by Robert Hardies, senior minister, All Souls Church, Unitarian, Washington D.C.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” This is the question in the gospel of Luke the angels pose to the women at the tomb where they have come to prepare the body of Jesus for final burial. Why do you look for the living among the dead? I mean, here the women had come, carrying all their spices and ointments and linens, only to find when they arrived that the tomb was empty. The angels’ question to them: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” is really a rhetorical question; the angels didn’t expect an answer. It was just their way of saying to the women, “Jesus has risen.”
But this question grabs hold of me. Why do you look for the living among the dead? I want to suggest that for us, the question is not merely rhetorical. We spend much of our lives, like the women at the tomb, searching the places of death, looking for signs of life. Death, in all shapes and sizes, is part and parcel of our living. It is a given. Literal and metaphorical death surrounds us. And so why do we look for the living among the dead? Because we have no other choice but to look for the living among the dead. That’s exactly how we go on living. By finding ways to draw life out of death.
Take James, for instance. It turns out that when he was a teenager, James realized he was gay. He told his parents and they threw him out of the house. With nowhere to go, he ended up on the streets of San Francisco to fend for himself, until one day some folks from Glide Memorial Church, one of the great Civil Rights churches, rescued him.
Someone from Glide picked James up off the streets one day, got him into recovery, and set him on the road to healing. James became very active at Glide, singing in the choir, working in the homeless shelter. He got his education at night and became a fairly successful writer. When I met him he was teaching creative writing at San Francisco State. But just as soon as James got his life back together, the AIDS crisis hit San Francisco, and everyone he loved started to die. He spent the next decade of his life doing nothing but caring for and writing about the dying in San Francisco.
Well, one day when I walked into the café where I got to know James, I noticed a group huddled around his table. Turns out, folks were saying goodbye to him. He was leaving San Francisco. When I asked him why, he said to me, “Rob, there’s just been too much death here for me. I need to be somewhere else now.” I asked him if he ever thought he would return to San Francisco, and James said to me that he’d like to, but “Only when I can find vitality in death.” Only when I can find vitality in death.
I thought about those words for a long time: vitality in death. What vitality could possibly be found in death? I wondered. And then I realized that James must have known what he was talking about, because he had brought life out of a kind of death before. He had gone from being an abandoned child on the streets to a healthy and vital young adult. He knew how to draw life out of death. And I knew that one day he would discover what it would take to do it again. And then, if he wanted to, he’d be able to go back to San Francisco.
Finding the living among the dead is what the Easter story is all about. This is what resurrection is all about. If resurrection were just something that happened to a man from Nazareth some 2000 years ago, the story would have been long forgotten. But resurrection is the story of our lives, too, and that makes the Easter tale one of the greatest dramas ever told. It’s the story of how, when we are lost in despair, we find hope. It’s the story of how we come to what seems like a dead end in our lives, and we discover a new path. It’s the story of how, when death touches our lives, we go on living and finding joy again. Salvaging the living from among the dead. Friends, this is the great search and rescue mission of our lives.
We first get introduced to this mission when we’re children, and we discover that sometimes when we feel bad, things can get better. Slowly, we learn what it takes to make that healing process happen. We mature in this discipline throughout adulthood, as we’re faced, like James, with trials. Hopefully, by the time we near the end of our lives we are more adept at this business of resurrection. By then we’ve had a lot of practice.
I think it’s no accident that Easter is the most crowded Sunday of the year at church. People always joke about coming to church on Easter. They’ll say, “I’m just here because my mother-in-law made me come.” Or because they want a place to go before Easter brunch. Or they didn’t want to break their six-year streak of attending church only on Christmas Eve and Easter. But the real reason we come to church on Easter may be because we know what the message is going to be. It’s the same every year. And we know it’s the most important message of our lives. The message that life can emerge from death. The assurance that hope can be squeezed out of despair. The good news that joy will rise up again like the morning sun over the horizon of our sorrow. We need to be reminded that we can find the living among the dead. That’s why we come to church on Easter.
My colleague Kim Crawford Harvie once shared this story with me. During the 1980s, Kim was the minister of the old Universalist Meeting House in Provincetown, MA.
This was, of course, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. When, Kim reminded me, “we still didn’t know if the disease would get us all.” People were dying all over the place, and the Provincetown church was filled with ghosts. Kim said that five men in her church—all good friends of each other—used to sit together in the front row. She’d see them every Sunday. One Sunday each of them was there. By the next Sunday all five were dead.
One June Sunday in the middle of the epidemic Kim had had a busy day. First there was the Sunday morning service, then a memorial service, then a June wedding on the front lawn. By 6 p.m. Kim was exhausted and ready to go home. But as she walked out of the church that evening a member of her congregation—we’ll call him Ted—came up to her and said: “Hey, Kim, my boat’s at the dock. Let’s go for a ride.” Kim says that part of her wanted to say, “Please, go away.” Part of her thought a boat ride sounded whimsical. And another part of her knew that Ted had already developed Kaposi’s sarcoma and that this could be his last boat ride. So Kim mustered the energy and went.
Together they motored out into Cape Cod Bay where the sun hung orange and low in the Western sky, the early evening light glistening on the protected waters. They went a long way out before Ted slowed the boat and killed the engine. And together, in silence, they looked back over Provincetown, shining in the light. From that distance it must’ve looked just like the old Portuguese fishing village of its founding.
After a long silence, during which they just soaked in the view, Ted said, “You know, Kim, it still matters. Even if one day it kills us all and this town lays empty and desolate, it still matters. It still matters that while we were here we loved each other. And cared for one another. And laughed. It still matters.”
And Kim said, “Yeah. You’re right. It does matter.”
Friends, that’s my message. It does matter. It does matter that we go on living and loving and caring and laughing, even amidst sorrow and death. It matters because life is a precious, irreplaceable gift. It matters because in our choice to go on living we participate in resurrection. In the triumph of life over death.
“I who have died, am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birthday of life and of love and of wings.” So the poet promises, so the Easter story promises, so our lives promise, over and over, as we daily find living in the place of the dead.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any—lifted from the no of all nothing—human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
by e. e. cummings
Is Easter your favorite holiday? One you detest? Does it seem crucial to you, or irrelevant? Are there traditions from your family or culture that give the holiday special meaning?
Write to us at clf@clfuu.org and let us know your thoughts and experiences, and we’ll share them in Quest around Easter time next year.
by Mark Belletini, minister, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Columbus, Ohio
Well, it’s spring at last, and the ancient feast of Easter is upon us.
I know all the hesitations about this day. “It’s just an ancient Celtic spring festival which celebrated the earlier rise of the sun.”“It’s an old agricultural festival that noted that young lambs and other baby animals are born in this season, and that new life rises up to green the earth.”
Personally, I am wary of the purist idea that tries to reduce Easter to some ancient ritual that’s the real Easter, with 1962 years of complex history of the day simply chopped off.
Oh, I know. So many Christians—Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox—have used this day cruelly. They have tainted it with their anti-Semitic pogroms and persecutions. Certainly, for historical reasons the day has lost much of its luster for many. I have sympathy with that.
But despite all the problems, this day still remains my favorite holiday of the whole year. And this, despite the fact that I do not for one minute think this day has to do with the resuscitation of an ancient crucified rabbi.
But then, I am not interested in supporting commonplace misunderstandings. Two words are central to my understanding of my work as a minister. These two words are the literal and the literate.
With all that is in me, I preach against the literal, the foolish notion that the ancient stories are to be understood in an authoritatively shallow and surface way, or else tossed in the garbage can. But at the same time, with my whole ministry I preach on behalf of a literate understanding of our ancient traditions, one respectful of our life experiences, our reason, our passion, and our desire to live a good and honest life.
So with my friend and colleague, Jane Rzepka, “I say this…there is no getting around it. Whatever else Easter may be based on, it’s about Jesus. Whatever agricultural roots it has, it is also based on the memory, however distorted, of how the unexpected and cruel death of an ancient teacher named Yeshu (Jesus) turned the lives of his students upside down.”
Jesus’ death was so unexpected, so devastating, that years later some of his friends could not stop talking about how difficult it had been for them to go on. Their shock and grief were terrible.
Eventually, they began to imagine that the death of their teacher was not a sign of divine displeasure, but just the opposite…that his spirit could not be destroyed just because he was killed. One author, who wrote a letter in the New Testament attributed to Peter, put it this way: “He was slain in the flesh, but rose up in the spirit.”
The imaginative, literate minds of his followers tried at first to explain this transformation of their shock and grief in wonderful, playful ways. They said that after Jesus died, folks began to see him. Well, not him exactly, but folks who they eventually figured out must be him. Mary of Magdala saw a gardener, a common slave, and said, “This must be him.” Two grieving students spent about six hours walking with a stranger one day, having an amazing conversation. Then, during supper in the village of Emmaus, when they ate with this stranger as they used to eat with Jesus, joyfully, they suddenly decided that this must be Jesus.
Over and over, strangers that no one recognized at first, or even for a long time, turned out to “be” Jesus. This kind of playful storytelling is clearly literate, not literal. But after a while, as it so often does, the literal mind took over, and these wonderful experiences of connection with strangers, with different people, turned into a resuscitated Jesus. Within 25 years of Jesus’ death, people would be saying, not that his students came back to life after being devastated, but that Jesus himself came back to life, and quite physically.
But I am convinced that such literalizing of the literate leads nowhere. It deadens the whole wonderful idea of Easter. And “Why,” as the young man at the tomb asks in one of the Easter stories, “would anyone look for what is alive among what is dead?”
For me, to talk of resurrection as a body coming back to life is quite simply deadly and I want nothing to do with it.
But nevertheless, over the years, a few folks continued to tell literate playful stories about Jesus, despite the literalism around them. We hear of one in the sixth century fairy tale about a woman named Veronica. She had seen Jesus, the legend goes, as he carried the beam of his own cross to the execution sight, and was moved to compassion by what she saw…a fellow human being covered in spit and blood, about to be tortured and killed. She broke through the ranks of soldiers, the tale goes, and took off her headscarf, which covered her modesty, and wiped the face of the suffering man. The soldiers brutally pushed her back. The next day, when she unfolded the veil to wash it, she saw a perfect portrait of Jesus imprinted on the veil. This handkerchief with the magic picture, the legend says, was so powerful that Tiberius the Roman Emperor heard about it and sent for it, in order to be healed from his sickness. The woman who wiped the blood off Jesus’ face had a name, we are told, Veronica. But her name only confirms the legendary nature of the story…after all, Vero means true, and icon, despite modern computer usage, still just means picture or image. Vero Icon, a True Picture.
What this legend is telling me, I think, is that a true picture of Easter begins to unfold when I look at the stories of Easter not literally, but literately, that is, with my imagination. I’m speaking of the early stories like that of the gardener in the gospel of John or the supper in the gospel of Luke, which speak not of the dead coming back to life, but of the living actually daring to live for a change. In the story of the gardener, we are told that Mary is a Magdalene—that is, she is a citizen of Magada, a wealthy coastal town very much like West Palm Beach today. She is part of the upper crust of society and clearly comes from a home where there are many slaves in the household. After her teacher dies Mary is understandably grief-stricken. When she sees a gardener working one day, she is rude to him at first, perhaps showing the same crispness she’s used with her household slaves. But when he refuses to be humiliated, she responds by letting her empathy show the true worth of this slave-gardener, who now becomes her teacher. The class system is called into question by her own empathy for this stranger. She doesn’t see Jesus, so much as become him for a moment.
The dinner story is similar. Three people walk along the road to the village of Emmaus; two are grief-stricken, and the stranger who has joined them feels for them, and listens to them and tries to be kind to them in their grief. Suddenly, this stranger no longer is strange, but familiar. They are transformed by this experience, realizing that they can face their grief best by changing their view of the world through their deepening empathy, as exemplified by the stranger. The later legend of Veronica tweaks all those, like Tiberius, who think religion means miracles and magic. The true picture of Easter, after all, is not on the cloth, the story says, but in the woman. Her name is True Picture, after all, Veronica. And what does she do, this true picture? She risks her safety just to do an act of kindness and wipe away the sweat and blood from a condemned stranger’s face.
Let me bring these ancient legends into our own day.
Some while ago a number of Israeli soldiers, 60 of them, in fact, publicly refused to serve in the West Bank or Gaza, on the grounds that the occupation forces there are abusing and humiliating Palestinians. “We all have limits,” said Lt. David Zonshein. “You can be the best officer and suddenly you are asked to do things that should not be asked of you…to shoot people, to stop ambulances, to destroy houses in which you don’t know if there are people living.” Since then, over 500 other military personnel have joined the initial 60.
The empathy of these soldiers is a true picture of Easter. So what if they are Jewish? The metaphor still works. Let me make this even clearer.
The empathy of the people who lost their lives in Selma to insist on justice is a true picture of Easter. The empathy of the citizens of Amsterdam who hid Jewish families during the Second World War is a true picture of Easter. The joint Palestinian and Israeli Women’s Organizations who work together for justice are a true picture of Easter. The Czech Unitarian minister Norbert Capek, who boldly preached against the occupation of the Nazis in his land, is a true picture of Easter. The priest who died in the Trade Tower rubble while ministering to the dying is a true picture of Easter.
The man Jesus died a long time ago, and no longer lives. His poor tortured body was thrown into a pit and is no more. But the Easter event first imagined by his friends in their grief has never stopped. Wherever empathy for the stranger—another gender, another color, another generation, another sexuality, another culture, another way of life, another emotional style, another class, or another size or shape—lives, you will see with your own eyes a true picture of Easter.
by Linda Berez, intern minister, Church of the Larger Fellowship
Erston M. Butterfield of Pleasant Hill, Tennessee sends letters to the Church of the Larger Fellowship that are wonderfully upbeat and hopeful. Here are some excerpts from a couple of recent letters :
Jane and I (see photo) find our living “good and abundant” here in the Elizabeth Fletcher House of “Uplands.” Our little group here is growing and our discussions are both thoughtful and enlightening. What a joy it has been to receive the tapes of both Quest and the UU World! I appreciate this special service for those of us who live with impaired sight. Life and the days of our years are flying by with such rapidity that we can’t even dream what the future may bring to challenge the generations that come after us. Both of us are thankful for the lives and loves of the past and happy in our lives together today. We have seen so much, witnessed such changes, and have been involved in so many advances of the human family that we dare to have high hopes for all the nations and peoples of the earth! Of course, we can’t predict what the dawns of future days may bring, but we are determined to live each day to the full, and accept the destiny that will be ours. The photo tells it all. So, dear ones, rejoice with us in the power of love that makes all life worth living, for such love is the hope of the world.
Jane and I (see photo) find our living “good and abundant” here in the Elizabeth Fletcher House of “Uplands.”
Our little group here is growing and our discussions are both thoughtful and enlightening.
What a joy it has been to receive the tapes of both Quest and the UU World! I appreciate this special service for those of us who live with impaired sight.
Life and the days of our years are flying by with such rapidity that we can’t even dream what the future may bring to challenge the generations that come after us.
Both of us are thankful for the lives and loves of the past and happy in our lives together today. We have seen so much, witnessed such changes, and have been involved in so many advances of the human family that we dare to have high hopes for all the nations and peoples of the earth!
Of course, we can’t predict what the dawns of future days may bring, but we are determined to live each day to the full, and accept the destiny that will be ours. The photo tells it all.
So, dear ones, rejoice with us in the power of love that makes all life worth living, for such love is the hope of the world.
by Jane Rzepka, minister, Church of the Larger Fellowship
One of the religion writers at Newsweek magazine is panic stricken. He has been investigating the latest scholarship about Jesus, and he can’t believe his ears. He’s discovered that the experts believe that the real Jesus was no more the child of God than anyone else. They tell him that Jesus was a Jewish peasant, and probably illiterate. A compelling itinerant preacher and social revolutionary, Jesus challenged Roman rulers and Jewish leaders. He may have been peaceful, but he was clearly outspoken.
How hard it must have been for the Newsweek journalist, Mr. Russell Watson, to hear that Jesus performed no miracles; called for an egalitarian Kingdom of God which would manifest not in Heaven, but in the here and now; and wanted people to experience God directly, unimpeded by hierarchy of temple or state. The scholars would have told Watson that the authorities executed Jesus rather routinely after he caused a disturbance in Jerusalem during Passover, that Jesus did not physically rise from the dead, and that his body was probably buried in a shallow grave.
The Newsweek journalist is utterly bewildered by this description of Jesus: incredulous, horror-struck. He concludes, “If that’s who Jesus was, then every important article of the traditional Christian faith goes out the window—no virgin birth, no divine nature and, most devastating of all, no Resurrection.” This is a “portrait of a Jesus no one ever encountered in Sunday school.”
So I’m reading along there in Newsweek magazine, and I’ve got to tell you, I get a little agitated myself. I’m reading along... “no virgin birth,” “no miracles,” “no Judgment Day,” “no church hierarchy,” “no divine nature,” “no bodily resurrection”—unlike Mr. Watson, I’m doing fine so far. The article goes on, Jesus was a “spell-binding preacher,” a “peaceful” reformer, “accepting” and “loving,” who “lived on in the hearts of followers.” In fact I’m doing great with all this until I hit the very last sentence where he says, “This is a portrait of a Jesus no one ever encountered in Sunday school.”
Excuse me. I did. That’s exactly the Jesus I encountered in Sunday school. Right down the line. We learned all about that Jesus when I was a Unitarian child, just as most Unitarian Universalist children do now: Jesus the teacher, Jesus the reformer, Jesus the source of inspiration—as our old Unitarian Sunday school text book put it in its title, Jesus, the Carpenter’s Son. Copyrighted in 1945, the book, written by Sophia Fahs, one of our greatest religious educators, was used for years and years. It paints exactly the portrait of Jesus that Newsweek claims “no one ever encountered in Sunday school.”
Sophia Fahs is a pretty big deal for liberal religion, not so much for the down-to-earth picture of Jesus she taught, but for her methodology and her respectful attitude toward children. Listen to what she says to our children about Jesus in 1945: “Was Jesus real or was he just a story person? When he was a baby did he know that he was different from all other babies? Could Jesus do anything he wanted to do? Did he die because he wanted to die, or couldn’t he help being killed? Why do some people say he is ‘the Son of God’? Does God have only one son? These are questions some boys and girls have asked. They have felt confused.”
She goes on to encourage children to put their ideas and questions about Jesus into words, to accept only what makes sense to them about Jesus and the Bible, and to “take responsibility for their own thoughts.” “You need to be prepared to question [the stories]. Keep your minds awake. Ask yourselves: Could this have happened? Read for yourselves the verses in the gospel records. Use your own imaginations. Bring [Jesus] to life, as it were, in your imagination, so that you will be emotionally stirred as you surely would have been had you actually seen and heard him.”
Sophia Fahs would be happy to know that she is not alone in approaching the question of Jesus in this spirit; increasingly in mainline Christian denominations, scholars do too.
It’s a funny thing about scholarship. I always thought that you take a subject, Jesus in this case, you learn more and more, and after years of research, ta-da, you have a fairly complete picture—at least you know a whole lot more about him than when you began. But when studying Jesus, the opposite is true. As Robert Funk points out in his Honest to Jesus, you think you know the general story of Jesus to begin with, but the more you investigate, the more you discover that a lot of what you thought you knew isn’t true, and that the amount of information we can really document about Jesus’ life gets smaller and smaller as we learn more. As your body of knowledge increases, you find more and more discrepancies between the Jesus portrayed in Bible stories and the actual historical Jesus.
Here’s what happens. You read the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and you notice that they include not one unified account of Jesus’ life but four different interpretations—that’s how John Dominic Crossan describes the process in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. Then you read further accounts in other gospels that have been recently discerned as sources, such as the so-called “Q Gospel,” and you read those gospels that have been found that were not included in the Bible, The Gospel of Thomas, for example, found in Upper Egypt in 1945. Then you study cross-cultural anthropology, and then Greco-Roman and Jewish history at the time of Jesus. And instead of lots of new information with which to bolster the stories of the typical picture of Jesus, you are left with a short list of information—the “no-frills Jesus,” as it was described in the Atlantic some years back.
To wit: most critical scholars agree that Jesus' home-town was Nazareth, and he was probably born there as well, contrary to later legends that assign his birth to Bethlehem to satisfy an ancient prophecy. His mother's name was Mary. Jesus had four brothers, and he may also have had some sisters.
His native tongue was Aramaic. We do not know whether Jesus could read and write. We do not know whether or not Jesus knew Hebrew. There is now evidence that suggests he may have been bilingual; Greek was probably his second language, learned from the pagan environment that surrounded him in Galilee. We do not know how long his public career lasted, but the narrative gospels imply a relatively short period, from one to three years.
In Honest to Jesus, Funk says that Jesus had “no permanent address, no bed to sleep in, and no respect on his home turf. He did not ask disciples to convert the world and establish a church. Unlike John the Baptist, he did not believe the world was going to end immediately, he did not even call on people to repent, and he did not practice baptism. He may have eaten a last meal with the inner circle of his followers, but he did not initiate what we know as the Eucharist.”
When I read along in this vein, I have this little nagging voice in the back of my mind asking, “Yes, this Jesus scholarship is fun, but is it important? Does it really matter?” As one generous scholar, Marcus Borg, notes, “There are millions of people for whom the older image of Jesus still works. And they have absolutely no need to pay any attention to us.”
Why would it matter that the real Jesus didn’t baptize, if baptism offers comfort or renewal to modern day folks? Who cares if the resurrection was a fabrication born of grief, political necessity, or blind faith, if it serves a hopeful function in society today? Why rain on the parade of people who believe Jesus looked like them and spoke English (the King James Version in fact), and smelled good, and didn’t drink, and advocated traditional American upscale family life in the suburbs?
The daily newspaper gave me an answer to my questions. There was a news story a while back about a play in New Jersey, the Passion Play about Jesus’ last days, where, for the first time in the theater’s 82 year run, a black man had been cast as Jesus.
Five tour groups canceled their reservations. Others wanted to reschedule for performances when a white actor played Jesus. After a couple of vague death threats were phoned into the theater, two church schools canceled out of fear for the safety of their students.
This story of racism is horrifying, that goes without saying. But it is born in part of ignorance. Why in the world do potential members of the audience think that Jesus, a resident of the Middle East, would look like white people in New Jersey?!
Knowledge, learning, the study of the historical Jesus would have helped here. Knowing the facts of Jesus’ life would have stopped the appropriation of Jesus by those who use him to promote values thoroughly at odds with what he really stood for.
One of the recent scholarly perspectives on Jesus is that he was a social deviant of the sort we’d do well to emulate, who fully accepted his fellow human beings, no matter how disreputable or marginal they seemed in the eyes of society. We are acquiring a deeper awareness that Jesus “kept an open table,” that is to say, again according to Funk, that “he ate promiscuously with sinners, toll collectors, prostitutes, lepers, and other social misfits and quarantined people.” He robbed humankind of all “protections and privileges, entitlements and ethnicities that segregate human beings into categories.”
Peter Gomes, who wrote The Good Book, goes a little further when he says that inclusion can legitimately be claimed “by the poor, persons of color, gays, lesbians and transgender people, women, and all persons beyond the conventional definitions of Western civilization.” When we study the record, when we learn what there is to learn about the historical Jesus, and model ourselves after what’s best in his teachings, every Christian, and any of us here who choose to follow the example of Jesus, will see the value of an open table.
Studying the historical Jesus is not only academically interesting, but also socially and religiously responsible for all of us who live in Western culture. When a neighbor claims that the Jesus cast in the Passion play needs to be white, we can state our case. And when Jesus is held up as a spokesperson for reactionary so-called “family values,” or for the exclusion of non-Christians, or gay people, or people of color, or any group at all, we’ll know to shout in protest; we’ll fight for that open table.
In the words of Robert Funk, “The Jesus of that alternative world encourages me to celebrate life, to suck the marrow out of existence, to explore, and probe, and experiment, to venture into uncharted seas.... He does not set limits on my curiosity, on my drive to challenge every axiom. That same Jesus prompts me to give myself to tasks that exceed, even contradict, my own self-interest. I am not infrequently startled at the tasks I find myself willing to undertake.”
Come to think of it, I learned all that in Sunday school.
by Lynn Ungar, cyberminister for lifespan religious education, Church of the Larger Fellowship
(This column is designed for the use of children—either for older kids to read themselves, or for parents to read to younger kids.)
What is your favorite thing about Easter? Personally, I’ve always been fond of chocolate Easter bunnies—dark chocolate, and solid, not the ones that are hollow inside—and those speckled candy eggs with crunchy malt balls inside. But did you ever wonder about what bunnies and eggs have to do with a Christian holiday about Jesus rising from the dead? It is a strange combination, but if you go back far enough, there’s some logic to it.
The Christian Easter story tells of the last days of Jesus, who had been traveling in the Middle Eastern country of Judea with his friends and students (known as the apostles), teaching and telling stories. Jesus’ message of love for all people and justice for the poor spoke to many, and he had an increasing number of followers. However, government leaders worried when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of God.” Jesus emphasized the equality of all people, and focused on love rather than following the long list of rules that were so important to the leaders of the time. These people worried that Jesus was going to lead a rebellion against the government—and other people, who were hoping for a revolution, were disappointed in Jesus because he wasn’t leading them into war!
The story goes that one of Jesus’ apostles turned him in to the government, and Jesus was killed in a horrible way because the government thought he was a traitor. Of course, Jesus’ friends were torn up inside at the loss of their beloved teacher. After his body was taken down from the wooden cross where he was tortured and killed, they placed it in a cave, and rolled a huge stone across the front. Three days later, women who had been companions of Jesus came to wash the body and prepare it for final burial. But, the story goes, when they got to the cave, the stone was rolled away and the body was gone. Later that day, as two of the apostles were walking and talking about everything that had happened, they met up with a man who walked with them and ate with them. According to Luke, who tells the story, when they ate together, they decided all of a sudden that the stranger they were talking with was actually Jesus! Jesus, Luke says, then appeared to the rest of the apostles and taught them one more time before “he blessed them [and] parted from them.”
Unlike some more traditional Christians, most Unitarian Universalists don’t believe that Jesus actually came back to life and went walking around in his body that had been dead. However, the idea that something that feels dead and gone can come back to life in a new way is important to people everywhere. When you remember the words of someone you loved who has died, and you keep learning from what they taught you, then, in a way, they are still alive within you. When a task, like a hard math problem or learning to ride a skateboard, seems too hard and you give up, then it can feel like something has died inside of you. But then, when something clicks and all of a sudden you get it, it feels like that part of you has come alive again. During the winter, in most parts of the world, the trees lose their leaves and flowers die back to the ground. Then, come spring, the plants that looked dead come back to life again.
For thousands of years, people around the world have celebrated this idea that life comes again after things looked like they were dead. Ancient Europeans believed in a goddess called Ostara or Eastre who was the spring goddess of new life and growing things. Eggs, which look like non-living stones until they hatch out chicks, and rabbits, well known for making lots of little rabbits, were sacred to her. When Christians came to Europe and wanted the people there to convert to Christianity, they added the ancient spring traditions involving coloring eggs and sharing sweet buns into their celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. It made sense to everyone involved because both the Christian story and the ancient story of Eastre have to do with new life coming out of seeming death.
Are there friendships that are springing to new life for you? Skills that you’ve learned that you thought would never come alive? Sad memories that you’ve come to look at in a new way? New leaves or flowers where before there was only dirt or dead-looking sticks? This Easter, celebrate all the ways that life carries on and grows and changes.
Make sure you don’t miss KidTalk, CLF’s web page designed just for children. Kids and parents can access the site, which changes monthly and is regularly monitored by CLF staff members, by clicking on the KidTalk icon at www.clfuu.org. KidTalk provides resources for celebrating holidays from around the world, introduces kids to historical Unitarian Universalists, and includes a monthly suggestion for a social justice or social service project. Children are invited to ask questions of CLiF, our CLF mascot, who will post answers under the supervision of Rev. Lynn Ungar, our CLF cyberminister for lifespan religious education. Children are also encouraged to listen and talk to one another on the “KidTalk blogspot.”
In the tomb of the soul, we carry secret yearnings, pains, frustrations, loneliness, fears, regrets, worries.
In the tomb of the soul, we take refuge from the world and its heaviness.
In the tomb of the soul, we wrap ourselves in the security of darkness.
Sometimes, this is a comfort. Sometimes it is an escape.
Sometimes it prepares us for experience. Sometimes it insulates us from life.
Sometimes this tomb-life gives us time to feel the pain of the world and reach out to heal others.
Sometimes it numbs us and locks us up with our own concerns.
In this season where light and dark balance the day, we seek balance for ourselves.
Grateful for the darkness that has nourished us, we push away the stone and invite the light to awaken us to the possibilities within us and among us—possibilities for new life in ourselves and in our world.
by Sarah York, interim senior minister, Eno River Unitarian Universalsist Fellowship, Durham, North Carolina. “Rolling Away the Stone” first appeared in Into the Wilderness, the 1990 UUA meditation manual, published by Skinner House, and available through the CLF library (www.clfuu.org/library).
...that the CLF has chalice jewelry for sale? The perfect gift for Coming of Age, graduations, and more is online at www.clfuu.org, click on Gift Shop, or call the office to place an order or get a brochure.
Last updated June 12, 2005
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823 Phone: (617) 948-6166 · Fax: (617) 523-4123 · E-mail: clf@clfuu.org
