Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 31st of March, 2002
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
to rejoice, to risk singing alleluia
in a world often resistant
to human dreams of peace and justice.
Blest is the person who blossoms
toward such life-affirming dreams.
And blest is this day of celebration
when beauty, truth and goodness
join hands as friends. And at worship's end,
may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each
other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together
become….
Exultet
[Next] [back
to top]
Tune Barvy Vune, Hymn #78
I could say they are beautiful, those stars hemming the blue veil of morning. I could say it gives me pleasure, that bronze and perfect Passover moon, or I could say they make me glad, those laughing daffodils along the lane.
Or, I could just as well say they are lit from within, divine, overflowing with what some long to call revelation, or even the growing vision of God.
But today, on Easter, I don't care which words I use to express my wonder. I just am glad to be alive, blest with such marvels.
Verse 1-2
I could say that the earth hanging in space is an accident in the universe that just happened, or I could say it's one more miracle in a cosmos full of miracles, one overflowing with divinity.
But today, on Easter, for all of my education and life experience, I cannot tell which word is which…accident, miracle…they seem to see each other's face in the mirror of my heart. And so I rise in gladness again, and sing the marvel that everything is!
Verse 3-4
When some argue for heaven, and others argue for earth, for the life of me I cannot comprehend the seriousness of the debate. After all, the heaven I see daily over head never argues with me…it just tumbles clouds through my eye and yours and paints the horizons pink and orange come evening or come morning.
And the earth I walk never argues with me either. It mostly just explodes with buds and petals like some out of control fountain.
Heaven and earth remain silent even before the much abused and much maligned name of God, whose ancient vision buckles whenever people claim that their violence is divine.
But now, on this Easter Day, everything grows beyond words, beyond both earth and heaven, into a necessary vision of harmony and peace for all humankind.
O Song that is far greater than any song I sing, O Song greater than my inadequacy, brokenness or loss, continue to sing your immortal anthem among all mortal beings, my sisters and brothers.
Verse 5 and 6
Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]
Who says Easter is just flowers and spring?
Who says Easter comes without a cross?
Behold! Passover families in Netanya wail as they bury their festival dead.
Children wail in the West Bank between the mosque and the church, afraid
that the soldiers will come again with bulldozers.
Houses built of poverty collapse on Afghan families and crush them, the earth
shaking without regard to magnitudes of sorrow.
A family buries their daughter, killed by a hockey puck from the home team.
Sadness still moves through the world.
Brokenness still sends its fractures through everything I love and long
for.
Families hurt.
Mistakes are made.
Lies are still told.
Therefore, let those of us who stand in the shadow of such day-to-day crosses find that part of us which is struck silent before such realities, a silence that neither rises to righteousness, nor sinks to despair.
A silence that is the noble threshold to a more steady and studied
response.
A silence that is kindred, in fact, to the silence that fills my heart when
I find myself in the presence of an opening rose, a child I love, a faithful
friend, or anyone who turns away from violence.
silence
On this Easter Day, we now set time aside to remember those we love, those who are in our day to day lives, and those who roam through the meadow of our memories like a child picking a handful of wildflowers on a warm day in spring.
We name them aloud if we wish, or we see their faces rise before our inner eye as welcome companions on this journey of life.
naming
Sorrow is real, but may our hearts today beat to the rhythm of an anthem that is tougher and more durable than even sorrow, the alleluia of yes to life, yes to love, and yes to the Life of Life itself, the Love that is deeper than our regrets and far higher than our highest hopes.
Alleluia to thee, O Love!
First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a wonderful selection from a story by one of the greatest Japanese authors of the last century, Nagai Kofu:
Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society.
Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from a study of the legends surrounding the historical realities of the Roman Prefect who condemned Jesus of Galilee to capital punishment, an excellent study written three years ago by Ann Wroe, an historian and economist. (precis and quote)
The death of the Roman Emperor Tiberius in the year 36 legally ended the appointment of Pilate as Prefect of Judea. The Legate of Syria, Vitellius, deposed him, and sent him to Rome on charges of murder brought up by the families of all those whom he had slaughtered over his ten year tour of duty.Many strange legends would later accrue around Pilate's dismissal back to Rome.
One of them is found in the 6th century legend which says that Tiberius recalled Pilate because he could not believe he had been so crass as to execute a man who might have been useful. You see, Tiberias had been ill with a fever and purple skin lesions. And news had reached Rome that Jesus cured people. Tiberius had already made a request for the holy veil on which a woman called Veronica had taken an impression of the face of Jesus while he was on his way to his death. When the veil arrived, the Emperor merely looked at the relic, and his skin was made soft as a child's. How could Pilate have executed such a man, the Emperor wondered, a human being whose very image imprinted on a square of cloth could be so powerful?
Sermon - Easter Celebration: Veronica's Veil [Next][back to top]
Well it's spring at last, and the ancient feast of Easter is upon us. I know all the hesitations about this day.
"It's just an ancient Celtic spring festival which celebrated the earlier rise of the sun in the East, thus Easter."
"It's an old agricultural festival that noted that young lambs and other baby animals are born in this season, and that new life rises up to green the earth."
But personally, I am wary of the purist idea that tries to reduce Easter to some ancient ritual that's the real Easter, with the complex history of the day for the last 1964 years simply chopped off rudely.
Oh, I know. So many Christians, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, used this day cruelly. They have tainted it with their anti-Semitic pogroms and persecutions. Certainly the day has lost lots of its luster, understandably, for many, for historical reasons. I have sympathy with that.
But despite all this, this day still remains my favorite holiday of the whole year. And this, despite the fact that I do not for one minute think this day has to do with the resuscitation of an ancient crucified rabbi.
But then those of you who have heard my Easter sermons before know that I am not interested in supporting commonplace misunderstandings. By now you know that two words are central to my understanding of my work as a minister. These two words are the literal and the literate.
With all that is in me, I preach against the literal, the foolish notion that the ancient stories are to be understood in an authoritatively shallow and surface way, or else tossed in the garbage can. But at the same time, with my whole ministry, I preach on behalf of a literate understanding of our ancient traditions, one respectful of our life experiences, our reason, our passion, and our desire to live a good and honest life.
So with my friend and colleague, Jane Rzepka, I say this…there is no getting around it. Whatever else Easter may be based on, it's about Jesus. Whatever agricultural roots it has, it is also based on the memory, however distorted, of how the unexpected and cruel death of an ancient teacher named Yeshu (Jesus) turned the lives of his students upside down.
The gospels are distortions, to be sure. Polemical, difficult. In order to read them in a literate and not literal way, you have to give up surface impressions and dig deep, working with the fullness of your mind over a long, long time.
Such work is not for everyone, I know, but it sure has been important to me. And after a while, you begin to get the picture of a man who was a peasant, born of an unwed mother, and raised in poverty in a brutally occupied territory. You get the picture of a thoughtful young man who was exposed to both Greek and his own Jewish cultural traditions in the cosmopolitan district where he lived. You get the picture of a man whose experiences and thoughtfulness and anger and tenderness and frustration made him an excellent story teller, and an empathic person who helped other to feel better about themselves. You get the story of a teacher who had no specific program he wanted to impose on folks, but who wanted to help folks to think for themselves, to get to the deeper, more basic issues, and to give up all sense that they already had all the answers on a silver platter. You get a picture of person who wanted those who were different from each other…women and men, rich and poor, the sick and the healthy, the Greek and Jew, the quick and the slow, the desperate and the comfortable… to meet each other face to face at table, and hear each other's stories. You get the picture of a human being who was seized by possibilities for a better world, which in his own rich language he wittily called malkut elaha, the Empire of God, deftly calling Caesar's role into question. And finally, for such improprieties, you get a man who was one of many who were routinely crucified by a ruthless Roman despot named Pilatus who was eventually and correctly deposed for his manifold cruelties.
His death was so unexpected, so devastating, that years later some of his friends could not stop talking about how difficult it had been for them to go on. Their shock and grief were terrible.
Eventually, they began to imagine that the death of their teacher was not a sign of divine displeasure, but just the opposite…his spirit could not be destroyed just because he was killed. One author, who wrote a letter in the New Testament attributed to Peter, put it this way: "He was slain in the flesh, but rose up in the spirit."
The imaginative, literate minds of his followers at first tried to explain this transformation of their shock and grief in wonderful, playful ways. They said that after Jesus died, folks began to see him. Well, not him exactly, but folks who they eventually figured out must be him…Mary of Magdala saw a gardener, a common slave, and said, "This must be him." Two grieving students spent about six hours walking with a stranger one day, having an amazing conversation. Then, during supper in the village of Emmaus (a painting of this tale by George Tooker is on the cover of your orders of celebration), when they ate with this stranger as they used to eat with Jesus, joyfully, they suddenly decided that this must be Jesus. Over and over, strangers that no one recognizes at first, or even for a long time, turn out to "be" Jesus. This kind of playful storytelling is clearly literate, not literal. But after a while, as it so often does, the literal mind took over, and these wonderful experiences of connection with strangers, with different people, actually turned into a resuscitated Jesus. Within twenty five years of Jesus' death, people would be saying, not that his students came back to life after being devastated, but that Jesus himself came back to life, and quite physically.
But I am convinced that such literalizing of the literate leads nowhere…it deadens the whole wonderful idea of Easter. And "why," as the young man at the tomb asks in one of the Easter stories, "would anyone look for what is alive among what is dead?"
For me, to talk of resurrection as a body coming back to life is quite simply deadly and I want nothing to do with it.
But nevertheless, over the years, a few folks continued to tell literate playful stories about Jesus, despite the literalism around them. In the second reading, we heard of one sixth century fairy tale about a woman named Veronica. She had seen Jesus, the legend goes, as he carried the beam of his own cross to the execution sight, and was moved to compassion by what she saw…a fellow human being covered in spit and blood, about to be tortured and killed. She broke through the ranks of soldiers, the tale goes, and took off her head scarf, which covered her modesty, and wiped the face of the suffering man. The soldiers brutally pushed her back. The next day, when she unfolded the veil to wash it, she saw a perfect portrait of Jesus imprinted on the veil. This handkerchief with the magic picture, the legend says, was so powerful that Tiberius the Roman Emperor heard about it and sent for it, in order to be healed from his sickness. The woman who wiped the blood off Jesus' face had a name, we are told, Veronica. But her name only confirms the legendary nature of the story…after all, Vero means true, and icon, despite modern computer usage, still just means picture or image. Vero Icon (a) True Picture.
A year ago I bought this work of art by Jeanne Fryer Kohles, who is a member of this church and a most excellent artist and art critic. It's called Veronica's Handkerchief, clearly referring to the famous early medieval legend. For its finely etched beauty, it hangs in an honored place in my loft. For what it means to me in my love of Easter, it has an honored place in my heart.
For what this legend is telling me, I think, is that a true picture of Easter begins to unfold when I look at the stories of Easter not literally, but literately, that is with my imagination. I'm speaking of the early stories like that of the gardener in John and the supper in Luke which speak not of the dead coming back to life, but of the living actually daring to live for a change. In the story of the gardener, we are told that Mary is a Magdalene - that is, she is a citizen of Magada, a wealthy coastal town very much like West Palm Beach today. She was part of the upper crust of society and clearly came from a home where there were many slaves in the household. After her teacher died, Mary was understandably grief stricken. When she sees a gardener working one day, she is rude to him at first, perhaps showing the same crispness she's used with her household slaves. But when he refuses to be humiliated, she responds by letting her empathy show the true worth of this slave-gardener, who now becomes her teacher. The class system is called into question by her own empathy for this stranger. She doesn't see Jesus so much as become him for a moment.
The dinner story is similar. Three people walk along the road to the village of Emmaus; two are grief stricken, and the stranger who has joined them feels for them, and listens to them and tries to be kind to them in their grief. Suddenly, this stranger no longer is strange, but familiar. They are transformed by this experience, realizing that they can face their grief best by changing their view of the world by their deepening empathy, as exemplified by the stranger. As our Japanese novelist Kofu reminds us, "Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society."
The artist Tooker expresses the idea of the story brilliantly, by have the two grieving men be Euro-American, and the stranger African American. Empathy does not let foolish things like race or culture have any final say. They sit at table and hear each other's stories and are transformed; the empathic stranger for them becomes a true picture of Easter.
And the later legend of Veronica provides an even smarter insight. It tweaks all those, like Tiberius, who think religion means miracles and magic. The true picture of Easter, after all, is not on the cloth, the story says, but in the woman. Her name is True Picture, after all, Veronica. And what does she do, this true picture? She risks her safety just to do an act of kindness and wipe away the sweat and blood from a condemned stranger's face. Let me bring these ancient legends into our own day to conclude my sermon.
A few months ago, a number of Israeli soldiers, 60 of them, in fact, publicly refused to serve in the West Bank or Gaza, on the grounds that the occupation forces there are abusing and humiliating Palestinians. "We all have limits," said Lt. David Zonshein. "You can be the best officer and suddenly you are asked to do things that should not be asked of you.. to shoot people, to stop ambulances, to destroy houses in which you don't know if there are people living." Since then, over 500 other military personnel have joined the initial 60.
The empathy of these soldiers is a true picture of Easter. So what if they are Jewish? The metaphor still works. Imagination, Whitehead said, is a way of illuminating the facts; and any true picture of Easter is imaginative, as I said earlier, never literal. Literate, not doctrinal. Let me make this even clearer.
The empathy of the people who lost their lives in Selma to insist on justice is a true picture of Easter. The empathy of the citizens of Amsterdam who hid Jewish families during the Second World War is a true picture of Easter. The joint Palestinian and Israeli Women's Organizations who work together for justice are a true picture of Easter. The Czech Unitarian minister Norbert Capek who boldly preached against the occupation of the Nazi's in his land is a true picture of Easter. The priest who died in the Trade Tower rubble while ministering to the dying is a true picture of Easter. My high school teacher Jim Clark who asked me to write like myself instead of demanding that I write like him is a true picture of Easter. The friends who will gather around my table later today to feast with me and lift up my joy by their love are a true picture of Easter.
The man Jesus died a long time ago, and no longer lives. His poor tortured body was thrown into a pit and is no more. But the Easter event first imagined by his friends in their grief has never stopped. Wherever empathy for the stranger…another gender, another color, another generation, another sexuality, another culture, another way of life, another emotional style, another class, or another size or shape, lives, you will see with your own eyes a true picture of Easter, one as beautiful in many ways as Jeanne Fryer Kohle's great piece.
Spring helps Easter along of course. I know that. And all the natural metaphors, the eggs, the green shoots, and the young lambs. I'm sure Easter just doesn't skip along as well in autumnal Sydney or Capetown or Santiago as it does here.
But take my word for it. Easter is not "just" a spring festival, and not "just" an agricultural celebration. That ancient teacher is still in the mix too, even though he has been dead a long time…and whenever in your life you see a transforming event, whenever you experience a kindness, a joy, a resistance, a thoughtful conversation, or a supportive shoulder, you just might hear an echo of his voice in the back of your head, saying in a language you can understand: "Love one another."
Consecration of the Flowers [back to top]
1. Candles of Memory and Hope:
We light this candle in memory and
thanksgiving for all the good we have
received from those gone before us.
We light this candle in anticipation of all
the good our lives shall yield to
those who come after us.
2. Procession of Flowers and Children
3. From Capek's 1923 Sermon on the Flowers
The man who first invented this form of the Flower Celebration, Norbert Capek, said these words in 1923 when he preached the first ever sermon for this service. He said:
"Today, each of us will take home a different flower than the one which we brought with us. We do not ask who brought the flower we shall take with us, for by doing this we confess we are brothers and sisters without regard to class, race or any other differences between us.We belong to one spiritual community of liberty we who come together for the common good.
Each of us needs to receive in order to grow up, but each of us needs to give something away for the same reason."
Then, Capek blessed the flowers in front of him with the following words: Consecration of the Flowers: # 732
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