BLESSING THE WORLD

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

April 8, 2007

WORDS FOR BLESSING by Rev. Rebecca Parker
Your gifts, whatever you discover them to be
can be used to bless or curse the world.
The mind’s power, the strength of the hand, the reaches of the heart,
the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting.
Any of these can serve to feed the hungry, bind up wounds,
welcome the stranger, praise what is sacred,
do the work of justice, or offer love.
Any of these can draw down the prison door, hoard bread,
abandon the poor, obscure what is holy,
comply with injustice, or withhold love.
You must answer this question: What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.

MEDITATION - Palm Sunday by Rev. Jane Rzepka
This is what we get in life: We want and want and want – undying love, a world that is fair, eternal life for ourselves and those we care about – and we can’t ever have them. We are faced always with a savior dead and gone and an empty tomb. To prove it.

We have, I believe, been extended not salvation but mercy. Jesus’ “reign of God” is with us – has been with us – radically, mercifully, all along in such forms as kindness, fairness, and wonder. We don’t have to wait for Judgment Day, we don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to be afraid: we need only look around and awaken to what has existed from the beginning of time.

We go on wanting and hoping and sometimes we are blessed. We don’t get what we want – the tomb is still empty. Against that background every act of mercy is cause for rejoicing. One stalk of asparagus, a kiss, stirring music, a healthy morning, a good laugh, a kind touch – we have all that – and all of it, all of it, is holy.

READING - Easter Miracle by the Rev. Jacob Trapp
I am amazed to the point of ecstasy by the miracle of awareness.
Life brings me its freshness as an ineffable gift.
Every moment renews my vision.
Death is permission granted to other modes of life to exist,
So that everything may be ceaselessly renewed.
The ploughshare of sorrow breaking the heart,
Opens up new sources of life.
The land bursts again in bgloom.
The possible and the future are one.
The possible strives to come into being, and can be, if we help.
Nothing grows, flowers, bears fruit save by giving.
All that we try to save in ourselves wastes and perishes.
All things ripen for the giving’s sake,
And in the giving are consummated.

SERMON

This time of year there is something fresh and renewing with each dawn. I see it in each flower, each leaf that emerges in our greening world – delicate, urgent, poking out of its tough, woody covering, new to the world, yet unfolding like the most intricate origami in a pattern that is deeply imprinted in the DNA of its roots and branches, which itself reveals patterns of a wider web that, if we follow it, eventually links it to all life.

The renewal of life: This, it seems to me, is the original gospel, the greatest, incontrovertible good news we can know, the deep truth that is at the heart of this season. With each opening bud, we are witness to a wonder both profound and mundane. Individuals come and go; life endures. It leads to what is at once the hardest and most transformative lesson that each of us has to learn. I will not endure; nor will those I know and love, and still there is meaning to be found in my days if I come to understand something about renewal.

The story of Easter, of course, offers a particular take on the subject of renewal. Today many churches will be celebrating the story of Jesus’ resurrection as told in varying versions in the four gospels of the New Testament, the story of how the teacher Jesus was put to death, of how his body disappeared from the cave where it was buried and how he later appeared to and even dined with his followers, entreated them to continue his teachings, and disappeared into the clouds.

In the Gospel of Luke, for example, the writer reports that on the day that the empty tomb was discovered Jesus, concealing his identity, joined two of his followers walking on the road to Emmaus, offering teaching on the Scripture. He is then said to have revealed his identity and disappeared. Shortly afterward, when these two joined their fellows in Jerusalem and told their story, the Bible says Jesus appeared before them all, inviting them to touch him, sharing a meal and offering another teaching. Then, the text says, “He led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them.”

For two millennia this has been and today it remains the core story of the Christian church, the affirmation of Jesus’ divinity and assurance of everlasting life to all followers of his message. Across the centuries, though, this story of bodily resurrection has continued to trouble many people otherwise drawn to Jesus’ story. As history, after all, it is sketchy material. Even among the writings of early Christians, it is not bodily resurrection but the continuing influence of his spirit that is emphasized. In fact, they say little about the circumstances of his death. It is not until the writings that appeared decades after Jesus’ death that we find increasing emphasis on the resurrection story.

The scholar John Dominic Crossan has argued that much of the narrative around events after Jesus’ death in the four gospels represents not so much faithful reporting as political maneuvering among various leaders and communities that rose up in the years afterward. He suggests that events chronicled at the end of the Gospels are emblematic of how the Christian community developed over time: not in the first days afterwards but over perhaps as much as a couple of generations.

For example, he says, the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is likely a condensed version of how the Christian community evolved in its first few years from days of doubt and fear to a new found faith. “What happened historically is that those who believed in Jesus before his execution continued to do so afterward,” Crossan writes. “Easter is not about the start of a new faith but about the continuation of an old one. That is the only miracle and the only mystery, and it is more than enough of both.”

If we are to steer clear of the myth of bodily resurrection, fashioned as it was by his followers to bring the story of Jesus’ life into accord with the prophecies of Hebrew scripture and Hellenic culture, we are left with a story of renewal. As Jane Rzepka suggests, it is a story that extends us not salvation but mercy.

At the center of this story is what I take away as Jesus’ central teaching that the “reign of God” is with us. All hope, all holiness is not waiting for some apocalyptic convulsion. It is present now, in every moment if we would but attend to it. We glimpse it in the simplest acts of kindness and compassion, but in time we lose focus and it slips from our grasp.

This simple statement, it seems to me, is the most revolutionary teaching that is attributed to Jesus. It is easy to await a savior, easy to dismiss everything around us as depraved and fallen. It is much harder to find in the world the emergent shoots of something better and to tend to those shoots, irrespective of our own failures and disappointments, irrespective of the weight of opinion to the contrary and circumstances that seem to act against every possible hope.

We stumble along in our search for such signs of hope, striking out as often as we chance upon a promising lead. As Jane Rzepka puts it, “we go on wanting and hoping,” even when things don’t go our way. But “sometimes we are blessed.” That is, sometimes our efforts are rewarded. We are given a glimpse of what wholeness might look like. One way we might frame the work of religion is to help us find ways to attend to those moments, to identify the emergent shoots that open the way to fresh understanding, that deepen our compassion, that strengthen the sense of integrity in our lives, and to help them grow.

I suggested earlier in the service that one way we might do this is in the giving of blessings. The notion of giving blessings is very old, rooted in ancient ceremonies of consecration, of somehow bringing divine power into play. We don’t need to evoke the old supernatural implications of this word, though, to find it of service to us. In her book, My Grandfather’s Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen says that “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 involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in each other.”

Dr. Remen’s definition echoes in my own experience: a profound moment of having been blessed. Many of you know that my father died in Florida about a year and a half ago. His death came at the end of a grueling bout with cancer that left him debilitated and exhausted. Those last days were made all the more unreal by the fact that as he was dying a hurricane came ripping through the city where he was in hospice, tearing down trees and utility lines, leaving the facility on generator power while my father was breathing his last. It was, in short, no calm, bedside vigil but more like a scene from the end of the world.

The memorial soon afterward is a blur in my mind, but I was surprised shortly after it ended when my sister handed me an envelope with my name on it written in my father’s hand. Each of us five children received one. Now, I should say that my father had never been much of a letter writer. Most of his correspondence consisted of a few words scribbled at the bottom of a letter from my mother.

I couldn’t quite imagine what this envelope would contain. Would it be advice, criticism, apology, affirmation? I was curious, but to be honest there was part of me that dreaded opening it. Still, of course, I did. Inside was a single sheet of paper with five words written in my father’s careful printing: Mark, I love you. Dad.

There was a time in my life when I would have been surprised to read those words, when things were not going well between us. But in recent years we had made our amends and we had expressed our love for each other on a number of occasions. So, this was no death-bed confession that he had saved up. No, what it was, was a blessing, a blessing I carry today. He is not here, but I carry his love. It helps sustain me, for it helps me appreciate, especially in those moments when I begin to doubt it, that I, too, am a blessing, and I, in turn, am capable of blessing the world.

This is our central teaching as Unitarian Universalists: that each of us has value in and of ourselves. There is no test we must pass, nothing we must prove. Yet, it is a truth we are not always able to hear, distracted as we are by doubts and the judgments of others. e are in need of the affirmation that we are acceptable in and of ourselves, of being blessed, but we are also in need of the opportunity to spread that affirmation outward, to give our own blessings as well.

With that in mind let me encourage you now to reflect for a moment on the words that you wrote on that piece of paper that you placed inside of that plastic egg earlier in this service. Imagine the child who will pick up that egg. Imagine her or him opening it and reading the words you wrote.

What do you hope that she or he will think and feel? Imagine that in that message, through your words you could radiate some sense of well-being, some sense of wholeness, acceptance, and love, a blessing indeed that comes of being part of this community, that comes specifically of the connection that you have made possible, a blessing that you are present to give.

Rachel Naomi Remen says that one gives a blessing from “a place beyond competition and struggle, a place where we belong to one another.”

Each day we have the opportunity to add to that place by how we choose to bless the world. “The choice to bless the world,” writes Rebecca Parker, “is more than an act of will, a moving forward into the world with the intention to do good. It is an act of recognition, a confession of surprise. . . . There is an embrace of kindness that accompanies all life, even yours. . . . The choice to bless the world will draw you into community, the endeavor shared, the heritage passed on, the companionship of struggle, the importance of keeping faith, the life of ritual and praise, the comfort of human friendship, the company of earth, its chorus of life welcoming you.”

Here in the spring, though snow fall may crush the early blooms, I am, as Jacob Trapp put it, “amazed to the point of ecstasy at the miracle of awareness. Life brings me its freshness as an ineffable gift.”

Renewal is everywhere around me. I am buoyed up by the vibrant greening of the Earth taking a deep inward breath after months of sleep. But I am also moved by the reminder once again that death is not defeat. It is, in Jacob Trapp’s words, “permission granted to other modes of life to exist, so that everything may be ceaselessly renewed.” The point of our lives is not the elevation of ourselves. As Trapp says, “All that we try to save in ourselves wastes and perishes.” Our “ripening” is for the giving’s sake: the seed, the flower, the fruit, the blessing that we have to pass on.

At the same time, while our end must come, death is also not obliteration, an eraser drawn across the page to remove every trace of our having been here. We, too, are woven inextricably into the web of life. Yet, what shall our legacy be? Will it have been to serve and sustain life and love, or will it have been to drain the world of a little of its vitality, to leave behind a scar that the future must heal? A blessing, or a curse?

The Easter message is that renewal is available to us if we can look past our grief, our fear, our disappointment, our absorption with ourselves and learn to see the deeper connections, the threads that tie us with each other, with all humankind, with all life. Present in the world around us are the emergent sprouts of wholeness and hope. They need our tending if they are to blossom, to leaf out.

Easter teaches that the endeavors of our individual lives have significance because life endures, even if we do not. And so we, too, may be parties to the miracle of rebirth, regeneration and renewal: by behaving like the blessings that we are and conferring our blessing on that which is to follow.

It is in the end a matter of choice, of deciding how we will orient ourselves to our lives. When I think of a place to start, I think of a children’s litany I have seen used in many places: It is a blessing to be. It is a blessing to be here. It is a blessing to be here together.

It is indeed a blessing to be here together with you on this Easter morning. May the blessings you give and receive be many, and may they awaken in you that spark of renewal and hope.

So Be It.