Awakening Life

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

April 12 , 2009

SERMON

As he prepared to introduce his project – the two years he spent in a cabin in the woods of Concord intending, in his words, “to live deliberately” – Henry David Thoreau began with some reflections on the morning.

“Every morning,” he wrote in Walden, “was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

Thoreau’s early rising and bath in Walden Pond, which he described as “a religious exercise and one of the best things which I did,” shook all manner of slumber out of him, he said: not only the physical, but the moral and intellectual as well, bringing to mind a saying he attributed to a Chinese King: “Renew thyself completely each day: do it again, and again, and forever again.”

Every day, he insisted, “contains an earlier and more sacred hour than (we have) yet profaned,” and so might we open our eyes each morning, prepared to attend to that fact and the hope that attends it. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,” Thoreau wrote, “not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”

This is the time of year when we truly live in expectation of the dawn. What new bulb will burst open today? What tree will erupt into flower or the filigree of fine green haze that signals this year’s first tender leaves? The ancient cycle of seasons turns, and we know that once again the forsythia will blaze into yellow flame and the crocus will send up its perfect purple parenthesis.

And yet while the cycle is ancient, each manifestation is new. This year’s tulip is not last year’s tulip. There is a freshness to it that, as Jacob Trapp puts it, is an ineffable gift that renews our vision, that awakens us to renewed possibility.

Amid this all we arrive at Easter, the culminating moment of the Christian year, marking the death of Jesus and the birth of the Christian church. The Easter flowers that decorate the churches today serve to celebrate that beginning, the blooming of faith from under the heel of oppression, the emergence of life from death symbolized in the story of Jesus’ resurrection.

We need not affirm the details of the story itself – the rolling away of the stone, the empty tomb, the angelic messenger and the stories of Jesus’ reappearance – to appreciate the transforming influence that Jesus had on his followers. Jesus Seminar scholar John Dominic Crossan has even suggested that the gospel narratives that tell of events in the days after Jesus’ death are in fact a telescoped summary of some years during which the thinking and practices of Jesus’ followers evolved.

What little we know about that period suggests that after the shock of loss, Jesus’ followers gathered into small, egalitarian communities teaching that a new way of being in the world, what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, was available to those lived a life centered in radical love.

But where specifically does the event of Jesus’ death fit in all of this? Today, across Christian churches of all stripes there is a rough consensus that Jesus is central to faith as the risen Christ whose crucifixion, whose death on the cross, saved the world and to this day assures believers a place in heaven at their deaths.

There are some, though, who while affirming Jesus’ teachings, question this message and see in it instead a sanction for violence and war, who find in the teaching that one person’s suffering can make up for another person’s misdeeds, that death and injury are redemptive an error that has contributed to terrible patterns of injustice and abuse.

In their recent book, Saving Paradise, Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock write that as distressed as they were by this way of thinking at the heart of the traditional Easter story, they had assumed from what they had been taught that it was central to Christianity. So, they headed off to some of the oldest churches in Europe to document for themselves how this had come to be.

What they discovered surprised them. Contrary to what they had been taught, they found that for a thousand years the death of Jesus was not the focus of Christian worship. The clearest indication of this was in the murals and mosaics of those ancient churches. Rather than the forlorn figure of Christ on the cross, the images that dominated the artwork were pastoral scenes, and where human figures appeared their arms were open and welcoming. Parker and Brock realized that what they were looking at was a depiction of paradise.

But this paradise was not some imaginary, distant place in the clouds with harps and angels. The landscape was clearly the orchards and low hills of the Mediterranean world: not a distant land, but the land of the people who created it. Yet, in that landscape, they said, the artwork’s vivid colors projected a sense of luminosity about the whole scene, as if, in their words, the subjects were “lit from within,” shining with an inner beauty.

“Our modern views of heaven and paradise think of them as a world after death,” they write. “However, in the early church, paradise – first and foremost – was this world permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. It was on the earth.” The world around them was not flawed and fallen, a place that the believer looked forward to escaping for “a better place.” The images they saw on the walls projected a sense, they said, of “aesthetic, emotional, spiritual and intellectual expressions of life in the present, in a world created as good and delightful.”

The scenes in these early churches, then, sought to point the believer toward the path of realizing paradise on Earth, a luminous place embraced for the wonder it holds. And that was a path that sought to guide the believer to resist the forces of evil and oppression and instead learn a discipline that Parker and Brock call “ethical grace”: love and generosity in community, care for all who have need, healing of the sick, appreciation for life, and confronting powers of injustice.

Acting in such a way gave followers a window into paradise, a sense of the kingdom of God on earth, a place where the teachings of radical love are realized. Their intent was to be born into the spirit of life and love and through their lives bless those they touched with a similar understanding. Though they mourned the loss of Jesus, they saw that the most courageous response to his death was to do as he had done, to employ the powers of life.

But it took more than a personal experience to achieve this transformation. It took the support and disciplines of a community that evolved over time to help its followers envision this luminous understanding to open their hearts to the world.

Approaching the second millennium, though, things changed. Images of the crucified Jesus began appearing in churches and moved to the center of Christian rituals. Looking over the factors driving this change, Parker and Brock discovered that what they called “the brutal logic of empire” had shifted the church’s emphasis.

The key figure in this transition was the king known as Charlemagne, who, in his drive to unify the Holy Roman Empire, recruited the aid of the church. Priests traveling with his army declared that the resurrection cross of Christ symbolized a force that protected them in battle and led them to victory.

A new rite of communion was instituted that Charlemagne’s theologians declared embodied the true flesh and blood of Christ on the cross, bringing the crucified Christ, rather than the spirit of Jesus who had defeated death into worship. By bringing Jesus’ death, rather than the enduring life of his teachings, into the center of faith, Parker and Brock say, paradise, the kingdom of God on earth was lost. Entrance to the spiritual realm was postponed to the hereafter, and communion with the luminous beauty of the earth and the saving hope of radical love were abandoned, replaced with faith centered in a domineering church and its elevated clergy.

Today we live with the consequences of that turn many centuries ago, with a sensibility that sees the Earth as a resource to be exploited, that finds fulfillment in consumption, with a sense of spirituality that too often is centered in a narrow and self-centered piety.

It is ironic to reflect on this journey on, of all days, Easter Sunday, when the blooming, buzzing world around us shines with a luminous beauty that demands that we attend to it: paradise, perhaps not, but darned close. With Jacob Trapp, on such a day I am amazed to the point of ecstasy at the miracle of awareness and filled with gratitude to be present for it.  It is a place where truly the possible and the future seem one, where we are challenged to renew ourselves completely.

And yet, with Henry Thoreau, I wonder how aware, how awake we are. Do we locate ourselves as part of this riot of emerging life, or simply observers of it? How would it be to live with an ethical grace: in Parker and Brock’s words, “a full-bodied life in the present, attuned to what is beautiful and good,” responsive to the hope and beauty, the infinite wonder in each of us? How would it be to make of this world sacred space by loving all of it and all of us fiercely?

We may have long abandoned or never adopted the perspective that sees our reward in “a better place,” in the sweet by and by. But we, too, can find ourselves bit by the bug of restless angst that projects a paradise of our own imagining at some place in the distance, trudging through days of obligation and dissatisfaction, oblivious to the wonder in both the place and the faces that surround us.

 We are indeed in need of a religious perspective that allows us to life that is full-bodied, open-hearted and aware in our present lives, that embodies practices of ethical grace that infuse us with a deep sense of dignity for ourselves and others, committed to the work of living rightly with each other and the Earth.

 Easter arrives on our calendar as a moment of transformation, inviting us to let something go that something better might be born, to let down our guard, the suspicion that nothing will ever come of our good intent, and send forth a blessing.

With that act we own, at least for a moment, our own power. We touch the hope, that sacred and auroral hour that hides in our hearts and release it that it might just help change the world.

May we more often awaken to that power, and as Henry Thoreau suggests, keep ourselves awake, not through distraction or busyness, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn within each of us, which does not forsake us, even in our soundest sleep.