You can go home now, if you like, since I've done what I really wanted to do in this service, that is, to tell the children the story of Easter, including, contrary to modern Unitarian practices, the troublesome parts, the Last Supper and the bit at the end, you know, the reason Easter is celebrated on Sunday. But, being a good Unitarian, I can't help but comment on what I've done here. Besides, I promised a few hints on what you can tell your kids when they ask why these two bits are so seldom discussed.
Why might that be? Here's one possibility. We don't mention the "R" word because we think that our kids might actually believe the whole thing and turn to trinitarianism or some other terrible heresy.
"Fred, I don't know how to tell you this, but our daughter's become a, a Methodist."
"Oh, no, a Methodist? How could this happen? We've always protected her from those cult religions. I can't believe it."
"Well, Fred, I hate to say it, but there was the time you told her about Easter. Remember that?"
"Me, me. Don't blame it on me, it was your idea in the first place!"
"My idea, why I never ...."
You get the notion. Well, I reject that explanation right of the bat. We are, after all, Unitarians, and therefore are deeply committed even to our kids' personal search for meaning. We have a long tradition of laying it all out for them and letting them decide.
So, maybe we don't tell our kids about Easter, because we think it's a fiction and we don't believe in lying to our kids. This explanation is worth thinking about.
I remember a sermon once preached by the Reverend (if irreverent) Joan Gelbein in the Unitarian Church of Arlington, Virginia. Joan was raised a Jew (like Jesus) and (unlike Jesus) was rather skeptical of Christianity, to say the least. Here is a summary of her Easter service.
Jesus died a horrible death because he and his followers were duped by an evil God into thinking that he, Jesus, would be resurrected. In fact nothing of the sort happened. It was all a rotten hoax, and if you believe it, you're even dumber than than Jesus and his retarded band. Besides that, God was obviously on the wrong side of feminism since he chose to have a son instead of a daughter. Your only salvation is to turn to the Goddess who doesn't go around killing her kids on purpose.
Now, this sermon, strangely enough, was well received, in spite of its many errors, not the least of which is that of a Unitarian minister casting aspersions on others' deeply held beliefs. But the real error, to my mind, is that of believing that it's the facts that matter. In a modest attempt to bring Joan some fame and noteriety, I'm calling this the Gelbein Error. Now facts often do matter, sometimes even in religion. But the Easter story is a story about the significance of life, and here, the St. ExupŽry Principle applies. I'm sure you all know it. "That which is essential is invisible to the eye, and can only be seen by the heart." The truth of the Easter story does not lie in the facts of the matter, but rather in the meaning of the events.
This plain truth was recognized by another Jewish scholar, Dr. Hoffman, whose lecture on the history of the Eucharist gave me that really delightful account of the Last Supper that I put in the story I just told the children. Hoffman was pretty clear that he thought his account had a basis in fact (which it may or may not), but clearly what entranced him (and me) was that it lent (no pun intended) meaning and significance to Jesus' words at that last Seder. A meaning that tied Jewish and Christian beliefs together in a fashion that had, in my experience, never been done. It carried the Eucharist right back into the very core of the Passover.
The Gelbein error, by the way, is one shared by many other religions including most fundamentalists. Take the Baptists, for example, who believe in the literal truth of the Bible and in letting that truth guide their lives. They and Joan share the same fundamental viewpoint. It's the facts that matter. They simply disagree as to what the facts are. But, when it comes to the significance of our lives, the facts don't matter. For one thing, the facts are absolutely neutral. They don't speak of good or bad, of profane or sacred. People can be viewed as biological systems, as complex molecules, or as systems of Schrodinger wave functions. On most conceptual scales, we don't even show up on the radar screen. Second, the facts are apt to change as science progresses, and, in fact, the history of science is one of decentering humanity. Our condition becomes less and less special, the more we learn about the universe. Does this mean that we have become less and less significant? Wouldn't it be better to have a religion that could rise above the facts? A religion that would work whether or not we found out, say, that there are racial differences in intelligence or that being gay is a contagious condition. If your faith is based on facts it's not really faith, and you'll inevitably wind up telling yourself lies to preserve it. So, is the Gelbein Error the reason why we don't tell our children about Easter? Yes, you say, but of course. And now we are ready to renounce our Gelbeinish ways and tell our kids about the meaning of the Easter story, which is ..., what?
Here's another Easter story. It took place right here, in this very church, on the occasion of Susan Smith's last sermon to us. If you were here three years ago, you may remember Susan Smith. She's no Joan Gelbein. Susan was a person of immense intellect and immense faith. On this particular Sunday-Palm Sunday, 1995-she spoke about Peter's denial of Jesus after his arrest. Peter's state of mind, Susan said, has a name; it's called "anomie," and it's that dark state of mind that tells us, "Something unpleasant is going on here, and I don't want to face it. I'm not going to get involved." Peter just wanted to keep out of the way. Not like Judas, incidentally, that is, the Judas of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's and Tim Rice's inspired musical, Jesus Christ, Superstar. That Judas did want to get involved. Judas in the musical wanted to avert what he saw as complete disaster for the Jesus movement.
But, back to Peter and Susan. Susan goes on to say, "Maybe you don't know what anomie is like, but I do. I once had a friend who was dying of AIDS, I was away at school and although I could have arranged for a visit to see him, I just didn't. I had many good excuses-no, bad excuses-but I could have paid him a visit, and I never did. Because I knew something unpleasant was going on here, and I didn't want to get involved. Anomie."
And that was where Susan left us that Palm Sunday, because, it was, after all, Palm Sunday-that time in Jerusalem when the smell of fear was in the air, and people were taking sides or not taking sides, not quite knowing even what those sides were. I knew what Susan was talking about. I knew that anomie is one of worst places you can be and has the darkest consequences. I knew this because I also had a good friend who died of AIDS. I also could have paid him a visit, and I also, in the clutches of anomie, failed to do so. I knew, just as I would never see Billy again, that Susan would never see her friend, and that Peter would never be able walk up to Jesus in front of God and everybody (especially God) and say, "Hey, I'm with you, man. I'm here for you."
Now I have to tell you that when I was six, my nanny gave me a very important prescription: "Big boys don't cry," she said one time when I was sobbing my six-year-old heart out. Now this bit of advice seemed sensible to me, so I stopped crying then and there, and haven't cried since ... until Palm Sunday, 1995. But I can tell you that I barely made it home from that sermon because I was bawling my eyes out.
I couldn't have been much lower, but then I realized that everything would be alright, because next Sunday was Easter, and Susan's sermon that Sunday would surely be about resurrection and salvation, about redeeming the irredeemable. We had to share Susan with the Kerrville congregation, so I had to make my way up to Kerrville on Sunday morning. Small price to have the stone rolled away from the cave imprisoning my spirit.
I'd been warned about the Kerrville congregation-50s Unitarianism at its worst, a spiritual vacuum. But I figured that Reverend Smith would not let that stop her from serving up a Smith-style Easter service. That did not occur. I don't think that the word Easter was even mentioned in the service. Instead the morning was dedicated to an issue that Susan brought back from a recent ministers' retreat. "What," she asked the congregation, "is at the enduring core of our religion?" And the answers that she got from this congregation were what you might expect: "diversity," " the interconnected web of all existence," "tolerance," (not acceptance), "blah, blah, blah." Nice words, but not directed to the enduring core of anything. I'm sure that the congregation left with the self-rightious warm fuzzies that we seem to get when we use vague concepts to avoid serious issues. But I sure didn't come away with anything like a feeling for what is at the enduring core of Unitarian-Universalism, and I sure didn't find the resurrection andthe light that I had hoped for that Easter.
At least not right away. But, you have to understand that I'm a slow thinker. If I'm asked about some matter in a conversation, I'll most likely think of the right thing to say a half hour or even a few days after the conversation has ended. And so it was that Easter. As I drove back to San Antonio, a thought came to me, as did Jesus to his disciples on the road to Ephesus, a thought concerning the enduring core of our religion, and it was this. Can there be anything but stories at the enduring core of any real religion, and if that's the case, what stories are at the enduring core of Unitarian-Universalism? What is a religion, what is our religion without stories, and what are our stories?
So, that's why I'm here today-to tell stories: my story, which is about Susan Smith's story, which is about Peter and Jesus' story, which is about Moses' story. And, to return the question that started me off on this tangent that isn't a tangent, what is the significance of Easter? What do we tell our kids about it? All I can say is what I told them this morning, "I don't know, but I do know that its important to keep telling the story because it's one of our stories." So, maybe there's a third reason why we don't tell our kids about resurrection and the Eucharist and all-because we don't know what they mean, and in this society, there's a serious taboo against grownups professing ignorance to kids.
"Officer, officer, do something! That little girl asked her father an innocent question and he said, he said 'I don't know.'"
"Another one of them prevert's, eh."
"She's probably scarred for life."
"Hey, scumbag! I'm arresting you on the charge of displaying ignorance to a minor. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say ...." You get the picture.
So, my message today is just what Jesus' was when he returned to Galilee. Tell the story, the whole story, and keep telling it. It won't turn your kids into Methodists. It doesn't matter that it's not factually correct. What matters is that it's true. And it's OK to tell your kids the story even if you don't know what it means. Maybe they'll know what it means. Or maybe we all know what it means but it's meaning is not something that can be put into words.
One final thought. As John has pointed out to us earlier this year, music helps. Music helps express meaning that can't come through words alone. With that thought in mind, I chose the musical works of three great religious thinkers of our time.
The offertory provides Rice and Lloyd-Webber's portrayal of Judas as the quntessential Unitiarian, on his own personal search for truth-"I just want to know."-as a counterpoint to a chorus in search of meaning, "Who are you, what did you sacrifice?"
The offertory was the great Jewish scholar, Kinky Friedman's, thesis on the connection between Jesus' life and his resurrection, "You just can't keep a good man down," and his comment on what makes a good man good. "...
I'll finish the sermon with a work from a modern-day Augustine, Ray Wylie Hubbard, on the uncertainties and contradictions in the Easter story and his implicit recommendation, which I completely endorse, that the spirit of Easter is all too easily lost if, like Gelbein or Robertson, we take it too seriously.
Hit it, maestro.