Which Story? (Easter 2010)
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
Every year it comes back to me. Easter is a strange holiday. Growing up in a household in which the Christian story was uncomfortable background noise to a day that was about new clothes (down to the knickers!), bunnies and chicks, egg hunts and candy, I have never quite escaped my sense that this is an odd sort of celebration.
It is widely understood as the critical event in the Christian calendar, the event upon which faith is most deeply founded: that God’s son was born into the world, was brutally executed and then rose from the dead as a substitute sacrifice for the sins of the world. In the context of the ancient world in which this story arose, this story wasn’t anything unusual. There were plenty of stories of gods who were murdered and whose blood was a sacrifice for the people. To modern ears, though, it sounds gruesome, perhaps even vampire-like. In spite of this, through this week people have been in prayer and worship and this morning, all around the world, people are going into churches to celebrate Easter, affirming their faith that the death and resurrection of Jesus two millennia ago have saved them from the sin that would commit them to an eternity of damnation.
When I am able to come to this story open to what it might offer, and when I can entertain this interpretation, I find that there is something deeply moving and comforting about it. That the powers that rule the universe came together to bring to birth a special one, who came into the world in order to redeem all the wrong that I have done, to redeem the wrong that is somehow threaded through human existence – well, it allows my shoulders to relax, allows me to faint down in thanks that it might be so. It makes me catch my breath to simply imagine that the hate and anger that have lived in me, that the failings – some of them so deep, some so deep – are somehow forgiven, made whole. It makes me catch my breath.
And yet it is not – and likely never will be – my story, the one that I turn to when I need to know something about the world and my place in it.
It is fascinating to consider here on this Easter day what has come down the ages as the central story for Christianity. In any story, there are details that one can include or exclude. What colour was the dress that the fairy princess was wearing, and was there any rust on the armour that the prince wore whilst slaying the dragon? Were the dragon scales iridescent or a single colour? How did the lemon smell when the old woman squeezed it into the potion that she gave to the prince to give him courage before he left the village. In any story, there are thousands of details that can be told or not, that can be lifted up or left unsaid. So why were these particular details included, and why have they come to have the prominence that they do? Why is it that we stop in this season on this day to remember these particular events?
We know some of those reasons. The Christians took over some of the ancient pagan rituals that occurred at this time of year, rituals that celebrated the rebirth of the earth in spring, rituals of fertility and fecundity. That’s why we have rabbits and eggs all over. Some of the decisions for inclusion of this bit or that had to do with the various agendas of the people who put together the Gospels, the editors who very often relied upon other, older texts, themselves adopting or leaving out some of what happened. And there’s the political realities of the times when the canon, the officially sanctioned works, were agreed.
However it has come about, this holiday – and indeed Christianity as it is most widely understood here and around the world – lifts up the religion that is about Jesus. When the creed is recited it doesn’t direct the faithful to loving each other and loving God who is one, as Jesus taught in our reading this morning, but instead claims belief in the events of his miracle birth, his brutal death, and his resurrection. In a similar way, fundamentalism as it is understood in the United States (and increasingly around the world) affirms 5 proclamations that centre on the same ideas: the virgin birth, inerrancy of the bible, substitutionary atonement, the deity of Jesus, the resurrection and the historical reality of the miracles he performed. The religion at its centre isn’t about the radical things he said, it isn’t about his works of mercy and calls to justice, it isn’t about his announcement that the kingdom of God is here among us. It is about a belief in a God who makes extraordinary things happen.
While I do find that I am moved by that story as I said at the beginning, and moved deeply by the image of the resurrection and the resonances it can have in our own lives – who among us hasn’t known at some moment that feeling of a stone being moved away and life being reborn in our own hearts? – while I am, indeed, deeply moved by the story and the image of the resurrection, it is not for me what is most important about Jesus.
Last week, a tweet by an American comedian called John Fugelsang went viral over both Twitter and Facebook, at least it did among people I know. He said: “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus." That short phrase lifts up what for me is the true centre of Christianity: the religion OF Jesus. The focus, it seems to me, should always be not upon what was supernatural – how he went outside the natural world – but on the stunning, fresh, world changing ideas that he preached. The focus should be what he told the people around him. The focus should be on the ministry he offered, not on his birth and death.
Antonio Machado describes this in a poem. He says:
I love Jesus, who said to us:
heaven and earth will pass away.
When heaven and earth have passed away,
my word will still remain.
What was your word, Jesus?
Love? Forgiveness? Affection?
All your words were
one word: Wakeup.
What it comes down to in the end, I think, is a question of what it is that we have to do to be saved. What do we have to do to be saved?
One answer, the one offered by more orthodox Christians is to believe in this Jesus as God who was born and executed and rose from the dead in order to give us all eternal life in heaven.
Another answer is that the salvation that is most meaningful isn’t the promise of eternal life, but a salvation that comes from living a life that is worthy. It is the salvation that comes from seeking, too, to embody the religion that Jesus lived: loving God with heart and mind and spirit, loving others in this world, practising kindness, tending to those who are excluded, helping the oppressed. The single prayer that Jesus taught speaks of honouring the powers of the universe, asking for what is most needful, and offering forgiveness. We could do a whole lot worse than trying to live into that prayer.
In my own selection of the details of the story of Jesus, I am most drawn to this manner of salvation: salvation that arrives not at the end with the trumpeting of angels and the welcome into God’s presence, but salvation that is a life long enterprise. I look for it everywhere:
salvation that lives within the cloth of my daily life,
salvation that comes from an awareness of ultimate things,
salvation in the attention I pay to the small moments,
salvation in the offering of forgiveness,
salvation in the creation of peace, for myself or for my world.
salvation that comes from the living of a life that is worthy,
that embodies compassion,
that seeks the good,
that loves without end.
And lest this salvation seem too big to accomplish – as it indeed is – then the final salvation will be remembering that finally we are saved not by what we are able to do, not saved by our works, but by our faithfulness to what we believe most deeply to be true. The poet reminds us that we will never be able to do it entirely:
And if the world were black and white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely. (Louis MacNeice)
So today in the midst of this holiday, this day of new life being born, of resurrections and fertility, let us say our own alleluia, praising the promise that life holds for us, and committing again to our own rebirth as it comes in the days we live, each morning a new start, each moment an opportunity to offer our love, each breath a chance for peace, each step that carries us along a path worth following. Let us say an alleluia.
Amen.