"Courage"
Easter service

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 20^th of April, 2003

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to celebrate Life with a joy only Spring knows.
How fly the years! Another Easter is upon us!
Once again the flowers and festivities.
Once again the summons to courage and care.
Once again, the privilege to do this together.
And with word, silence, music and rite we pray

And at celebration'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.

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

The symbols of the season
are all in place:

The sacred sift of morning light
through red-bud branches,
the drift of rain-clouds sailing along the dark north sky serving as a robe for a feast day,
the minarets of tulips singing the call to prayer,
the young bees chanting their sunrise communion service as they sip nectar
from the chalice of the narcissus flower,
the newly packaged seeds and burrs reciting
their Passover maggid of strange travels and quick escapes on the wind.

Once again the tapestry of family dinners
and the peculiar loneliness of holidays.

Once again the jarring of murky world events
set against the soft pastel butterflies of spring.

Oh Love, the time is tender and sweet here on the earth, but the orbit of its passage is tough and jagged, filled with sorrows that silence themselves. Therefore come, Silence deeper than our speechlessness, rock us close in your silent arms for a while.

(silence)

Remembering the joys and sorrows of our lives
in this safe place
we are free to call to mind
our place in the vast tapestry of life,
our loves and losses, the tight weaving of our
family and friends.

Bringing them into this, our Easter Service,
by naming them in our hearts or aloud,
we mark our communion with all who
have touched our hearts, hearts which
sing Alleluia in this place with love.

(communion)

And now let the Easter Psalms be sung,
the fields of the earth rejoice, alleluia,
joining all the trees of the wild
which clap their hands in joy.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from a most remarkable book by Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, that is unlike any other book I have read recently.

There is another kind of revolution, one that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from the sense, but instead from our bodies. It is part of a language older than words.

It is the honeybee that stings in defense of the larger being that is her hive. There are the indigenous Zapatistas in Mexico who declare "There are those who resign themselves to being slaves. But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves, or surrender themselves." It is Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urging of Shell Oil, whose last words were, "Lord, take my soul, but let the struggle continue." It is anyone who dares to speak for him or her self. It is Nestor Makhno of Ukraine fighting for the autonomy of those who work the land. It is those who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is those who rebelled at Treblinka. It is Jesus. It is the women and men who lock themselves down before bulldozers. It is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Geronimo. It is actions based on the instinctual drive to live with dignity. It is remembering what it means to love, and to be alive.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is a most excellent short poem of the great United States poet Linda Pastan.

Crocuses

They come by stealth,
spreading the rumor of spring
near the hedge, by the gate,
at our chilly feet
mothers of saffron,
fathers of insurrection
purple and yellow scouts
of an army still massing
just to the south.

Sermon: "Courage" Easter service [Next][back to top]

I love Easter. It's my favorite holiday of the year. But I love when it happens just as much. I love that we celebrate Easter in high spring.

This means I would not be at all happy to celebrate Easter in Hobart, Tasmania, or Durban South Africa, or Buenos Aires. Or in Santiago where the air, according to my friend Bonni who lives in Chile, is now growing colder, dusting the lower elevations of the Andes and painting the leaves of trees bronze, orange and red.

Easter, for me, is not about spring. But it sure doesn't work very well without it. After all, there are all those "insurrections" of the crocuses which Linda Pastan reminds us of, so lyrically.

And is not the word "insurrection" a first cousin to the word "resurrection," the central word of Easter? Both words come from the Latin verb surgere, which simply means to rise, to get up, to stand up for something. Insurrection just means to rise up, but resurrection means to rise up again, to stand up again.

When flowers resurge in the spring, they are doing something that serves as a perfect metaphor for the Easter event.

But what is that event? Paul, one of the earliest Christians, wrote letter after letter without ever suggesting once that Easter has something to do with a revived corpse. He says emphatically that Jesus' body is no longer flesh and blood, but is now the body of the gathered people. "For the body is not made up of one part, but of many," he wrote quite plainly, 25 years after the death of Jesus. "You are the Messiah's body, and each of you individually are parts of that body." (First Letter to Community at Korinthos, 12: 12; 27, one example of many.)

Now clearly, Paul knows nothing of some empty tomb over in Palestine. He knows nothing of any claim that Jesus came back to life as an individual. Those stories came later, first as metaphors and teaching stories, and only many decades later were they understood literally by uncritical and very credulous minds.

So resurrection is a form of insurrection, an uprising of people for purpose. And what is that purpose? I say it's to cultivate courage in the depth of the human spirit so that we might live our lives as fully as we can.

I think the story of Jesus' death, as the gospels report it, was originally a meditation on the meaning of courage. It was never at first about what it means to live on in some form after death.

However, I think this meditation on courage was based on a remembered incident, one just as historical as the one the gospels are reporting, namely, the execution of Jesus on a Roman cross.

And what was that event? Although not well known to us these days, it was a rather amazing affair involving religion and politics. It stars one of the same historical characters that features in the story of Jesus' death, to wit, Lucius Pontius Pilatus (Pontius Pilate), the Roman Prefect of Judea from 26-36 CE. Two historians of the first century, Flauius Iosephus and Philo of Alexandria, tell versions of this dramatic story. It is thus very well attested in ancient sources.

It went like this. In the year twenty six, Pontius Pilate arrived by ship at Caesaria Maretima to take up his post as the Prefect of the Roman Prouincia Iudaeae (the Province of Judea). Caesaria was a lovely coastal resort town about a two and a half day's walk from Jerusalem.

Pilate also knew this would be a tough post. He was following the stressful tenure of the former Prefect, Ualerius Gratus, who himself came on the heels of many other Prefects, none of whom had lasted more than a couple of years. The citizens of Iudaea were, after all, not a pacified people…. conquered, yes, but resenting it all the way. Always stirring up trouble. Pilate decided he was the one who was going to change all that, and make the province conform. He learned from his advisors that the Judeans worshipped a God no one could see. He found out that they recoiled from the idea of any human being claiming to be God. So, in order to goad them goad, he sent a whole platoon of his soldiers down to Jerusalem under cover of night, bearing a large number of Roman shields that had the phrase "Divi Augustus Tiberius Caesar" inscribed across them. (That phrase basically means "Caesar Tiberius is Lord and God.") The soldiers were told to hang these shields where they could be seen in the Temple.

When the citizens of Jerusalem woke up the next day and saw the insulting shields, many of them dropped their immediate business, left their homes and shops and marched all the way up to Caesaria where the Prefect lived. There, by the thousands, they picketed in front of the palace, saying, "Take down the shields. They are an affront to our way of life and our beliefs." The number who had walked all that way surprised Pilate, but he shunned them. But they continued parading back and forth for three days, demanding an audience. Finally, fuming at their stubbornness, the red-faced Pilate had them all herded into the stadium. Then he motioned to his soldiers, who quickly surrounded the crowd and drew their swords. "Go home," he said. "Go home and return to your families and places of work. Stop this nonsense at once. If you do not…" and he drew his thumb across his neck.

The Judeans looked at each other, and then, one by one, they slowly dropped to their knees, and bared their necks, exposing themselves to the swords.

"Go ahead," they said. "Kill us. But do not make fun of our Torah and our way of life."

Pilate was understandably dumbfounded. And he knew very well that he could not begin his tenure as Prefect with the wanton and wholesale slaughter of thousands of people. So he relented. And sent them home. And, yes, he had the shields removed.

News of this amazing confrontation traveled like wildfire, as you can well imagine. The power of Rome had been met non-violently and was toppled in this one incident. Whispered in the marketplace and shouted from the housetops, Pilate's turnaround became the talk of the town.

The Prefect was resentful of course. He drew plans for his revenge. He callously embezzled money from the temple treasury to build a new aqueduct Rome "couldn't afford," and he routinely rounded up folks and bullied them or crucified them for no particular reason. He thought of such oppression as a pacification process, something to get the Judean people to tow the line. Jesus may have even died, in part, as the result of such a random pogrom. Pilate's ruthlessness was so effective that two things resulted: 1. He survived in office for ten years, about twice as long as any other Prefect. And 2. He was eventually deposed by the Emperor for his cruelty. Even Tiberius couldn't stomach another decade of his brutality.

Jesus and his friends, especially his best student Simon Peter, would have known this story. Everyone knew this story. It was the most popular story of the day, told and retold, embellished and laughed at. It was a story of a non-violent insurrection that saved the life of the people, their spiritual life, their sacred code, which declares that no human being is God, no human being is final, and no human being is truth and life. I accept that sacred code myself.

When Jesus was arrested, suddenly, without warning, it was devastating. What could they do? For Peter especially, it would appear from the sources, something had to be done. As he wrestled with his options, the story of Pilate and the shields must certainly have surfaced. Pilate being forced to be just by a non-violent insurrection. He also must have known about the sheer number of the Galilean pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem for Passover at that moment, swelling its population by almost 80,000. Hadn't they heard Jesus teach amid the flowers in the hills? Had they not seen him touch children with gentleness by the lake? Had he not spoken to them in a way that made them feel more whole when he was through (healed, they would later say) able to see things they had never seen before? If Peter went to these people, now camping around the walls of the city on the hills, assembled for the great Holiday of Freedom, wouldn't they show up at Pilate's door, now that he was staying in Jerusalem, and do exactly what those others had done in Caesaria four years earlier? Wouldn't they shout at Pilate, "Do not kill an innocent man. You mock the authority of Rome by doing such things. You invalidate your culture and you pervert the spirit of your people. Free him! Free him now."

But he did not do that. Nor did any of Jesus' friends. They could have. It would not have taken much organization. Just the thought of getting an arrogant and vicious man like Pilate to back down one more time would have been too tempting for anyone to resist. Pilate would not dare, at Passover, to have his soldiers commence a slaughter of tens of thousands. The protestors would have been perfectly safe, but, more importantly, they would have saved a life, the life of their beloved teacher, no less.

But of course, this did not happen. No one had the courage to get up, to rise up, to stand up and be counted. They were afraid, and unwilling to do anything courageous. They sulked around the edges of things, wept, trembled, and ultimately ran away back to Galilee and quivered. A couple of women had the guts to stick around, the story says, but all the men fled. What happened at the end, no one seems to know for sure. All we know is that one more state-sponsored execution took the life of yet another Galilean peasant, one of hundreds that year. And no one knew what happened to his corpse.

Some months later, Peter, convulsed with grief, still in shock, remembered deep inside himself, in a place profounder than words, that he could have stood up and done something. It was a wholly unbearable realization. So, suddenly, Peter decided that Jesus' death must have had to happen. It was NOT some terrible and quite typical example of the systemic evil of a State culture based on slavery. Instead, Peter said, it was a cosmic death, willed by God for cosmic reasons, and that it was the teaching peasant Jesus, in fact, who was divi augustus, Lord and God in human form, not golden Caesar in Rome This insight was quite brilliant. It is revolutionary to name a powerless peasant as the chief power. It is spectacular to turn things on their head in such a way. Effectively, Peter's remarkable insight, which proceeded from his unbearable memory, was the first Easter, the first "vision" of the risen Christ. Now, it was all part of a plan. Jesus was with God. "It was meant to be." The prophets predicted everything. Everything was OK.

And that's when Peter's courage finally hit him…all of a sudden, he…and his friends who ran away, had found their courage. They found courage to speak and preach and proclaim the message of love and peace their teacher had taught them in the context of their new affirmation as to who he really was, God's answer to Caesar's violence. Now the words, which had been strangling in their mouths these many months since his tragic death, came forward. Now their feet marched forward. The courage came late…after the fact. But it was courage when it eventually came. And they even faced death themselves with that courage in their hearts.

But I wish it had happened earlier. Jesus would have lived, not been crucified. And, yes, it's possible. Maybe Christianity itself would not have developed. But even if the loss of the drama of the cross had left Jesus of Galilee forgotten, you and I know that, in two thousand years, someone would have eventually said the words again: "Love your enemies. Consider the lilies, how they grow. Question the system and overturn their tables. Don't settle for being lost. Your priorities will determine who you are. Decide for yourself. Hunger for justice. You are worthy. Be courageous and ask for what you know is right." After all, as Easter has always reminded me, it's the word and the spirit which are immortal, not flesh and blood.

But what about the body stuff? The idea, that so many preach on this day, that Jesus was raised in the flesh? I have a different take on that idea. I think that idea was rooted in the understanding that Derrick Jensen presents in his magnificent book A Language Older Than Words.

There is another kind of revolution, he writes, one that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from the sense, but instead from our bodies.

Our bodies that are like the body of the honey bee, fierce in defense of its brothers and sisters.

Or like the Native Americans whose bodies had the courage to resist the mighty tyranny of the colonists, or like the women who have the courage to tie themselves to trees in front of the bulldozers, or like the Zapatistas in Mexico who refuse to be slaves to the system. Or I think of Spartacus, the slave who had the courage to revolt against being a slave even though he also ended up on a Roman cross. Or the famous revolt at Treblinka. Or that powerful uprising in Warsaw.

Uprising. Did you hear that word. Uprising? The English meaning of both the words insurrection and resurrection. An uprising, a resurrection, is a person, or a group of people, who refuse to be defeated, who gather their courage, despite their very reasonable fears, and speak up and speak out and even act. Who say No to oppression and Yes to the future of justice on earth. The Warsaw Uprising was a resurrection of the body…the body of the people oppressed there. Easter is not a Jewish holiday, but on that day, some resurrection was going on, as far as I am concerned.

I think of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, no longer cooperating with the patriarchal rules that hemmed them in. "Women are not allowed to have a voice," proclaimed the men, sending them packing. Their response, the great conferences like the one at Seneca Falls in 1848, was also an Easter Day. It was a resurrection of the body of the people there.

I think of sexual minorities who have said, "A pox on all of you. I will ask and I will tell, for I am a human being, not an embarrassment."

In all such refusals to capitulate to a hurtful and controlling culture, I see many Easters, a hundred resurrections, a thousand resurrections, an Eastering of the spirit which leaves me breathless and full of wonder.

Why do some people have the courage to stand up, to get going, to resurrect? I am not sure. I have not been able to find out. I suspect such courage comes from something deeper than our reason, deeper even than our passions, our usual emotions. In Herman Hesse's words, it comes from deeper "strata" in the body, something that might even be called spirit. But believe me, when I use this word spirit, I am still talking about the body, about the whole person, not a disembodied phantom. I am talking about being alive now. I am talking about those who feel "in their very bones" that the injustices experienced by others haunt their heart, and won't let them go. And I think sensitivity to such feelings in one's bones can be cultivated. And such cultivation is what I would mean by the word "spiritual life." Working to feed the homeless, meditation, therapy, certain forms of prayer, good religious ritual, any of these and more can help make up the structure of a spiritual life. But the purpose of a spiritual life is clearly the cultivation of courage in the human heart so that abundant life in this world is a possibility for everyone.

Courage is not some comfortable "virtue" you will, or a way of viewing the world that you rationally choose, as far as I am concerned. When you know your own back is against the wall, and you stand up away from that wall and come forward to confront the powers that oppress you no matter what the consequences will be, you'll find what courage means.

Now please, I am not suggesting dramatic things here, just because I have used a dramatic example about the death of Jesus and Peter's slow courage. I am not suggesting that the only real life is at the barricades, or the only honest life is a protest march, although certainly showing up at the B.R.E.A.D. meeting, that Cathy Levine talked about, would be a great way to get things started.

I guess I am just asking us all to remember how we were when we were children…our instincts of fairness and justice were so clear back then. "That's not fair!" we would say immediately.

We didn't philosophize about it. We just spoke up. But as we grow up, we are slowly silenced. We are slowly divorced from the juice, in our own bodies, which cries out for fairness. We are trained by family, by church or synagogue, by school, to recite the mantra, "Life isn't fair. Life isn't fair. Life isn't fair. Get used to it. Don't expect anything." We do this, I suppose, to take away at least some of the pain of being aware of how much injustice there is around us. In schools with unequal education for different classes of people; in businesses where the constant downsizing, which wrecks people's lives is, well, "just business"; in neighborhoods which are divided by falsely moral language into "good neighborhoods" and "bad neighborhoods"; and in the very halls of government itself, where other things besides the sparsely attended voting booth can sway the powers that be. It takes a lot of courage to live in a world like this. It takes courage not to run away from such realities into one's head, into despair, into socially approved social self-medicating, and, my personal favorite, into long philosophical excuses as to why "nothing can be done."

Nothing can be done, and a group of ordinary citizens took on the power and might of Rome itself and prevailed?

Nothing can be done, and women vote, run for congress, and pilot shuttles into space?

Nothing can be done, and four thousand years of human slavery has mostly perished off the earth?

Nothing can be done?

Easter says it can be done.

Easter for me is the day when we are invited to rise up, exactly like the flowers rise in spring in the northern hemisphere. They rise out of the frozen mire, to join with others to make a body, in the poet's word, of gorgeous "insurrection," making the earth beautiful with justice.

The Capek Blessing and Hallowing of the Flowers [back to top]

In the name of the providence which implants into the heart of the seed the future of the flower, and which implants in our hearts that unrest which will not be quenched till people live lovingly with each other, we bless these flowers.

In the name of the highest, in which we live and move and take our being, and in the name of the deepest, which makes father and mother, brother and sister, lover and loner who they are, we bless these flowers.

In the name of the prophets and sages, who sacrificed their lives to hasten the coming of the age of mutual respect, we bless these flowers.

Let us renew our resolution, sincerely, to be sisters and brothers regardless of the barriers which estrange.

May these flowers be, for us, the sign of the glory and variety to which we aspire, knowing the whole while that we are one family, the family of spirit and nature.

In this holy resolve, may we be strengthened by the spirit of love, that we ourselves may bloom, bloom in splendor of a joyful life, and endeavor to be ever more perfect in our days.

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