Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Easter Courage”
Rev. Rod Debs
April 12, 2009

 

Story for All Ages: “What do you say about Jesus?”

 

When I was little, I heard a lot of stories about Jesus. I heard several different stories about his birth atChristmas: the story about angels and shepherds, the story about wise men following a star, stories about an angel speaking to Mary in a dream and an angel speaking to Joseph in a dream.

 

The Bible has 65 or 70 little books in it and four are about Jesus. Each book tells stories about Jesus differently. There were other stories in other books about Jesus. The original little books about Jesus were lost. Today we have different copies of them, each telling stories about Jesus a little bit differently.

 

There are stories about Jesus doing impossible things,miracles: like walking on water, changing water into grape juice, healing people who were sick or blind or couldn’t walk. One story says that Jesus raised people from the dead.

 

Some people say that Jesus was killed by Roman soldiers on a cross, and we think that probably really happened because the Roman soldiers killed a lot of people on crosses. Some stories say that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning. There are stories that say he floated away into the sky, into heaven.

 

The stories I like best are the stories about how Jesus was kind and loving to everyone. He even said to love our enemies and to give to the poor. Those are my favorite stories about Jesus.

 

Some of your friends at school might ask if you believe in Jesus. Some people believe that Jesus did miracles and rose from the dead on Easter morning. That’s what they believe about Jesus. Other people believe that Jesus taught loving kindness to everyone, especially the poor and outcasts. That’s what I believe about Jesus.

 

Long before Jesus was born and anybody saying he rose from the dead, Easter was celebrated inspringtime when flowers came back to life, and baby animals were born. Easter rabbits and Easter eggs are a sign of new life. Today, I have a treat for you. Here’s a young dwarf lop rabbit who is seven weeks old and just left his mother. Here are two tiny rabbit kits that were born last Sunday. I’ll keep them snuggly until I can return them to their mother.

 

Easter is the time we celebrate rebirth of life all around us. It’s about new hope for the future. Happy Easter.

 

Message: Henri Nouwen writes: “Have you ever seen a tree actually grow? Can you see a child grow? Growth is too gentle, too tender. Life is basically hidden…. If you are committed to always saying yes to life, you are going to have to become a person who chooses it when it is hidden.” (“Fragile and Hidden” inThe Impossible Will Take a Little Time by Paul Rogat Loeb, 2004)

 

The growth of trees and children is gentle, tender and hidden. Destruction is blatant. It’s in your face.Sometimes it’s cumulative, like global warming with symptoms multiplying with time. And at the same time, life is an incredible gift. Each moment brings gift after gift. Do I need to list life’s gifts in words? As if wordscould recreate the joy and healing that life gently and tenderly bestows moment by moment. Gracious life is more hidden and more real than any words. Wendell Berry writes:

 

“When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron fees. / I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief. I come into the presence of still water. / And I feel above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their light. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” (Collected Poems: 1957-1982, 1987)

 

Easter is about the rebirth of hope—Spring is about rebirth of hope: Though winter’s death and destruction seems to be so cruel, green sprouts, blossoms and sweet-smelling, gorgeous flowers, nesting birds, eggs hatching with peeps, birthing mammals suckling, sunlight and warm breezes appear, and hope is reborn.

 

Forrest Church wrote: “Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” How do we deal with the cruel realities of suffering and dying in the midst of life’s graces? Where do we find hope?

 

There seem to be two Easter messages of hope and courage: Western Christendom, now spreading world-wide, offers a theology of the cross and resurrection. A Catholic priest in Iowa, climbing into his van after a clergy meeting said to me: When people experience overwhelming suffering, the greater suffering of Jesus on the cross gives them comfort. Jesus knows their suffering. He shares their pain.

 

There are all kinds of reasons given for suffering: as correction, purification, penance. But in the end, reason doesn’t matter. Feelings of meaningless suffering fade in contemplation of Christ’s passion, his innocent suffering. By accepting suffering, by taking up ones own cross and following Jesus’ compassionate ethic nonetheless, Christians are able to persist in the face of injustice and cruelty. To be like Christ is to share in his suffering.

 

Our exchange student from Ukraine, Ivanna Koziy brought a gift to me from her country. I learned that, for all the Russian men who died in WW II, more died in Ukraine where the fighting largely took place. I think of the sufferings of the Eastern Orthodox people when I look at this gift, an icon of Madonna and Child and of The Christ. One evening at dusk, sitting at my Buddhist altar, a bit cluttered with other religious symbols, though everything around was dull and lifeless, the gold of the icons glowed. When life’s light grew dim, the icons were beautiful still. To many people, the passion of Christ brings such meaning to the meaninglessness of suffering.

 

Christianity can be exclusive. Some use Scripture to reject other sources of meaning. In I Corinthians 15.14 we read: “If Christ was not raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your trust in God is useless.” Rather than finding hope for the world in Jesus’ ethic of loving-kindness and generosity toward all beings, some of his followers found hope only by claiming he came back to physical life—and that bodily resurrection is our only, useful hope. Jesus’ example and call to create loving community is replaced by the death and resurrection message of his followers.

 

Perhaps after the Roman massacre and destruction of Jerusalem, the call to share in Christ’s suffering with the promise of bodily resurrection was meaningful. As my Catholic colleague pointed out, everyone knows suffering. Everyone needs some kind of hope. But the preaching of Jesus’ followers, that hope is only to be found in sharing the passion of Christ, in suffering, death and resurrection—well, that’s not the message Jesus seems to have been preaching himself, the message of loving community.

 

The growth of loving community takes time. It’s like the growth of a plant or of a child. It seems hidden until blossoms burst into flower, eggs crack open and the newborn announces itself with that tender cry. The growth of loving community grows from unseen influences. A single person’s act of conviction, can be traced to have had unforeseen influence. Paul Loeb writes:

 

“In the early 1960s, a friend of mine named Lisa took two of her kids to a Washington, D.C., vigil in front of the White House protesting nuclear testing. The demonstration was small, a hundred women at most.Rain poured down. The women felt frustrated and powerless. A few years later, the movement against testing had grown dramatically, and Lisa attended a major march. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, spoke. He described how he’d come to take a stand, which because of his stature had already influenced thousands, and would reach far more when he challenged the Vietnam War. Spock talked briefly about the issues, then mentioned that when he was in D.C. a few years earlier he saw a small group of women huddled, with their kids, in the rain. It was Lisa’s group. `I thought that if those women were out there,’ he said, `their cause must be really important.’” (The Impossible Will Take a Little While, p.7)

 

That’s how loving community grows. Spiritual growth and inspiration grow in sometimes hidden ways, as Unitarian Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Plant the seed of hope and caring, and leave the garden to God.”Marian Wright Edelman of The Children’s Defense Fund writes: “Many dismissed him as a crank or a social deviant. But Leo Tolstoy read Thoreau’s essay `Civil Disobedience’; Gandhi learned about it from Tolstoy; Martin Luther King, Jr., read Gandhi; and the civil rights movement made history. Don’t be afraid to be a voice in the wilderness for children and the poor. It’s the moral and sensible thing to do.”(“Standing Up for Children” in The Impossible Will Take a Little While,p.42)

 

Although Marian Wright Edelman didn’t trace advocacy for children and the poor to Jesus’ message of loving community that includes everyone, especially the outcast and the poor, we know that Thoreau was nurtured in Jesus’ ethic: “`Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’”(Matthew 25.40, RSV)

 

I find a book by Paul Loeb to be very encouraging. The title of the book comes from a song lyric by Billie Holiday that became the WWII motto of the Army Corp of Engineers: “The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.” The Impossible Will Take a Little While (2004) is the title of his book.Growth, constructive growth of gardens and of community takes a little while. It’s not like resurrection or the promised rapture in the twinkling of an eye when the last trumpet sounds. It’s like the sprouting of a seed and the growing of a child.

 

Paul Loeb writes about hope: “Nothing buoys the spirit and fosters hope like the knowledge that others faced equal or greater challenges in the past and continued on to bequeath us a better world.” (Ibid., p.6) That is why he quotes Unitarian Victoria Stafford who advises us to“plant ourselves at the gates of hope” no matter what the circumstances, because it is “with our lives we make our answers all the time, to this ravenous, beautiful, mutilated, gorgeous world.” (Ibid., p.9) This is the witness of Jesus and all the prophets of every faith.

 

Hope is not optimism, positive expectation based upon reason and evidence. Vaclav Havel writes: “Hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” (Ibid., p.82) Hope is based upon faith, upon spiritual conviction that it is good and right and worthy of commitment.

 

Paul Loeb asks: Why do some people lose faith, why do some give up on life, on love, on a better day, and others do not? The difference between hope and despair is based on two things: 1) the feeling that we have options—have influence, and 2) the ability to savor the abundance of the world, life’s grace and gifts.

 

Our spiritual courage, our faith is rooted in the witness of thousands, “a community of like-minded souls stretching across the globe and extending backward and forward in time”… “many people taking small steps together over a long period of time.” (Ibid., p.5) Many forgotten, their hidden influences unknown. And we are called to join the cloud of witnesses, to exercise our options, our small influence in building a better world.

 

And our spiritual courage, our faith to hope is based on the gifts of life graciously renewed with spring, with each morning light, with each breath. Hope of Easter.

Rose Marie Berger writes: “I stare out the window and daydream when I’m desperate…. `Life shouldn’t be this hard,’ I think…. After some time staring at my mind-mud, I turn to the window. I watch butterflies and wonder about color variations on peaches.” (Ibid., p.111-2)

 

I don’t believe in wordy prayers anymore. I believe in breathing: whether daydreaming in my chair or waiting in line or standing on my back deck or walking the dog. I practice respecting others’ efforts, both the bumbling and the efficiently misdirected, as are my own, sometimes. Call it Buddhist meditation or wasting time, such attentiveness and longing for a better world are the Sabbath we need to renew our faith—faith that life is gracious and surprising and gives many good gifts.

 

“Have you ever seen a tree actually grow? Can you see a child grow? Growth is too gentle, too tender. Life is basically hidden…. If you are committed to always saying yes to life, you are going to have to become a person who chooses it when it is hidden.” (“Fragile and Hidden” in The Impossible Will Take a Little Time by Paul Rogat Loeb, 2004)

May our faith be renewed in this community of conviction and by opening to life’s grace. May have hope, courage to influence, to change the world.