HomeGood morning!
Happy Passover and happy Easter to one and all.
What does Easter mean to you?
Is it decorated eggs?
Is it fake grass in a basket filled with chocolate and jelly beans left by a giant rabbit?
Is it dinner with family or friends or both?
Is it a celebration of springtime, of flowers and the leaping green fullness of the season?
Is it a celebration that you watch from outside, either because it was never yours or because it is something you once believed but now deny?
Is it for you a day of renewal of heart and opening of soul; a day of reminders of the beauty of life and earth?
Or is it for you a celebration of the day that Jesus rose from the tome, conquering death and guaranteeing for you the surety of life eternal?
In the Christian tradition it is the latter. It is a complex story told differently by different people, even by the different Gospel writers. Jesus the Christ, Christ the Son of God and Firstborn of the Father, God come to Earth as human being, Jesus the human being filled with the spirit of God, dies and rises from the tomb having freed the world from Satan and from the death brought into the world by Adam’s Fall.
The world seems full of death, not only in places of war like Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur, but also in our personal lives. People we love have passed out of life, leaving us with tears in the fabric of our being, empty places that will never be rewoven.
If we are fortunate, happy memory takes the place of much of the pain and loss, but the sense of loss remains.
And all too often we impose death upon one another. Human beings impose death and do so in ways that seem casual, with no sense of the heartache and suffering being implanted into the souls of both the person dying and the loved ones left behind.
When people die they leave behind them loss, longing, irrational expectations that they will turn a corner or walk into a room. And there are surprising times when we think, if only for a moment, that we see them again driving a car or walking down the street.
And we know that we ourselves face death, the dark extinction of non-existence. We know that we ourselves will die and leave this world of experience, this world of beauty, this world of sunlight and starlight and love.
The Christian story of Easter says that death is not the end. In the Easter story Jesus goes through the trials, whippings and jeering of the crowd, goes through the suffering and death of Good Friday, and is laid in the cold tomb.
But the story goes on to say that Jesus rose from the dead.
And it also says that like Jesus, our loved ones will rise from the dead to a new life of joy and hope. And that we, too, will rise from the tomb, not just to life but to an even better life.
It also makes the plain statement that rebirth follows death, that wee cannot be reborn without having the death experience first. But, we will, it claims, be reborn.
Some may say to themselves, “This can not apply to me; I have been too bad in life to get to heaven. I have done things that are unforgivable.”.
Our Universalist forebears denied that and claimed that this story was true for you even if you feel you have done such evil in life that you are beyond redemption. The Universalist message is that God loves you and will bring you home.
In the story of the Prodigal son, the Father sees the son approaching in the distance, and does not wait to see why his child is coming home, or whether the son has changed and is remorseful about what happened and what he did. No, the father sees the son coming from a distance and prepares a feast of celebration. Everyone is welcomed home with joy and unconditional love and immeasurable forgiveness.
But wait a minute, there are people who did the unforgivable to me; are you saying that they, too, will be welcomed to heaven by the Father? Yes; as the father says to the brother who stayed home in the last line of the story, “because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, he was lost and has been found”.
Easter is primarily the promise of that new life in the world to come.
But I take it also as a promise of new life in the here and now.
Sometimes we have the immediate events that bring on strong emotion. In time of grief following a sudden death, for example, we may be plunged into a kind of vortex of misery; we may spend our time wondering, “When will this end; or will it?”. We may find ourselves in a tomb of time and existence.
The Easter promise is that it will end; that grief and loss will transform into happy memory or into strength and fortitude. There will be rebirth of our spirit.
Sometimes it creeps upon us more slowly.
I am affected by weather and season, more affected than I used to be, or maybe more aware of its affect in retrospect. For me, spring is the season of lifting up. My spirits rise and are renewed. And the interesting thing to me is that every spring I discover that I was not aware of how low I had sunk. It is with sun and the warmth and the flowers and other life that I begin to realize how much of my happiness, how much of my good feeling about life, has been dormant, hibernating with the bears and the bulbs and the buds.
The Easter promise is that like bulb and bud in springtime, so our spirits will lift and new hope and happiness will arise.
There are other things we do to ourselves, things that are protective in intent but not always in effect.
Some years ago I began a recovery process that included acknowledging old angers. Had you told me that I was an angry person, I would not have believed it, but that is because I had suppressed the anger so well that I no longer saw or consciously felt it, except for particular moments when it burst forth destructively. Now the funny thing is that some other people could see always see my anger. But for me it was suppressed except, as I said, for those particular moments.
That anger had been pushed down long before. I had encapsulated it and set it aside within myself as a means of protecting myself from the power of it. I thought I had wrapped it in a shroud, mummified it, entombed and buried it.
When I began to allow myself to touch into that anger, I was surprised at how alive it was, and how strong and deep it was. But that is the dynamic with suppressed feelings; they are still there and they usually still make themselves known to others. We simply blind only ourselves to them. We suppress feelings because they hurt. But that very suppressing is a form of self killing; it is a form of imposing death upon our own being. We “kill” the emotions by burying them because they feel too overwhelming. In doing so we fail to recognize that we suppress not only that aspect of ourselves, but others as well. If I suppress anger I may also be suppressing joy and love. And all too often where we think we have killed an emotion by burying it, we have simply planted a seed of feeling that will take root and will grow abundantly in our souls in the future. That is how we move from being a person who is angry to becoming an angry person, a person whose life is ruled by the anger within. Whatever emotions we suppress, they can thrive within until their own springtime. Have I suppressed sorrow? It is still there and it will grow. Have I suppressed grief? It is still there, and it will grow.
Now, if the bad and hurtful things when suppressed can grow and thrive, why not the good and nurturing things of life?
The Easter promise is that if we show courage and face our inner selves, not only will we survive the pain of doing so, but genuine healing will take place, our demons will be exorcized.
Whatever our feelings may be (grief, despair, anger, loneliness or whatever), each of these ways of finding ourselves with them--the sudden breaking into us of emotion, the slow unnoticed sinking into emotion, the suppressed emotions-- these are all forms of deadness within. Easter says that we can rise out of any of them.
First, it tells us, we must experience the pain of Good Friday then we must experience the tomb. This is an ancient story. Ishtar in the underworld, Demeter and Ceres, and many other myths tell the tale of entering into death or a cave or a maze. The time in the darkness is part of the process of rebirth. It is the tomb as the womb where we grow and develop our new selves.
Jesus did not come down off the cross alive. He suffered, died and entered into the world of the dead. But then, the stone rolled away and he arose. This is our story, the human story. In this life it is the story of restoration and recovery, of rebirth and renewal.
Where is the deadness in your life today?
Where is the place of entombed emotions within?
Which emotions have you entombed in their grip?
The Easter story tells us that each of these can be overcome. Whether we roll away the stone by ourselves, or someone rolls it away for us; whether we soften the stoniness of our own hearts or someone else acts in a way that frees us from the ice cold callousness of hate or anger or despair, we can be free, we will be free, and we can walk out of that tomb today.
Feel the stone rolling away and it will.
An empty tomb symbolizes the promise of new life both here and in the hereafter; an empty tomb is the abandoned shell of a seed.
April skies yield falling tears of rain, just as human eyes once shed tears of pain on that ancient Good Friday, and as human eyes shed tears of pain on the Good Fridays we each face in life.
As wet and gloomy days of spring disappear in the abundance of sunshine and blooming stalk and branch, so do the wet and gloomy moods of our saddest days give way to new life, new birth and the ongoing story of human reaching for hope and goodness. May all of our good longings be fulfilled, all of our sorrows pass away, and all of our hopes be answered.
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