HUU Sermon Archives

Jesus Christ and Peter Cottontail — a matter of Semantics?

by Merle Wenger
Easter Sunday, March 31, 2002

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Opening song "Here comes Peter Cottontail" sung by presenter while distributing treats to the children.

Chalice lighting thought: I enjoy getting inspiration from the moment and I had just that on this rainy, Easter morning, I had to make a ten-minute walk downtown and as I walked in the drizzle, I met a 10-inch-long earthworm making its way up 1st Street. She appeared to be having a very good time-all stretched out and soaking up the rain. But I was rather mystified by her situation. Here she was, in the middle of a 30-foot-wide asphalt street, headed, not towards the grass and earth on either side, but due West, the only direction, as was the case, where she would have to travel at least 1000 feet before she would hit land. I wondered, had she tried to cross the street, and come within 2 feet of the edge, only to give up and turn around to go back in the other direction? How many times had she done this before she headed west? Or did she know that she was taking the most difficult route, sort of an "I know life is difficult, but I love the rain" attitude?

A bit further on as I crossed Elizabeth Street, a duck stood in the middle of the street, flapping his wings as if he owned the day. I could only imagine how many people were disappointed that this was a rainy day. How would the rain affect sunrise services? What about leaking tents at those Easter reenactment scenes? How many people had a bad morning getting ready for church as they worried about all their fine Easter clothes getting soaked? And, dear me, what is the White House going to do with all those thousands of Easter eggs I saw them coloring on last evenings news? But for the duck, this was only reason to stand out in the middle of the street at 7:30 in the morning and flex his wings a little.

I thought the earthworm, the duck and the rain, all reinforced the idea, for me, that Easter is a day that celebrates mystery. And what could possibly demonstrate that any better than the earthworm heading silently, patiently, uphill on a well-traveled street, celebrating this wet day while I could not even begin to imagine the "why" of her story. All I can do is respect the journey.

Reading from Chief Seattle:

When the last Red Man shall have perished from this earth and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe . . . And when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone . . .At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land . . . The White Man will never be alone . . . Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless . . .Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds."

Additional readings from rap artist Tupac Shakur

Album: Still I Rise, Song "The Good Die Young"

It was more than a tragedy
Emotions be grabbin' me
Plane fell from the sky
We tryin' to figure what happened
Burnin' churches, fearin' God
Who can be so cruel
We all ignorant to AIDS
Till it happen to you
Just be a man, make plans
Listen to your voice
A woman's tryin to make decisions
We should leave them a choice
Cause who are we to say who lives and dies
Breathes and stops
All this judgement on other lives
Needs to stop
What are we livin' for
Givin' more back than takin'
On my knees still waitin' for my own salvation
Now I feel abandoned
Cause Pat Buchanan say I'm greedy
You can take my taxes, send me to war
But can't feed me
It's so easy to regret things
After they done
Babies catchin' murder cases
Scared to laugh in the sun
The tragedies that we all need
Love in doses
In times like these we feel closest
The good die young.

Album: Still I Rise, Song: U Can Be Touched

Oh God forgive me
Somebody please say a prayer for me
Needed my parents
But they was never there for me
Believe in everything they feed me
I'm seeing demons
I wake up screaming
Who believe me or was I dreaming?
Five fingers on the .45 chrome
Dead aim at the brain, infrared with no lights on
I ain't afraid to die, I want to see what's after this
I'm living blind writing rhymes
Til they capture this
And if we die let the world understand why
Soldier my eyes hate to see a young thug cry
They seeing us inside a casket
That's how they see us
Oh God forgive us ghetto bastards
We human beings
They leaving us inside this hell-hole
Just waiting to fail so they tell us
That's what jail for
Adolescence young teens turned violent
It's floating, in a world turned silent
Cause you could be touched

Main Message

I like holidays. Maybe it's the inner child thing, maybe it's the food, or maybe it's tradition. I don't care whether someone celebrates Easter by going to a hilltop and watching the sun come up--some of them worshiping the sun, some of them remembering the story that it was at sunrise on Easter many years ago when Mary, the mother of Jesus and his friend, Mary Magdalene, supposedly went to the tomb and found the stone rolled aside and Jesus' body missing. I tend to think we should celebrate holidays because they have been around a long time and for that reason all the metaphors of new life from old are valid. Whether it be bright green Easter grass, signifying the feeble thrust of fresh, new blades pushing through the brown, matted, mass of last years dead remains, or jumpy little Peter Cottontails, celebrating the miracle-like speedy regeneration life-cycle of bunnies, or the proliferation of cuddly, fluffy, down-covered chicks which pop out of eggs as if to say that even seemingly inanimate objects can in fact spring to life--without giving a thought to the gangly, awkward, full-grown chickens they will mature into in 50 days. Easter is about regeneration, about the cycle of life, death and rebirth.

I love Easter, most of all, because it holds that one ingredient necessary for any good holiday-mystery-the mystery about how life and death are connected. Psychologist Stanislav Grof, in his Book of the Dead; Manuals for Living and Dying, points out that the modern era, with its scientific and industrial revolutions, brought about to humanity "a progressive alienation from our biological nature and loss of connection with the spiritual source." Three basic areas in particular that link humans to the rest of nature: "birth, sex and death, were subjected to deep psychological repression and denial." Maybe this is enough reason to examine the UU's Christian roots and their emphasis on life, death and resurrection. (As recounted in Matthew Fox's, One River, Many Wells)

The meaning and origins of Easter are as diverse and convoluted as you might expect, considering the delight we take in language manipulation. No other species maintains a tool, similar to language, to define so discriminatingly how its members are slightly different from each other. Of course without language we human beings would not be so complex. We have become obsessed with our collective language behavior. We actually presume, because of this tool, that we can decipher what other people are thinking, or perhaps what they should be thinking.

Unlike my cat, Smokie, whose eyes I gaze into quizzically, in an attempt to communicate compassion and understanding. Merely 10 minutes later she assumes a warrior role as she darts madly from some under-the-chair hideout to pounce upon the helpless little toes of my bare feet. I'm sure I simply appear as the unenlightened one in this ritual of the hunt.

Smokie has little interest in pondering the riddle of existence through endless daytime and nighttime churning of a language imagination. However, if the amount of time Smokie spends sleeping and meditating is any indication of her spiritual depth and acceptance of mystery in life, then it is possible that everyday, for Smokie, is a holiday.

The Buddhist writer, Ticht Naht Hanh, recounts the relationship of vertical and horizontal theology. He says if we cannot get in touch with the horizontal-relating to other people, plants and animals, then we have little hope of achieving a vertical theology-a relationship with a higher spiritual reality-I might add that for me the two are inseparable. Part of being a UU for me is accepting that my cat, Smokie, has something to teach me.

I am a UU because I respect the power of mystery. I believe, like many UU's that the mystery created when you combine a respect for the traditions of pagan, atheist, humanist and religious experience, that the sum of the experience is exponentially greater than any individual path. I am a UU because the restless meandering of my childhood mind flew in the face of simple Christian teaching. But I have not chosen to discard those teachings, rather to preserve and supplement them. I can not carry the burden of telling others how they can or can not worship. That feels like part of another life I lived. Somehow to proselytize makes me feel insecure. I can not pretend that my path could supplant another. But I do feel energized by the life creating ideologies of hope/despair that I glean from the traditions of Buddhists, Christians, Jews, earth centered worshipers, atheists, agnostics, and modern rap musicians to mention a few.

I am aware that my understanding and journey is possible only because of when and where I live, and had I lived 3000 years ago my language and myths would be entirely different. I am also aware that my belief in finding my own personal path means I must respect and tolerate the path of all others. That is what our first principle is about-to respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Make no mistake about it--that includes the most irresponsible person you know, the politician you love to rail against, the TV evangelist who chooses to spoon feed his flock the same generic brand of spiritual Pablum that the mother church fed him. The minute we exclude one person from our vow of compassionate respect, then the mystery of Unitarian Universalism dissipates. To adopt strict tolerance for only a week is an exercise in discipline that can challenge and amaze you.

Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Russian physicist, once told his wife, Elena Bonner, that the thing he loved most in the world was radio background emanation--the barely discernable radio waves which reach us here on earth from outer space and reflect unknown cosmic processes that ended billions of years ago. What he was saying of course was that in spite of all his knowledge about physics and astronomy, it was the mystery of the cosmos that intrigued him the most. (As taken from Pocket Guide to Unitarian Universalism.)

Easter is a celebration of Joy for Christians--in 325AD a church council, decided that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the spring equinox on March 21. Therefore Easter falls between March 22 and April 25. On the previous Sunday Jesus supposedly rode into the palm-strewn streets of Jerusalem, on a donkey, celebrated the well-documented Last Supper on Maundy or Holy Thursday, was crucified by his enemies and hanged on a cross on Good Friday. His dead body was placed in a tomb later that day and he subsequently rose from the dead on a Sunday: thus, the mystery. And then, the most amazing thing of all. This man uses the power of language over the next 40 days to convince his followers that, not only has he risen from the dead, but that he will ascend now to the heavens, only to return again to take the chosen with him. Talk about the power of language. And to think of the implications of this single week's events, regardless of how much you believe it is based on fact or fiction, you come to understand the power of Easter.

As is often the case with official church holidays, pagan celebrations and customs were incorporated into the religious celebration as a sensible marketing tool to sell more product--or collect greater Sunday morning offerings. Any church treasurer is sympathetic. According to an article I found on the web at religioustolerance.org, "Many religious historians believe that the death and resurrection legends were first associated with Attis, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. They were simply grafted onto stories of Jesus' life in order to make Christian theology more acceptable to Pagans. Attis was a fictional consort to the Phrygian fertility goddess, Cybele. Attis was believed to have been born via a virgin birth and he was believed to have died and been resurrected each year during the period March 22 to March 25. What we come to realize is that most pagan religions in the Mediterranean are had some kind of day of religious celebration following the spring equinox and it is impossible to separate the Christian Easter from these celebrations. In fact, it really detracts from the meaning of Easter to do so. It weakens the encompassing power of the Easter message.

Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, points out that it is Christ on the cross that makes him lovable-here we see the emphasis on the imperfect deity-representing the suffering part of God. I think this is why this story persists today-because people identify with the idea of imperfection. The most recent issue of the UU World cautions us that by putting too much emphasis on the suffering Christ, we can encourage people to live in abusive situations and not take care of themselves. That is a valid criticism. On the other hand the idea of accepting suffering as a part of life is common to most spiritual traditions; many such as Buddhism and Hinduism that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years before the Christian era. I think the trouble arises when you see God as a separate being from Christ who says, "You're gonna die, young man," rather than a part of Christ's or man's psyche choosing to die rather than fight his opponents. That, on the other hand is a story that is easy for me to believe as I recall the half dozen people, some young, some old, who have told me, over the past year, how much they would like to be done with their battle of life. Apparently this tension between life and death, this desire to give up the battle, is a dynamic thread that runs deep within the human psyche.

The particulars of how Christ died or how he was killed are really as foggy as the particulars of dozens of other sacrifice and rebirth stories. The important part of the Easter story is more personal-the idea that we can cast aside darkness and despair in our lives and experience positive regeneration and we can do this with the support of many world myths and regeneration models. The death and resurrection motif is repeated over and over: in the monthly cycles of the moon, the daily and yearly journey of the sun, the annual return of the seasons. Or think about the recurring cycles of drought and flooding of great river basins of the world, such as the Nile, or the cycle of snowy cold and growing seasons in the Swiss Alps, not to mention the constant time-keeping ebb and flow of the

tides over millions of years. To many physicists the ultimate example of the birth and death cycle would be the explosion of matter that resulted in our universe and the contrasting implosion that will follow some millions of years hereafter.

When he started teaching comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell was concerned his teachings might destroy the religious beliefs of his students. He taught students from all the great religions of the world but what he found was that his teachings only energized his students' quest for spiritual truth. "There's no danger in interpreting the symbols of a religious system and calling them metaphors instead of facts. What that does is to turn them into messages for your own inner experience and life. The system suddenly becomes a personal experience."

Now to look at a few other resurrection stories.

According to the ancient Maya, things are never what they seem. Or rather they are always more than they seem. (Here again you see the idea of mystery.) At the core of the Maya's instructions for resurrecting the soul was their belief that even life and death are not what they appear to be. The one changes into the other in a hallucinogenic, dreamlike way. Good is exposed as possessing the germ of evil within it, and evil seems to miraculously give birth to good. (We hear the same thing over and over in our own Joys and Concerns time in Sunday morning service-that joy and sorrow are so often connected-one leading to the other.) All creations, including human creatures-societies, institutions, and relationships-carry the seeds of their own destruction, and out of destruction and loss, new life emerges. As was true for the gods in their myths, the Maya believed that sacrificial death of the most gruesome kind was the necessary prelude to rebirth, and the tortured sacrificial victims, in the twinkling of an eye, became gods on the other side of death's dreaded portal." (from The Shaman's Secret by Douglas Gilette) This story also reminded me that the violence of the Christian resurrection story is rather tame compared with many others, especially one that Joseph Campbell recounts from New Guinea.

Among the North American Hopi, the experience of emergence and rebirth pervade every progressive cycle of life. The spiritual rebirth of the community nurtures the rebirth of every individual . . . Hopi life must follow a path which coincides with the cycle of the natural world, a cycle of fertilization, birth, youth, maturity, death and rebirth. On the earth, the Hopis must follow a divinely ordered path of life and at death they must follow the sacred path to the spirit world where the protection and sustenance of the Hopi peoples on earth is their principal responsibility. (Taken from Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells)

Yesterday, a friend from Pittsburgh shared with me the some of the liturgy from the Passover service she attended Friday night. "We give praise for the fruit of the vine, and for the festivals of joy, seasons and holidays for happiness, among them the Passover-the season of liberation, a day of sacred assembly, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt . . . Each spring people celebrate creation and the mystery of life. We remind ourselves that both the tender greens of the earth and salts of the sea joined together to sustain life. We remember that the brine of tears releases the strength to live. We break the bread of slavery, and remember the people who are not free by setting aside these pieces of Matzah. Tonight we add our voices to all those who have risen their voices in pain. They will not be forgotten." (At this point in the service, each person was asked to offer the name of someone who is not free of whatever it is that imprisons them.)

Or as seen by Kahil Gibran the life and death cycle is seemingly effortless. "In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring. Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity . . . And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered. Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."

I can not take away these symbols, these metaphors of hope even if they do not work for me. I can not assume the selfish pretense that gives me the right to lay claim to the message of hope and redemption for others. It is in the moments of personal crisis and death that we are forced to stop and listen for answers to the haunting cycle of life and death--to formulate from our being and experience an archetype that elevates our life out of anxiety to a level of peace.

Just imagine which life and death stories might have given hope and peace of mind to famous people we all know-people who know experienced great suffering near the end of their lives. Elvis Presley--what mystery of death and life resurrection did he turn to get him through his misery, or Martin Luther King or Gandhi, or Anne Frank FDR, Nelson Mandela, Solzchenitzen, The Japanese kamikaze pilots of WWII, or the now famous abused child called It, Angela Yates in Prison, the children who have died on the battlefields of Chechnya, Gettysburg or Rwanda, and to the millions who have suffered undeservedly for the misdeeds of the larger society. In imagining the horror these men and women faced, I think we accept the vision that delivers them out of their pain and suffering.

But even more important is the fact that at the same time that I can not adopt any one of these messages of hope and new life, I also can not claim personally their restorative power. Rather I must look within my experience; I must create my story of death and resurrection, I must weave the threads of my Christian heritage and its rich, mythological patterns, with my animal nature and my non-Christian heritage, for, after all, my ancestry goes back prior to Christ. (In fact I am always more interested in imagining my ancestry in the middle ages, or say 4000 years ago then I am of those of the last 200 years.)

Or on a more personal note my messages of death and resurrection this year are:

• Watching a close friend fight the ravages of drug addiction and little by little pull themselves out of that darkness,
• recognizing how personal friendship and community like we have here can rescue us from the numbing doldrums of this reality-based experience we call life,
• watching a mentally-handicapped friend who is coping with defining a new life dependent on medication,
• observing my dad, and my friend, Gail, adapt, rather unwillingly to a nursing home life, where a great deal of time is spent staring at the walls.

I stand in awe of hope. I think mystery is related to faith: often defined as "the evidence of things unseen" or stated another way, the "non-evidence of things seen." In spite of my respect for the scientific process and mythology, I will continue to cultivate my relationship with mystery. I will continue listening for clues: in the silence of the morning sunrise, I will turn off the lights, the radio and television, keep the newspaper in its rubber band, I will set aside my morning coffee and toast. I will attempt to block out all things seen and part of the known, and then the regenerative powers of the mind will take over momentarily and deliver me from the death of micromanaging my sensory experience.

For a moment I will delight in an experience more personally spiritual that the message of Jesus Christ, Peter Cottontail, the colored eggs and the green grass or fragrant blooms of springtime flowers. I will even attempt to relinquish all the facts that I have sifted from those metaphors. For a brief moment I will join Smokie and sit in quiet contemplation, reaching out for clues from silence, seeking to be aware of the irrational chapters of my story, evidence as provocative as radio background emanation. I will do this because I feel more whole, more connected to reality, when I respect the power of mystery.

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