Happy Error (Felix Culpa)
AN EASTER SUNDAY SERMON BY REV LINDA HART
Barbara Kingsolver notes in one of her early collections of essays that she is prone to be kidnapped by any random bookshelf. On her way to retrieve something from her study, or to get her diary from where it sits next to the phone, a book will catch her eye. She’ll stop, pull that book out and then another and another and soon she has lost hours of time doing something that she didn’t intend, but loving what she has found.
A similar thing happens to me sometimes, though it is more likely to be on the internet these days as on my bookshelves. It happened, in fact, when I began work on this sermon a month or more ago. I found a poem, you see, called ‘Easter Exultet’, and I liked it straightaway. It is a call to us on this Easter Sunday to come alive again:
Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
James Broughton, the poet, offers us even more encouragement, if we might need it:
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
This is a declaration of the possibility of life in the midst of what has become dead, a call to us to be awake, to dare, to dance and run and leap, even if it is only metaphorically.
But I wondered what an Exultet was having never heard the word before, and I knew that if I didn’t know, someone would ask me, and so I needed to find out. A little poking around and I found some information. The Exultet is a prayer that traditionally is sung as a part of a more orthodox Easter liturgy, after the procession and before the formal Liturgy of the Word begins. It is an exuberant prayer filled with joy, calling on the faithful to rejoice, to sing of the glory of the morning, and the gift of life given. It recounts the first time a lamb was killed to protect God’s people – that is, the Passover lamb that the Jews killed so that they could mark their doors and be exempt from the death of the firstborns, the most horrific of tragedies that God sent to the Egyptians before the Jews were freed.
And it then goes on to tell the story of this week of Jesus’s life: the Passover meal, the arrest, the darkness and death and resurrection, and again it calls us to be joyful.
But there in the midst of all of this happiness – a part of it really – there is this line that stopped me in my tracks:
O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!
‘Felix culpa’ in the Latin, it is in some convoluted way giving thanks for the fall from grace that we might be saved by Jesus. I’ve heard some echoes of this notion, but never seen it quite so explicitly stated. Centuries after this part of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church was instituted, Martin Luther himself wrote that we ought to ‘Sin boldly!’ a direction that we used to repeat to each other often and enthusiastically when I was in training for ministry. Loving this invitation to run amok, we often neglected to add the rest of his advice: Sin boldly, he told the generations, that grace may abound.
Do you see what I mean about getting kidnapped and finding yourself in a place you hadn’t imagined? Here am I - a post-modern, liberal religionist, fan of the teachings of Jesus but tilting toward the humanist, Unitarian - entering the murky waters of original sin and redemption and happy fault, felix culpa.
But I’ve always known that the most potent of holidays take us all to places we didn’t expect to go. When we listen carefully, we always hear something about what it means to be human that we had forgotten or that had never quite been clear in that same way before, at least that‘s true for me. No matter if it is the Days of Awe for the Jews or Ramadan or the Hadj for a Muslim, Easter for a Christian or any one of the pagan festivals; each speaks to some element of our lives, our experience, that points us towards the holy, towards something that is true.
I hasten to add that not all of them are the same. Religions carry some universal sparks, I think, but they are each their own particular, peculiar way of being in the world. Each gives us something different.
And I’ve spent a month pondering this notion of the happy fault, the happy error, the moment of gratitude for the cause of human suffering and struggle in the world, at least according to some of the interpretations of Christian theology. As I said, it stops me in my tracks, and perhaps it does you, too. It has nearly a sadistic feel to it: to cause pain so that when it stops we can feel grateful. I’m not sure that I want to worship a God who sets this all in motion, who has arranged the universe in such a way that we must suffer, and find relief only in the torture and suffering of another being.
And yet, there is something about it that is profoundly right, too. Because we all know that life isn’t easy. And we human beings are flawed and difficult at moments. Not meaning to, we fail at what we know is best and true. Our loving falters, our intentions get lost in the midst of other worries, we lash out in anger, we hurt those who don’t deserve it. This flesh can fail, will fail. Death is a companion to us all, loss is woven into the fabric of the world. And time continues its march, demanding that we ever continue on and yet not leave behind what has been, but carry it with us.
This is what it means to be human. This vulnerable, incomplete, mortal existence is what it means to be human. It is not, I would argue, a flaw in our creation so much as the central truth. It’s not an error, but simply the way that we are made, not because of an angry or capricious God, but because we are part of a creation that shares in that same central truth of vulnerability, incompletion, mortality. It is threaded through all of existence.
This is, then, not a curse, this reality is not to be disparaged. Woven in with this central reality is its twin, well described by Rebecca Blagget in her poem:
I want to tell you that the world
is still beautiful.
I tell you. . .
Despite my own terror and despair.
Yes.
Remember, she tells us, that
spring
is no small thing, that
the tender grasses curling
like a baby’s fine hairs around
your fingers are a recurring miracle.
The beauty of the world, the intensity of love, the power of attention all come from this same reality. Were we not vulnerable, the sweetness of life would be diminished, our mortality means that life is precious and not to be wasted, and we are well served by really seeing it all unfold, not hiding from either the terror or the beauty.
As the Exultet is sung in churches all over the world today, I don’t think that I can quite join in the song. I won’t call our nature in error, a mistake, a fault, a flaw. But I will join in the song to proclaim that transformation is possible, that love can win out, that ‘a great and common tenderness' is possible. I will sing with the poet his ongoing song:
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
On this Easter morning, may we all sing the song.
So may it be. Amen.
Prayer
God of all things,
thou who formed each
speck;
Breath of Life,
thou who infuses
vulnerable matter with
awareness and spirit,
we are here again
on an Easter morning.
We are no longer startled
by an empty tomb,
by reports of the dead rising,
the story becomes worn,
an ordinary tale, stripped
of its power by its familiarity.
Yet, on this Easter morning,
we know once more,
that life springs where death has been,
that the promise of a resurrection is
not empty,
not ordinary,
not without the power
to transform.
All of creation is incomplete,
there is brokeness, loss, despair
terror,
and woven throughout there is
love, beauty, joy,
not always in equal measure.
God of all things,
thou Breath of Life,
may we know this day
the power of transformation,
and have the gift of eyes to see the whole of
your creation and rejoice, yes,
rejoice in it all.
Amen and alleluia.