From Blossom to Blossom
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- Created on Sunday, 12 April 2009 01:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2009-04-12-9am-sermon.mp3}
It is Good Friday as I write this, Good Friday in my twenty-first year of my ministry here with you in Concord, and, as I sit at my computer, my fingers are momentarily frozen over the keyboard, trying to conjure up yet another Easter sermon. It will be Easter morning again, and what is a preacher to do? What is a preacher to say that will be new? What words might I find that will linger with you at least until the ham is sliced? And then I remind myself that the task of preaching is always to find some words to connect my life to yours, and then, if we’re all lucky, to find a way to connect our collective lives out into the transcendent, the divine, the sacred.
Reynolds Price, in his essay, “The Ghost-Writer in the Cellar,” says that all of this word finding comes about, if it is to come about at all, simply by our “hanging around.” And I mean “hanging around” both literally and metaphorically. So I mean my “hanging around” all of a week and all of a lifetime to gather up the words to speak, and I mean you, too, in your own “hanging around” and, in particular, in your own willingness to show up here and take these words in, and then on a good day, there comes a shift that begins to let the transcendent, the divine, the sacred, do its dance among us.
I sat here in this room Thursday evening with more than a few of you, and I sat, not in my usual place up here, but back there, watching events up here unfold, and I found myself looking at the back of people’s heads, an anonymity really, no faces, and I thought then of all who have come into this room over the years, thousands and thousands of people, weary people, sad people, happy people, hopeful people, desperate people, frightened people, faithful people. I thought of people just showing up, hanging around, showing up for each other, and talk about humility, I realized once again that that it is more about putting ourselves in these pews than hearing any of the words that are said from up here. As the bread and juice was passed among us, I was grateful to be part of this community through it all, Christmas Eve and Easter for certain, but thank you for being here, too, on cold February mornings, and after late Saturday nights, showing up, hanging around.
But it is April, and this is Easter morning. I can tell by the lilies. Lest you have wandered in here for the first time this morning, even wandered into a Unitarian congregation for the first time, we welcome you and we hope you caught the warnings and disclaimers at the entrance. It is Easter, and we are a congregation with decidedly heretical leanings. We love the Easter hymns, but some of us can be heard humming, instead of singing, a phrase here and there. We look more to Jesus’ humanity than to his divinity. We are inspired more by Jesus’ teachings than by the teachings about him. Did Jesus die on the cross? It seems likely. Did he rise from the dead? We allow for the possibility. And that is why we sing, “Jesus Christ is risen today,” just in case.
Like my occasional writer’s block, some here have what I would call “Easter block.” Easter block takes place in the head. In the light of Easter, we are an over-educated people. We analyze the story to death. We get all literal in the creedal professions that may have come from our childhood, and we lose sight of the hope that the Easter story carries. We focus too much on the twists and turns of the resurrection theology--I like this part, I don’t like that part, a buffet of belief, some of this, some of that--that we forget our hearts, we forget to ask ourselves, what is it that matters to me in this life? What is in me that is dead that cries out to be alive again? What is in me that is broken that could be made whole again? What is it in my life that is sealed in a tomb, waiting, just waiting, for someone to open, to roll back the stone, to let the air and the life and the color back in?
“What will restore me?” is another way of putting it, “restoration” coming close to definition number five of “resurrection” in Webster’s Unabridged. And not only “what will restore me,” but what will restore us, as a community, as a people, as a world, these are all questions central to the teachings and parables of Jesus. “Who is my neighbor?” he asks more than once, which moves the question more to the horizontal, from me to you, more to the horizontal than to the vertical, that is, me and you to the heavens. These are the two questions, “what will restore me?” and “what will restore this world?” that strike close to the essence of our Unitarian Universalist faith: tending my soul, restoring my spirit, reaching out, renewing the world, who is my neighbor? We are speaking of a resurrection within and a resurrection without. And how do we practice these two kinds of resurrection?
The answer, for me, is in the poetry, is in the bag of peaches, I mean, “the brown paper bag of peaches…O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background…” “I have come,” Jesus said, as recorded in the Gospel of John, “that you might have fullness of life,” and his teachings, his parables, his acts of healing, his very being, pointed the way toward what that kind of fullness might be. What in you is broken, he would ask, and how could it be made whole once again?
What of the birds in the air, he asked as recorded in the Gospel of Luke, what about the lilies of the field, he asked, what about the peaches in the brown paper bag, the poet wonders. “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” Jesus asks. What restores us? How do we begin practicing resurrection? How do we move “from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.” These are Easter questions, these are Easter questions not of the head but of the heart, they move from my life to your life, and then, if we’re lucky, they touch something of the transcendent, the divine, the sacred. It is Easter morning, and the writer’s block, and the Easter block, is lifting.
If that is a practice of resurrection and restoration from within ourselves, this tending of our soul, this restoration of our spirit, this touching of those deep places inside us, what of the resurrection that is without, that is in all of the ripple of relationships moving out from ourselves, what is our place then in the renewal of this world we are given, this world where bombs fall and children lose their innocence and people are hungry and homeless and hopeless and out of work, who is our neighbor? Can we simply smell the lilies, sing two or three hymns and go home, as if there is not a world and its people out there, crying for our attention?
“Instead of seeing stones rolled away,” Johann Christoph Arnold writes, “we throw stones at each other.” Where are you in that picture--rolling a stone back to open new life or throwing a stone to kill? In the healing of the brokenness of this world, most of us need a lot of practice. And for a mentor in this resurrection practice work, I would suggest that we need only look to Jesus himself. I love this description of Jesus from Dorothy Sayers. In her unique style, she says you might not recognize Jesus if you’ve already “certified him as meek and mild…a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”
“True,” she writes, “he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers and humble before Heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites; he referred to King Herod as ‘that fox;’ he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a ‘gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners;’ he assaulted indignant trades-men and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.”
How is it that we practice resurrection in the restoration of the world? How do we, like Jesus, turn the usual upside down, so that the mighty become weak, the weak become mighty? It’s Wendell Berry who brings all this into the present world. He calls one of his poems a “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” “So, friends,” he says, “do something that won’t compute…Love the world. Work for nothing. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Be joyful even though you have considered all the facts.” And then he asks these two questions that grabbed hold of me when I read them. When you are about to do something, he says, “Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child?” And two, “Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?” Wendell Berry ends his manifesto with this line, “Practice Resurrection.”
And there it is, my friends. This is Easter morning. The day holds out far too much possibility to be dismissed as a mismatch for a theology that might miss the mark; the day holds out far too much promise than to be just green grass, tra-la-la, it’s spring. Consider this as a day of invitation. You can be more. The pieces of you that feel broken can be made whole. The part of you and your life that is dead can be alive again. The life in you that is sealed in a tomb, waiting, just waiting, for someone to open, to roll back the stone, to let the air and the life and the color back in, can be opened, can be rolled back, and the air and the life and the color can be restored. We can be made strong again, and then we can be agents of restoration and resurrection in the lives of others and of this world we live in. Keep that love alive. Keep that hope alive. Have a fantastic Easter day.