Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018
About a year ago, maybe even longer, some of my clergy colleagues began raising an alarm. It seemed that Easter this year was going to take place on April 1: on April Fool’s Day. This was greeted with some consternation. Easter Sunday is challenging for Unitarian Universalists as it is: we aren’t entirely sure what to do with the ancient story that has come down to us. We tend to seek the rational. We want to define and to explain. And nothing about Easter is rational, or can be explained as fact; it is a day of layers of mystery, of wonder, of faith. It can make some of us very uncomfortable. On top of that, add April Fool’s Day into the mix, and it creates one more layer for us to explore, to make sense of.
And yet, the more and more I thought about this, the more that it seems absolutely perfect to have Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day coincide.
For one thing, let’s think for a moment about the version of the Easter story that we heard a few minutes ago: the women, Mary Magdalene, Mary (presumably Jesus’ mother) and Joanna went to the tomb and found it empty. And in this version of the story, in the Gospel of Luke, the male apostles did not believe them. “But the words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” In our day, we could imagine someone scoffing, “Fake news!” Something unexpected had happened. Something unbelievable. And it was as unbelievable to the followers of Jesus as it seems to many of us retelling the story over 2000 years later.
The story was hard to accept from the beginning, and its veracity was rejected, for several reasons. First, of course, is the claim that Jesus returned to life, that he rose from the dead. No one would have had an explanation for that. Then, it would have been unbelievable that the events at the empty tomb would have been revealed to women – an ‘idle tale’. A message of such importance would never have been entrusted to women, went the argument. Then too, the claim that Jesus was the messiah was hotly disputed. For one thing, he was from the tiny village of Nazareth in Galilee, a region of poverty, of rebellion, where royalty and leadership were unexpected. Early in Jesus’ ministry, one follower, Philip, was trying to convince Nathanael that Jesus was the Messiah, and Nathanael famously replied, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”(John 1:46)
Not only was Jesus from a poor area with a somewhat disreputable image, but he himself was likely from the class of day laborers, a tekton, or builder, and the assumptions of classism even 2000 years ago prevented many from taking him seriously as the messiah. And finally, the manner of his death – put to death by crucifixion, like many a common criminal, also created disbelief in the claims that he was the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Son of God. The Messiah wasn’t supposed to die this way.
All of the arguments against Jesus as divine, as the Messiah, could be reduced to a common denominator, namely, that everything about him was unexpected. None of this made any sense. His origins; his followers, who included those commonly thought of as oppressed, such as the poor, and women; the manner of his death; the story of his resurrection: all of this added up to something that was hard to believe, something that very probably was not true.
But the old saying goes, the Holy works in mysterious ways.
Many of us have grown up hearing that expression, but we might not really understand what is meant by it. We might have grown up believing that God is omnipotent, has total power, and can create magical events, can make things such as the resurrection of Jesus take place. But in fact, what this expression refers to is God’s presence on the margins of life, where you least expect to encounter holiness: on the edges, transforming, creating chaos, upending the natural course of events.
As we walk through our lives, trying to understand, trying to make meaning of the events that occur to us and around us, we seek meaning sometimes by looking for the presence of the Holy. We can ask, “Where was God in this?” And what we often do not realize is that we are unlikely to find that presence in the center, in the still waters, in the calm times when everything is going along just the way we want it and the way we think it ‘should’ be unfolding.
If you are seeking divine presence, it is most likely to be found in the chaos, when things appear to be upside down. The divine presence can be unexpected at best, and even downright disturbing.
Like it or not, we are not transformed during the smooth passages of life, during those brief periods when we feel we can take things for granted, when we are comfortable. Nothing grows while comfortable, neither seeds in the ground, nor humans who are satisfied. And to prod us out of our comfort zones, God can play the role of a Trickster at times. Think of God appearing to Moses, quietly herding his sheep, in a burning bush. God is in the unexpected.
And so, we can see how fitting it is, here on April 1, to commemorate a time when the entire world seemed to be upended. When a peasant from the countryside was put to death by the state, and did not stay hidden away in a sealed tomb. It made no sense to anyone.
But in one way, the events of that first Easter did indeed make sense. What made sense then and makes sense today is the knowledge that the story did not end there. The story has not ended yet.
If we look around us, if we stay open to life and its unfolding, we see that life has a way of reversing itself, turning us sharply to the left or the right, turning us upside down. Think about all that happens in our lives: our beloveds die, children are born, marriages can end, our bodies can fail us, hurricanes might rip the roofs off our houses. One day our feet are firmly planted along a path, probably a path that we are enjoying, or at least were comfortable with, and then the next day we are blown or knocked off course. We are forced to let go of our assumptions, our hopes and dreams. But just when we think a story might have ended, we see a way forward, see that life continues on in a new way, see that love is still present even if we are suddenly on a new path. That transformer, that Trickster, that change agent, both turns the world upside down and offers a glimpse of a resurrection.
Our lives are full of resurrections. We tend to save that word: resurrection, to be used only in the story of Easter. We talk about The Resurrection, with a capital R. However, another definition of resurrection is ‘revival’: in other words, to rise again from decay, or disuse. If we broaden our way of thinking about resurrection to focus on revival, we will open ourselves to see that this happens all around us, every day. It is especially easy to see at this time of year, as bit by bit life returns, the green blade rises. And it happens in unexpected ways. God is in the unexpected.
We can often think that the divine presence has forsaken us in times of need. I think of the young high school students hiding for their lives in their school in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day. No doubt many people: students, and parents, and teachers, were wondering where God was in those moments. But the story did not end there. For the survivors rose up, walked out, and have upended the country’s conversation about gun violence. Last week all across the world people took to the streets to demand action, and to take control of the narrative, led by those high school students. The story did not end in Parkland, and it is not finished yet.
A little girl lost her grandmother and wrote her a note and tossed it into the ocean. And five years later the note came back, returning memories of the grandmother, and memories of the little girl as she was then, and of the strong love between them. The love and the memories rose up again, resurrected in a way that never could have been anticipated. A miracle? Maybe. But certainly something unexpected. A little girl loved her grandmother so much that she reached out to her in a way that she could all by herself. In some way that we can’t explain, the love found its way back to Sabine and Taylor. And now, new friendships have formed. The story of Sabine and her grandmother is now something different. The story is not ended, and it will carry forward into the future.
The Romans are no longer the oppressors in the Middle East. They have been replaced, over and over again, as the story continues to unfold. And at times those who claim to be worshippers of the man who rose from the dead have acted as the oppressors. The story twists and turns, but has not ended.
Evil can appear to triumph, and it can triumph for a time. Here in this country, we watch uneasily as evil seems to gain a foothold in ways we never expected. White supremacists hold a torchlight march in a college town. People with brown skin are harassed, non-citizens are deported on the flimsiest of excuses. People of color continue to be executed by police. In some ways we are not the country we were three years ago. This new path is unexpected, but the story is not finished. For the message of Easter is exactly that: the story is never finished, and love will prevail in the end. Love’s touch will call us back to life again.
On this April 1, this Easter Sunday, my hope for us all is that our eyes and our ears will be opened, so that we might see and hear and be open to new ways of living and loving that arise throughout our lives. May we learn to see all the unexpected resurrections that life will offer us; and may we have the faith we need to remind ourselves two things: one, that love never dies, and second, that our stories, and all the stories are not finished as long as love abides among us.
Amen. Alleluia!
