when we see our own Christ-nature, the love from which we came -- before our silence and our fear made us complicit with white supremacist assumptions and complacent in the emergence of today’s police departments.

Mark’s Gospel leaves you with silence and fear, leaving you to write the end of the story. What’s the continuation to the Gospel of Mark that you will write today? What’s the continuation that you will write . . . today?

Go to part 1

Ordinary Easter, part 1

Go to part 2

I’ll share with you a Zen koan, and talk about ordinariness as salvific: the reliable quotidian rhythms. Then we’ll look at the larger scale hopes for social and political liberation – in the foreground of the Passover story and in the background of the Easter story. We’ll note how the four gospel accounts of Easter are different. In part 2, we’ll take a deep dive into the Gospel of Mark, and see if can emerge with a context for both the ordinary, everyday resurrection and a social liberation that we have not yet seen. I will end with a question, rather than an affirmation, so I won’t be saying Amen at the end this time. Here we go.

A friend of mine is a United Church of Christ minister. We met at the Zen center where we both practice. Every couple weeks we meet on zoom to study a koan together, and from there we often talk shop about how things are at our respective congregations. We are working our way through a collection of koans called the Mumonkan – or Gateless Gate – and when we zoomed last Thursday, the one we were on was number 19:

Zhaozhou earnestly asked Nanquan, “What is the Way?”
Nanquan said, “The ordinary mind is the Way.”
Zhaozhou said, “Should I direct myself toward it or not?”
Nanquan said, “If you try to turn toward it, you go against it.”
Zhaozhou said, “If I do not try to turn toward it, how can I know that it is the Way?”
Nanquan said, “The Way does not belong to knowing or not-knowing. Knowing is delusion; not-knowing is a blank consciousness. When you have really reached the true Way beyond all doubt, you will find it as vast and boundless as the great empty firmament. How can it be talked about on a level of right and wrong?”
At these words, Zhaozhou was suddenly enlightened.

Ordinary mind is the way. There’s no special state to be achieved. The way does call for being mindful – and this mindfulness is simply paying attention to your ordinary life with its ordinary events. There’s no particular turning toward it that is called for. Anything special would be turning away from it.

You don’t have to learn some special knowledge – knowing is delusion. But don’t glorify ignorance either – not knowing is blank consciousness. The way is nothing special.

As my friend and I were talking about ordinariness, we got to talking what we were going to say to our congregations for Easter. I shared with him that I found this koan to be helpful. This is my eighth Easter service with Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation at White Plains. All the splashy interpretations that I might have to offer have been shared in Easters past. It’s getting kinda ordinary – and ordinary is the way: the ordinary and reliable rebirth of spring – the ordinary and reliable lightening of our hearts as the days grow longer, the air warms, and the lovely blossoms push up from the earth.

He shared with me that he wished he could convince his congregation that the resurrection was nothing special. I’ve been reflecting about that. He’s a Christian, and I’m a nonChristian Unitarian – and we’re both also Buddhists. Whether you’re a Christian or not, you may be thinking there’s something special about the resurrection of Jesus – something extraordinary. You might think it’s extraordinary and true -- and is a truth that gives life much of its meaning. Or you might think it’s extraordinary and false – too extraordinary to be credible. But what if neither of those? What if it’s not extraordinary? What if it’s nothing special?

Before you die, your life has what meaning it has in and through the hearts and minds of the people who know you. After you die, your life continues – meaning what it means, in and through the hearts and minds of the people who know you. And apart from that, there's the reliable rhythm of the returning beauty of spring: so glorious – so gloriously ordinary.

The annual rhythm of the seasons is recapitulated in the ups and downs of life – the cycle of defeats and triumphs, of wounding and healing. We resurrect out of silence and into our voice – and find we still have episodes of being silenced. We resurrect out of fear and into assured confidence – and find we still have episodes of being scared. Nothing special.

I am not being the Schmeaster Bunny here. You know the Schmeaster Bunny – the dismissive little rabbit that’s through with carrying eggs all over the place – done with those pretty, brightly colored symbols of fertility – fed up with chocolate representations of itself. “Easter, schmeaster,” says the Schmeaster Bunny. Don’t be a Schmeaster Bunny.

The cycles of rebirth are wonderful, beautiful, delightful – and ordinary. These ordinary and reliable rhythms of life and death and rebirth are indeed glorious and rich – and nothing to be dismissive of. Along with these ordinary rhythms, we also have this background of large-scale liberation. There’s Passover -- the eight days of which conclude at sundown this evening – and the Passover story telling us of the Hebrew people fleeing from slavery in Egypt. The Israelites were then conquered by the Assyrians – though they pretty much thrived as a semi-independent Assyrian vassal. When the Assyrian empire collapsed, the area was conquered by the Babylonians, then Persians, then the Greeks under Alexander the Great, then the Romans. The Romans had been the occupying force for a little over a hundred years by the time of Jesus. And once again (or, more-or-less, still) the Jewish people were longing for liberation from their occupying oppressors.

The original hope of the Jesus movement was a political hope – that he would be the leader, the king, of an independent Israel – like David and Solomon of old. They called him the "Christ," a Latin term, calqued from the Hebrew “Messiah,” which meant anointed one. The reference is to ceremonially anointing with oil at the inauguration of a monarch.

The common thread that links Passover and Easter is the story of a people longing for freedom from oppressive rulers: the Egyptians in one case, and the Romans in the other. The hopes of the people are pinned, in the one story, on Moses, and on the other story, on Jesus. One story has a happy ending – they escape Egyptian oppression. The other story has, well, a different sort of happy ending. The people don’t get the political freedom that they wanted. The hero is executed. Instead the story offers what may be called a spiritual bypass. The message is that a spiritual freedom is offered us – though the oppression of the body continues.

I want to remember with you, that the Four Canonical Gospels differ on what happened Easter morning. Mary Magdalene went by herself to the tomb, or she went with another Mary, or there were three women, or at least four.

She, or they, were taking spices to prepare the body for burial. She came in the pre-dawn darkness, or they came when the day was dawning, or the sun had already risen. They arrived just in time to see an angel roll the stone back, or found the stone already rolled back.

In Matthew, the two women saw an angel and some guards. Mark says the three women entered the tomb and saw one “young man dressed in a white robe." Luke says the group of four or more women saw “two men in dazzling robes.” In John, Mary Magdalene went alone and saw no one; she then left, found two of the male disciples, told them the body was missing, rushed back to the tomb with the men. They saw nothing but linen wrappings. The men left Mary alone crying, and only then did she look into the tomb and see "two angels in white."

Each of the four different stories offers us an allegory with resources for meaning making. For this year, let’s look particularly at the account in Mark. We'll begin that look in part 2.

Go to part 2

Traditions of Liberation

OPENING WORDS

It seems appropriate during this time when we are worshipping via internet to begin with a poem that came to my attention by being widely circulated around the internet. In this time of virus, here’s a poem that went viral. Some of those circulating it claimed it was written a hundred years ago as a response to the 1918 flu pandemic, but it turns out it was written in the last month. This is by Kitty O’Meara.

And people stayed home
and read books and listened
and rested and exercised
and made art and played
and learned new ways of being
and stopped
and listened deeper
someone meditated
someone prayed
someone danced
someone met their shadow
and people began to think differently
and people healed
and in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways,
dangerous, meaningless and heartless,
even the earth began to heal
and when the danger ended
and people found each other
grieved for the dead people
and they made new choices
and dreamed of new visions
and created new ways of life
and healed the earth completely
just as they were healed themselves.

HOMILY ONE

We are celebrating today both Passover and Easter. The Jewish holiday of Passover began last Wednesday sun down, and continues until sundown on Thu Apr 16. Some of you joined me for an online virtual Seder that night, and I thank you. It was moving to be together and to tell again the familiar story, and say again the familiar words.

A traditional saying at the end of Seder and also at the end of Yom Kippur services is “next year in Jerusalem” – evoking the hope for, and commitment to, a more full spiritual redemption, a more complete liberation that comes from a more widely realized justice. But as our online virtual Seder concluded, my thoughts were also on, “Next year, back in our building, together in person.”

The Passover story is a story of political liberation – the story of a people escaping from enslavement in Egypt. Two ideas in the Passover festival have remained unchanging and central. One, it is a celebration of freedom. Passover is known as “The Season of our Liberation.” Two, it is a call to hospitality.

In Exodus, Yahweh alternates between telling Moses what to do, and telling Moses how, in future years, he is to celebrate what he’s now in the middle of doing. As soon as the Israelites get out of Egypt – before Pharaoh’s army comes chasing after them – Exodus 13 relates:

“Today, in the month of Abib, you are going out. You shall keep this observance in this month. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a festival to the Lord. You shall tell your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’”

“You shall tell your child,” it commands. So the Haggadah text to be followed at Seder dinners emerged in order to obey this commandment, this mitzvah, to tell each generation about the liberation.

The two phrases that echo most loudly through the Haggadah are

"In every generation let each one feel as if he or she came forth out of Egypt"

and

“Let any who are hungry come and eat.”

These are interrelated and intertwined.

The human psyche has three basic categories: ME, US, and THEM. US is, roughly, the people who share a culture with me. “Culture” is a fuzzy notion – its borders are vague and constantly shifting – but it is important and powerful nonetheless. Exodus tells about the liberation of an US. As a story initially and primarily told by Jewish people to Jewish people, it’s the story of how WE were enslaved. Physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, or sleep were often inadequately met. Worse, human needs for respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression were systematically and extremely denied – through regular use and constant threat of inflicting great pain and humiliation, typically the lash, applied in a way sometimes punitive and sometimes simply random, though always ostensibly punitive. Another way to say that: sometimes the slave is publicly tortured or executed for something they did, and sometimes just for who they are – and it’s never clear which one a given instance might be. It’s a combination cruelly effective at maintaining tremendous oppression.

It was an utterly miserable existence. That’s the miserable existence WE were stuck in. But WE got out of it. WE, as a people, as an US, achieved political liberation – a system of some modicum, at least, of rights and liberties. It was not at all a democracy, and a read through the books of the prophets illustrates how the Israelites struggled constantly for centuries with issues of oppressing each other. But the oppressors were US now – we shared a bond of culture and of worship -- and their cruelties were less systematic, less extensive, and usually less extreme. So we were free.

(And, I’d like to add: What’s remarkable isn’t that Israelites oppressed each other – for every people of that time did. What’s remarkable is that they actually struggled with it – they had a tradition of prophets, a tradition of calling each other out for abuses of power. The Jewish people invented social justice. They hardly perfected it, and may not have been much better at it than other cultures of the times, but they invented the idea of it -- the idea that there was a standard of social justice to which even the powerful were held. That idea was their tremendous gift to the world.)

When political liberation happens – when a people enjoy some rights and liberties, when physical needs can be met and those human needs -- respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression – are not systematically denied, people become susceptible to different kind of bondage. We are likely to want to guard what we have. We can become, essentially, enslaved to self-protective habits and desires of the moment. Life can come to feel bereft of meaning. The tradition of liberation that begins with political liberation from external oppressors must then turn to personal liberation from our own internal oppressors. When US is no longer oppressed by THEM, ME may still be oppressed by ME-self.

The internal voices of self-protection and of satisfying desires of the moment drown out the voices that want our life to mean something more than its own security and gratification. Thus the Passover Seder tradition, the Haggadah text, addresses this liberation, too. “Let any who are hungry come and eat” is as central a message as “we escaped our enslavement in Egypt.”

To liberate US, we get away from the THEM that oppresses. But then, to liberate ME – that is, liberation from internal voices of self-protection and desire – we must turn toward THEM, turn toward those who are other, turn with an open heart toward those, whatever their culture, who we can help. We make our lives meaningful – liberated from the abyss of meaninglessness – by reaching out to help, to share with, any THEM that is need.

I just used a whole bunch of words to say what I think Rabbi Hillel so beautifully said in 25 words or less:

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”

Hillel’s plaintive question, "What am I? If I am not for others, what am I?" points to the void of meaninglessness of a life solely consumed with self-protection and gratifying the moment’s desires.

Yet another way to say it is that gratitude and generosity are intrinsically linked. The Seder exercise of imagining yourself as personally coming forth out of Egypt is an exercise in gratitude. It fills us with thanksgiving for the freedoms we enjoy. And the concomitant of gratitude – the action that confirms and solidifies and sustains gratitude – is generosity. So the gratitude of escaping slavery very naturally segues into the generosity of “let any who are hungry come and eat.”

I invite you to inspect your own experience here. What does being ungenerous – being stingy – feel like? Whether you notice the stinginess in yourself or in someone else, what is it like? Does it not feel like a kind of ungratefulness? Isn’t the miser necessarily also an ingrate (whether in the form of your own inner miser, or someone else)?

In the story that Tracy’s going to share with us in a few minutes, you’ll notice a movement toward generosity, toward radical hospitality, toward open-heartedness toward THEM who are not US. As you do, notice the feeling of increased liberation, of increased meaning that comes with that turning.

Political liberation without radical hospitality becomes personal enslavement.

[Tracy's story, from UUA's "Tapestry of Faith" set of curricula, is HERE.]

PRAYER

In the midst of this Passover season, sacred in the Jewish tradition, today is Easter, sacred in the Christian tradition. So let us pray:

Dear Light of the World that can pierce the darkness of our world and understanding – piercer of darkness that Christians name Jesus:

We come to this Easter morning in the midst of a pandemic. These are times of uncertainty, fear; lack of food, money; lack of access to basic necessities, healthcare, clean water and sanitation.

Let us remember that for those on the margins, this is their “normal.” Facing conditions of uncertainty and lack has been the daily reality for those with severe disabilities or illness, the migrant, the refugee, the homeless, the poor, the jobless, the voiceless, the powerless, victims of violence, those with mental illness. For many there is the added trauma of grieving the loss of loved ones while separated by ‘social distancing’, quarantine, or lockdown.

Light of the World, illuminate us with loving compassion. Pierce the darkness of our world and understanding.

Many are rediscovering the joy of sharing and the joy of loving those who are our neighbors. We celebrate and give thanks for the kindness of so many. In Italy, the Rainbow in Every Street movement leaves food for those in need. “If you don’t have food, please take. If you have, please give.”

Two Nigerian software engineers fix faulty ventilators for free at the University of Jos teaching hospital.

In Capetown, South Africa, the gangland truce helps provide food instead instead of lethal turf wars.

We rejoice in the inventiveness of so many across the globe trying to solve the critical shortage of medical equipment and personal protective supplies.

Light of the World, heal our selfishness and help us reset our values where every one of us truly looks out for each other. May we come out to the reality of new life for us all. Help us to travel the road to freedom to live in your Light. May we be open to the promptings of compassion.

Amen

HOMILY TWO

The Easter story is also a story of liberation – the story of freedom from the bondage of sin. I know that language, for many of us, evokes a way of thinking that feels alien. Yet we would agree, I think, that we aren’t always our best selves – that heedless pursuit of passing desires can feel like a kind of bondage – and that habits of self-protection can sometimes constrain us from a more fulfilling joy.

Even so, we may well wonder how this is supposed to work: how does a story of a person cruelly executed yet rising from the dead free us from any kind of bondage. One account, prevalent in much of traditional Christianity, is called the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. This is the account of Easter that, somewhere along the line, you probably learned. It goes roughly like this:

The Easter story tells us that Jesus' suffering on the cross is redemptive. He suffered and died that we might have life (i.e., he substituted for us in order to atone for us). In that way, we are freed from bondage to sin.

I don’t think substitutionary atonement is the best way to read the Easter story. The implication of substitionary atonement is that real love manifests as complete submission and self-sacrifice. God required of Jesus -- and may sometimes require of us -- passive acceptance of violence. I think that’s actually a dangerous and harmful interpretation of the Easter story. As I read it, the death from which we may rise, from which we can help others rise, is specifically an entombment in fear and shame.

Crucifixion was designed to inflict optimal physical pain, dragged out over many hours. More than that, crucifixion was designed to humiliate. The person was stripped naked – lifted up to public view, gasping, fully exposed, utterly powerless. At the moment of death, his bowels would loosen, for all to see. Crucifixion was designed to instill fear, and to make anyone associated with the victim feel ashamed of themselves. As Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, write in their book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire:

“Crucifixion was used against the underclasses and slaves and was regarded as so shameful that even victims’ families would not speak of it. It functioned to fragment communities, tearing the fabric of even the strongest bonds of connection and commitment.”

And, as Ron Rolheiser adds, for some of Jesus’ followers, it worked.

“Many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph.”

In their fear and their shame, they fell silent about the promise of a new social order, a Kindom of God. Others, though – women, at first – broke silence. Brock and Parker write:

"The Passion narratives broke silence about the shame and fear that crucifixion instilled. To lament was to claim powers that crucifixion was designed to destroy: dignity, courage, love, creativity, and truth-telling. In telling his story, his community remembered his name and claimed the death-defying power of saying his name aloud....The Passion stories brought testimony before a higher court of appeals than the bogus trial of Jesus they indict. The purpose of such writing is assuredly not to valorize victims, to praise their suffering as redemptive, to reveal ‘true love’ as submission and self-sacrifice, or to say that God requires the passive acceptance of violence. Such interpretations mistakenly answer the abusive use of power with an abnegation of power. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, in marked contrast, asserted that the answer to abusive power is the courageous and decisive employment of the powers of life – to do deeds in Jesus’ name.... To break silence whenever violence is used to shame, instill fear, fragment human community, or suppress those who advocate for justice is life-giving. Just as Jesus, in John’s Gospel, stood before Pilate and said, ‘you have no power over me,’ the Passion narratives defied the power of crucifixion to silence Jesus’ movement. In doing so, they placed before his movement the choice to tell the truth and live by ethical grace. They said life is found in surviving the worst a community can imagine, in lamenting the consequences of imperialism, and in holding fast to the core goodness of this world, blessed by divine justice and abundant life."

Against all violence to body or to spirit, against all fear and shame endured by us and by others, against all the protective strategies we ourselves devise to be safe, there is rising to accept and affirm and speak who we are. There is yet the possibility of transformation into who we are, unobscured by fear or shame. There is yet the possibility of justice, an end to violence, a new social order, a Kindom of God. That’s how I read the Easter story.

But why would that story need to include the part of the story about the empty tomb – the resurrection? One answer is what I've indicated: the resurrection of Jesus is symbolic of resurrection from the psychic death of fear and shame. Another answer is: because it’s important to remember that the dead are not gone. On Easter we remember that the dead do continue to guide us. They do so through conscious memories of them, what they said, and what we may imagine they would say. They also do so in unconscious ways – they continue to influence our individual and collective way of being.

Let me share with you a personal story by way of inviting you to reflect this Easter on your experience of ways the dead rise -- continue to comfort, to guide – ways their love and their wisdom continues somehow to be felt.

I have had three lucid dreams in my life. The first was 40 years ago, and the last was just couple months ago, and is still very vivid for me.“Lucid dream” is a name for the extraordinary experience of being conscious that you are dreaming while you’re in the dream. As you are conscious that you are dreaming, more of your waking brain is functioning. So if something completely crazy happens, your normal dreaming brain casually accepts it as if it were perfectly ordinary, but in a lucid dream you would recognize that things that make no sense, and you can bring more of waking cognitive capacity to the unfolding narrative. In what’s called lucid dreaming, the awake consciousness gets to interact with subconscious stuff in a way that it normally can’t.

In the first two lucid dreams of my life, as soon as I realized I was dreaming, my concern was to wake up. I was like: “This place isn’t real. I don’t want to be in an unreal place. Get me out of here.” I was straining to wake up, but couldn’t – so I felt trapped. In this third one, though, I met my father, and was delighted to have the chance to be with him again.

I was on an academic campus. Nothing unusual there. I grew up on college campuses, as both my parents were professors, and then spent my young adulthood as a grad student and then professor myself. I had left something behind in one of the buildings, and went back in to look for it. In the lobby, there was my Dad.

He said, “I’ll show to your new office.” Now that was a twist, because the narrative up to that point was that I was just visiting this campus, for some conference, say. I didn’t have an office there – or the responsibilities that would go along with that.

It was at that moment that the dream became lucid – that I became aware that this was a dream while I was still having it. My brain went from casually accepting that it was perfectly natural for my father to be standing there to: “Oh, my god! Dad!”

It’s been five years since my father died of Alzheimer’s in January 2015 at the age of 82. Because of the nature of Alzheimer’s, the Dad I knew has actually been gone for a lot longer than that. The man who was standing before me – who was offering to show me to my ‘new office,’ wearing a tie and a tan sport coat with elbow patches – was the version of my father when he was in his early 50s and at the height of his powers. He was smart, he was funny – could be sarcastic sometimes – had a finely tuned sense of irony. God, I've missed him.

So I held out my arms and I said, “Dad! Hold me.” And he did.

Then we were walking down the hall toward this new office, and I said to him, “You’re dead, you know.”

And he answered in that one-eyebrow-raised, ironical way of his, “here and there.”

And then, sadly, I did wake up in my bunk at the monastery. But what a perfect answer that was. Just like my Dad. Yet my conscious brain by itself would never have thought of that.

Death, like life, is always a "here and there" affair – parts of us go and other parts stay.

Some would characterize such a visitation as a projection of the subconscious. Others would say that a spirit from the afterlife broke the veil to communicate with the living. As for me, I don’t see what the difference is. Aren't they the same thing? After all, my subconscious knew the man very well.

The dead are with us. They continue, in ways we often but dimly apprehend, to comfort, to guide, to orient us toward our next “new office” whatever that may be. In such ways the presence of those who are absent calls us to our better self – offers us a nudge toward liberation from pettiness.

He is risen. She is risen. They are risen.

Happy Easter, everyone.

Amen.