April 4, 2010

Where Hope Lives - Easter

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

Asheville, NC

SERMON

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a bit like that black bear these days: Rising from a long, hard winter, a little disoriented, stumbling down the hillside, ready to sharpen my claws against the silent trees just now erupting into leaf and flower. Perhaps in my scratching I might touch that essence, that agent of renewal that somehow orchestrates this astonishing greening that I see all around me.

Without fail, even though it is the oldest story on Earth, the coming of spring each year surprises me: the exuberance of songbirds, those gangs of finches that suddenly invade the feeders; the trilling of toads and the cheeping of frogs, whose calls had slipped from memory until, oh, there they are again; the intensity of color, was the yellow of the forsythia, the pink of the cherries always that brilliant? Each day I reacquaint myself with another figure in the landscape emerging from slumber.

All of this confronts me with a further question: How might I, how might we, too, come to know renewal, and, if so, where does renewal come from? It is in a sense the central question of religion: What is it that connects me most deeply with what I know to be true? To what can I give my heart that I might live freely with integrity and at peace? It is a variation of what Mary Oliver called the only question: How to love this world?

It is a question that goes far beyond simply appreciating the world in which we live and move and have our being, that world now trumpeting itself with every daffodil, every gentle breeze. It is also about coming to know what the poem calls “this dazzling blackness” within us that seeks and yearns, “coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting.”

It’s a question about hope, about finding a way to live that puts that essential vitality to the service of the best that we know, to name and know the love that settles our souls and lives in our hearts.

I am grateful to my friend Jim McKinley, minister of the UU Fellowship of Hendersonville, for a distinction that I find helps me think about what hope is and how it serves our religious life. He argues that there are two different ways of understanding hope: one is hope in; the other is hope for.

Hope for is always oriented toward a future outcome or state. I hope for a certain thing to happen. Nearly everything we do has some kind of hope attached to it. It could be as simple as hoping for a good grade on a term paper or hoping that someone we’re attracted to will like us. This kind of hope can bring us some solidarity with others when we share a hope as a couple, a family, a city, a nation. It can, indeed, unite people in that way.

The downside of this sort of hope, though, is that it is centered in a present sense of loss, deprivation, even despair. We hope for something we do not have. If our hopes are unrealized, we are left unhappy and unsatisfied with little to show for it.

Hope in, though, takes a different tack. What we have hope in is what sustains us while we wait to see if all the things that we hope for come to pass. A parent may hope, say, that her child will make the sports team or do well in school, but whatever the outcome of all that it will have no bearing on a deeper hope that arises from her love for that child, love that colors her world and helps give meaning to her life.

Hope for can be simple, passive. It requires no special investment. We simply wait to receive. Hope in, on the other hand, is active and engaged. It is a motivating force that guides our way in the world.

The Easter story being celebrated in churches around the world today is often framed as a story of hope, and so it is worth reflecting, what kind hope does this story celebrate? Is it a story of hope in, or of hope for, and what does it have to offer us?

 We begin with the events leading up to Jesus’ death on Good Friday. Altogether, they certainly paint a grim picture, from his abandonment by the sleeping disciples, to his betrayal by Judas, his capture, imprisonment, condemnation, abuse and crucifixion. If there ever was a moment absent of hope, it is Jesus’ death on the cross.

Then, what? Different gospels tell the Easter story in different ways, but the consensus is that the next day the grave where his body was placed was empty and that at some point later he appeared to his followers to assure them that he had risen from the dead and to urge them to continue to spread his teachings.

What are we to make of this story? Seen from the perspective of hoping for, it is the tale of an otherworldly figure who surmounts what experience tells us is a fundamental limit on all things, the finality of death, and in doing so offers those who would follow him a similar path for themselves.

Among the things that one might hope for, eternal life certainly ranks as a pretty good reward. And yet, the price of that hope is essentially to abandon the hope of finding meaning in the world of our experience. If true hope is to be found in the otherworldly, then our pedestrian world with its pedestrian concerns is little more than a hindrance.

Such a hope, for all its claims to joy, is in the end a recipe for despair and ultimately an abnegation of self. I am bid to deny all that calls to me in this life and to put my trust in a future fate. Little wonder that this reading of the Easter story occupies itself so heavily with the miraculous, which serves to reinforce its counterintuitive claims.

Unfortunately, this reading reduces the notion of faith to some variety of wishful thinking. Despite the bravado with which claims for it are made, it plays most powerfully to our fears and a way of living in the world that actually can work against hope.

There is, however, another way to read the Easter story, a way that is in keeping with the elliptical nature of the gospels themselves, that invites us to discover hope in and through our individual and communal lives.

This reading begins by understanding the context in which the Easter story is told.  In each telling in the Bible, the Easter narrative marks a major shift when the subject is no longer the life and deeds of Jesus but the context in which his legacy is understood. The gospels collected in the New Testament, we know, constitute only four of perhaps a dozen or so tellings of Jesus’ life and legacy. Their having been included in the canon of the Christian church represents victories by groups within that church who sought room for their perspectives. And, in reading the gospels, scholars have been able to tease out how different elements of the story reflect the communities within the church arguing for their point of view.

To treat the Easter story as a simple historical account, then, is to misunderstand the nature of the narrative itself. In terms of history, we have evidence that Jesus, a prophetic Jewish figure in 1st Century Palestine, lived and died, and that his followers carried on what they understood to be his teachings. The otherworldy elements of the story, including rising from the dead, mirror traits attributed to other prophetic figures at the time. They were, in essence, part of the vernacular for the telling of such stories.

But, most important, they are not what was most unique about Jesus’ ministry. For that we turn to his teachings of radically inclusive ethical life, teachings that pointed, not to some home in the sweet by and by, but to the possibilities that could be realized among those he taught and among us now, possibilities he framed in language of the time as the kingdom of God, a kingdom that was not so much proclaimed as lived into existence.

This suggests, then, that those who were to bring this kingdom about were not the dead but the living. Jesus’ death left those he had inspired and taught to accomplish that. His success was evidenced, not by rising into the clouds in glory, but by enunciating a vision so persuasive, so transformative that his devoted disciples were able to carry it forward without him.

So, it’s not hard to imagine that amid their grief in the days, weeks and months after Jesus’ death, those who walked with him in life could feel his presence with them and had a sense of how he would guide them.

John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar scholar, argues that one element of what was distinctive about Jesus’ message was that, in his words, it was “an empowering rather than a dominating one.” Jesus, Crossan says, “did not send others out to speak about himself or bring others to him. He told them they could do just what he was doing. They could heal one another, share their food together and thereby bring the kingdom into their midst.”

In this reading, then, the Easter message is one, not of hope for, but of hope in. Its point is not to argue for an eruption of the natural order that awaits the chosen believer. Instead, it invites one to envision a way of being in the world that will liberate oneself and all people. It is a way of being that we discover by living fully, openly, and with integrity in common life.

We can find hope in this way of being together. It empowers us to live out of our best selves and see renewal as a possibility available to any of us at any time, if we should turn our hearts to each other and be open ourselves to receiving. It is not an otherworldly hope. It arises in the context of our lives with each gesture of appreciation and love, and it is fed by a resulting deepening of relationship and more profound knowledge of ourselves. Each gesture makes the next more possible and more likely.

Our annual giving of blessings is a way we both demonstrate and remind ourselves of this truth. As Rachel Naomi Remen puts it, “A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people remember and acknowledge their true worth and nature.”

This is now the third year that we have offered this blessing exercise at Easter, and I wish that for a moment I could sneak you in to watch the opening of the eggs you have filled. While I haven’t been present myself, I have heard the accounts of what happens as the children gather in an attitude of something like awe to hear the messages read. Well, who could blame them? Imagine finding surprises filled with messages that are not the sayings of some anonymous fortune cookie maker but words of people of your own community written to bless you and bring you hope.

Think about it: In that gesture, with your words of hope you have extended yourself to that child. You have helped her or him experience the grace of relationship that begins from a point of appreciation, your appreciation of their own true worth. And they have been given the opportunity to see themselves in that light.

Your words scribbled quickly on a piece of pastel paper may not, a la Denise Levertov, have offered that child the secret of life. But they may have helped him or her see the possibilities that arise from a community of care and concern. And what a gift it is in return to think that we might be the agents of such learning.

 This is the place where hope lives: in the possibility of connections that build and extend links of love and trust, that holiest moment that reveals to us the interconnection of all things, that dissolves our sense of aloneness, and helps us find home in the wonder of this world in this very moment.

 So might we each awaken one morning and push out of our hollows, nose about in the world and come to know the place where the “dazzling blackness” of our seeking, yearning selves is realized in our “perfect love.”