"Unitarian Universalists Celebrate the Resurrection"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
April 4, 2010

Four years ago on Easter, the Unitarian Universalist Church Ogden, Utah moved into it’s very own church building for the first time.  When I arrived there as Interim Minister, the congregation had been renting space in a community center to hold worship services ever since it’s inception, 14 years before.  The week before the move, on Palm Sunday, they ordained me, and the occasion served as a going away party to our old home.  On Easter Sunday, we began our service in the community center then the entire congregation walked the several blocks to our new building, carrying our chalice, community water, banners, and balloons.  Before we went in, we circled our new building calling the directions, and then we finished our service in our new sanctuary.  What a glorious, joyful Easter Sunday it was!

I had called the local newspaper religion reporter to tell her about our move, and she was quite gracious to us in her article, giving our story about a third of a page in the Sunday paper.  We were delighted to have the publicity, but we were bemused at her lead-in sentence for the story.  She began the article with: “Members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ogden will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ with a rebirth of their own on Sunday.”  Fair warning to anyone who ever talks with a reporter - no matter how much you want your story out there, you have to know they are going to put their own spin on what you tell them.  In this case, there was no harm to us, and it gave me an opportunity to tell her more about UUism and that made her amenable to doing another story on us later when we hosted a political candidate meet’n’greet.

I immediately assured the congregation that I had said no such thing, and that we would not be celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I think I would have been run out of town on a rail if we had.  Even though early American Unitarians held on to the actual occurrence of Jesus’s miracles of as proof of the validity of his message, we have long since come to see them as mythological stories.  In fact,  in counter-reaction to fundamentalist claims of the literal truth of supernatural miracles, most UUs dismiss them altogether.  Many of us consider ourselves scientific naturalists; that is, we think nature is quite awesome on its own and see no need for - nor evidence of - supernatural intervention in the process of creation/evolution.  Scientific naturalists say that miracles, events that couldn’t happen naturally, don’t happen, and claims to the contrary are false.  Of course, to be fair to other UUs who believe God can or does influence life, we scientific naturalists have no real proof that supernatural intervention has never happened, either.  We could be wrong.

Small u unitarians, those who believe in one God and only one, believe Jesus was fully human and not a mutated God.   A unitarian theology therefor calls into question not only the Resurrection of Jesus from death but also the claims that he Ascended into Heaven in bodily form to be at the right hand of God and his later Transfiguration, when he supposedly appeared to some of his disciples as a heavenly being.  So, what the heck are unitarians doing celebrating Easter, everywhere known as the commemoration of Jesus rising from his tomb and appearing to his followers?  Well, we have to tell our kids something about it, don’t we?  After all - it’s inescapable in our culture.  But, is it enough just to tell them everyone else believes this Easter Resurrection thing, but we don’t?  If that’s all we have to say about Easter, I think we’re leaving the kids without much to go on, and all we can do is try to avoid Easter as much as possible.  So, how do we deal with Easter?
Some UU churches substitute another holiday, such as Passover while others celebrate with a Flower Communion.   UU churches with a more Christian congregation, might even celebrate Easter with a traditional matzoh and wine communion service which helps them remember the messages of Jesus’s life.  Congregations that include a Pagan contingent might celebrate the Vernal Equinox or simply the season of spring.  Here, the Pagans and the Resurrection deniers might find common ground.  “See,” they say, “the celebration of spring is much more ancient than Easter, and this is just another instance of the Catholic Church co-opting a pagan holiday into the Christian calendar!”  I can remember clearly the first time my UU minister told us about the ancient use of rabbits and eggs to  symbolize the earth’s fecundity in spring as we heard in our reading this morning.  It was quite an awakening for me, and I felt she had given me back Easter.  Each of these methods has it’s advantages, and I’ll bet almost all of them have been tried here in the past, but  for the last several years I have been taking a different tack.  I have been preaching about - well, Easter - and so far, no one has stormed out of the sanctuary in protest.

So, what can we say about the Easter story?  In the first place, is it true?  If science has debunked the miracle claims, why don’t we just leave it to the fundamentalists who after all live out of a  fantasy world view?   How could this ancient, overworked story possibly contain a relevant message for modern people like us?  Why even bother?

If we are ever to get beyond these objections to a place where we can find some benefit from Easter, we must address the idea that Jesus was just some magician traveling the dusty roads of  Palestine whose feats were mere trickery or that his followers and later church leaders embellished Jesus’s prophetic lessons with miracle stories to convert impressionable people.  It may seem to you like I’m beating around the bush, but I am going to begin my response to the question, “Is the Easter story true?” by saying, “No, it’s not literally true, but it is mythologically true.”

In his book, The Pagan Christ, Tom Harpur, a former Anglican priest and long time religion editor for the Toronto Star, says there was never a man named Jesus, and the miracles attributed to him in the Christian scriptures did not happen.  He found that most of the stories were  borrowed from Egyptian mythology,  which contained the "virgin birth, a star in the east, three wise men bearing gifts, the evil power that tries to take a special child's life, and angelic messengers."  “The Egyptian hieroglyph KRST, meaning the anointed one, was applied to the deity Horus, who was born of a mortal woman and later crucified between two thieves.” Egyptologists say pretty much the entire Jesus story can be found in hieroglyphs dating back to 3000 years Before the Christian Era (BCE).  Given these facts, it is hard to escape the notion Christianity evolved from older Middle Eastern religions.  Both the Egyptians and Persians told stories about a deity who struggled to learn of the goodness inside him, but neither of these traditions considered the stories to be actual history.  Their purpose in telling and re-telling the stories was to give people a hero they could understand, whose spiritual trials were similar to their own.  This has always been the purpose of mythological stories, and if we modern people will let it, mythology can still be powerful and helpful in our lives. 

In spite of all the evidence of Christianity’s plagiarism Tom Harpur presented in his book, he is still a Christian. "I'm not interested in debunking," he says. "The things I'm saying don't downgrade the Jesus story.  Instead, they save us from this plodding tale of a magic wonder worker, which is so hard for modern people to believe.  Instead of being unhealthily dependent on a historic Jesus [Christianity can] be a more mystical religion, but [that does] not [make it] less practical.”

“Practical because it is more mystical?” he says.  That’s not the way I heard it - back in engineering school.  We learned to only trust provable facts modeled in theory and measured with data.  So, when I heard stories of Jesus walking on water and bringing people back from the dead, I felt the scriptures were corrupted, and in my mind that placed the the entire Christian enterprise in doubt.  But, if we look at the Bible as mostly mythology, as opposed to history, scientific arguments become moot.  And, I’m an engineer here to tell you, “Things other than scientific fact can be very helpful in understanding our world.”  We can all be mystics.  Simply put, mystics are those who able to apprehend spiritual truths.  Mystics who teach often use parables, and mythological tales.  Although the tales can be fantastical, the messages of the stories are simple enough to understand, given a little imagination.  I’m pretty sure we big-brained, modern UUs are creative enough to allow mythology to help us ascertain spiritual truths.

“OK, fine,” you say, “we can tell the miracle story of the multiplying of loaves and fishes to our kids because we can interpret it not that Jesus literally made more bread and meat out of the air, but that he got the people to share the food they had.  It’s an ever better message that way, but Jesus coming back from death - come on!  And the interpretation that our human bodies will be reconstituted a few millennia down the road and taken to heaven, but only if we accept that already happened to Jesus - well, we just can’t go there.  If you think UUs are going to celebrate the resurrection, you had better have a better story line than that.”

Alright, here’s what I really believe.  Jesus’s core message was populist, that is aimed at the 90% of the people of his time who were owned by or totally beholden for their livelihood on the small upper class.  They were essentially slaves.  Jesus didn’t try to free them bodily, but he tried to help them free themselves spiritually.  A Jew, he would have understood the interpretation of the passover in this Lynn Ungar poem.

“They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.
Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.”

The God of Jewish scripture did not promise them eternal life but guided them on a path of spiritual freedom.  The Jesus message was essentially the same except it could be applied by anyone, not only the Jews.  Unitarian Universalism likewise does not promise eternal life, but neither does it leave us without spiritual resources.  Even though we may live in oppressing circumstances or may be wandering in the desert of uncertainty or depression, making a connection to the universe, feeling awed by its beauty, its complexity and by our privileged place in the scheme of things, can help us transcend a lowly emotional state.

Death, especially our own, can be the most difficult of problems for us to transcend, and so it is an essential topic of stories meant to strengthen our spirits.  The story of Jesus’s death and resurrection was implanted into the annual cycle of mythological celebrations in the spring when the people already understood the message that even though a great person dies, life, abundant life goes on.  The resurrection of life in the spring is a metaphor used in mythological stories both to illustrate an individual life’s impermanence and to underscore the permanence of the interconnected web of life.  The myths are meant to help us deal with our present realities and to guide us toward a bountiful spiritual life.

Unitarian Universalism does not promise us a life after death which means our message of assurance is based on life here on earth.  Yes, we will each physically die, but nature provided for that by creating a world teeming with human life, so that we can rest assured life will go on after our individual deaths.  What we do while we are alive is what’s important - both for the good we do today and for the influence we have on the future.  Ours is not hope for our own lives to be eternal but a realistic hope for a better future for our children and the world.   It is a hope that we can be of use and be present for the next important part of our lives.  It is a hope that our lives will make a difference and the knowledge that a life well lived today is a triumph over death.

Spring is about rebirth, the resurrection of the seemingly dead daffodil from it’s wintry grave.  Spring is a celebration of life we don’t even have to prepare for.  It comes free, and revives our spirits by it’s warming sunlight, it’s prolific display of color, it’s joyful birdsong, by it’s very exuberance.  The ancient rites of spring, celebrate the awakening of dormant plants and animals, the creation of new life, and the renewal of the human spirit these bring.    The ancients knew all the plants and animals hadn’t died.  The resurrection of life in the spring was for them, and can still be for us, a powerful metaphor for how the annual cycle of life can bring us a needed revitalization of our spirits.

At some point in our lives all of us will ask, “Since death is certain and living life to the fullest is so important, what should we do?”  The goal is to remain present for every part of our lives, to appreciate what we have, and to lovingly engage the people in our world.  Each of us will have to find our own ways of doing this.  One person’s answer might be to invite all of her friends over to bake and eat chocolate chip cookies on Thursday nights.  For someone else, it might be to make amends to a loved one from whom she has been estranged.  For another, it could be to reduce his stress by taking a quiet nap in the shade of his favorite tree.  Whatever it is for you, don’t wait until tomorrow to get out and immerse yourself in the spring sunshine and participate in life.   Go, enjoy this Easter afternoon!