Easter Sunday

Easter is perhaps the most theologically difficult holiday in our liturgical calendar as Unitarian-Universalists, because it commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and UU's do not as a denomination affirm the divinity of Jesus. As a denomination, we do not declare that he was resurrected or that he died for our sins and won salvation for all faithful believers through his suffering and death on the cross. So what do we do when wheel of our liturgical year turns and comes up, as it always does, Easter?

One common response is to celebrate Easter by speaking only about Jesus' rebirth as a metaphor in terms of his actual life, and a reality in nature, evident in the buds and blossoms all around us, the warming air, the longer days, the animals being born, the birds returned and singing in the morning. And that's legitimate, as far as it goes.

But it is also easy, and more importantly, it doesn't offer us the opportunity to grow our spirituality and our understanding of this holiday and our relationship to it. If you've heard some of my sermons this year, you know by now how strongly I believe that it is important, even crucial, for us as spiritual people, as people who purport to be open-minded about religion and religious history, to pay attention even to stories that pose problems for us. It is important for us to consider even stories we think we know, maybe stories we don't even like, stories we wish to dismiss, because the truth is we can learn more about anything, and in learning more about anything, we understand more not only about what is around us, but also about our relationship to what is around us, and finally, more about ourselves.

Raised a UU myself during the 70's when most religious liberals, if they treated the bible at all, treated it with contempt, I never encountered the bible until I entered seminary. There I discovered, to my amazement, that there were parts I (sacrilege!) liked, stories that resonated with me, passages and ideas that offered a new perspective, or brought me peace or helped my grief. Even in some of the accounts of Jesus' life, ministry, suffering, and death.

In the gospel accounts of what happened after Jesus' death it says, for instance in Matthew, that:

"When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.

The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, "Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, 'After three days I will rise again.' Therefore command the tomb to be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, 'He has been raised from the dead.' and the last deception would be worse than the first." Pilate said to them, "You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can." So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.

After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, 'He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.' This is my message for you." So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, "Greetings!" And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, 'Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.'" (Matt 27:57-28:10).

I don't preach this sermon lightly; I know that the bible is a complicated thing for many UU's, especially those of us who come out of bible-based traditions. And I know that reconsidering this and other scripture is hard for many, even painful for some. Still, the point of this sermon is to make the suggestion that it is important for us to consider and keep considering whether we can roll away the stone that an experience of life or hurt or wrongdoing have placed before our own connection to such an important piece of our heritage, history, and theology. And my reason for making this point is the idea I put earlier - that reconsideration can lead to fresh perspectives, new understandings, even, sometimes, healing.

For example, many scholars nowadays consider that Mary Magdalene was a much more important part of Jesus' movement than the early and later established church was comfortable with. Traditional roles for men and women in society and religion would have been very challenged by a movement that gave women an equal opportunity to participate and even lead in understanding and observing ritual and theology. But the biblical account of Jesus' death and resurrection is one that strongly supports the idea that women, particularly Mary Magdalene were crucial and highly respected leaders in his work, because in all four gospel accounts Mary Magdalene is the one person who first sees him once he has risen and who first recognizes him for who he is when she does see him. It was the later church that downplayed the significance of this, and which eventually branded her a prostitute and mere camp-follower, when in fact there is nothing anywhere in the gospels to identify her as either. Indeed the gnostic gospels which I preached on a few weeks ago further support the idea that she was a major figure in Jesus' church - they identify her not only as a respected leader but indeed as an actual apostle, and the subject of her own gospel.

So in the spirit of inquiry and openness, it behooves us to take a push at any stones that block us from furthering our own religious understandings - and this morning, my subject is Jesus: trying to cover the essentials and make sure we all have access to the same basic information and ideas.

The name Jesus Christ is a composite, made up of the personal name Jesus which means 'God is salvation' in ancient Hebrew, and Christ, from the Greek Christos, meaning anointed, an allusion to the messiah who was understood to be anointed in his role. Thus the name Jesus Christ binds together the historic figure Jesus and the messianic role that early Christian faith attributed to him. During his own lifetime, the gospels tell us he was known as Jesus the Galilean (Matt 26:69) or more often Jesus of Nazareth.

Whether or not we believe in Jesus as Christ, that is to say, the messiah, almost all mainstream religious scholars across denominations and countries agree that Jesus the man did actually live, preach radical doctrine within his Jewish tradition, amass followers, and die, executed by the Romans in the fairly common way at that time for criminals and enemies of the state: crucifixion. There is simply too much evidence, across languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Coptic and more; drawing on texts derived from people who lived during Jesus' lifetime. The gospels we have in the bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, developed 30 to 60 years after Jesus' death, themselves demonstrably and indisputably draw on earlier sources, which no longer exist, but which must have existed at the time. Otherwise four such different gospels written by such different authors with such different viewpoints over three decades could not possibly have as many verbatim identical quotes within the bodies of their gospel stories of Jesus.

There are other attestations to Jesus' existence as well; in other gospels that were not part of the Biblical canon but have survived to be discovered such as the Nag Hammadi Gnostic gospels I mentioned earlier, which were found in 1945 in Egypt. Within those books there are testimonies, liturgies and apocalyptic texts, not all of which praise Jesus when they mention him. There are also archaeological discoveries, such as the recent discovery in Jerusalem of a tombstone dating to some years after Jesus's death for a Jewish high priest named Caiaphas. The gospel texts tell us that Caiaphas was the name of the Jewish high priest in Jerusalem who opposed Jesus and his radical teachings so strongly that he entered into an alliance against him with Pontius Pilate. There cannot have been two such men with the same name from exactly the same time period, location, and cultural position. And beyond all the evidence which simply could not have been amassed if Jesus didn't actually exist, if no one had ever met him, spoken to him, heard him, been moved by his life and his words, all the wealth of detail and information in the texts; dates, individuals, geography, political developments, all the pieces that have been confirmable by outside sources such as archaeological discoveries or other texts, have proved highly accurate.

So people may continue to argue about whether Jesus lived or not, but there is a wealth of evidence for his really having lived, even for his brother James having taken over leadership of his followers and apostles a while after his death, and none that refutes his existence. To be sure, Jesus was not the only proclaimed messiah in Judea in those days. There were many messiahs, both before and after him, mentioned in texts and remains. One, a hundred years later named Simon Bar Kochba, was supported by one of Judaism's most famous ancient rabbis, R. Akiva, and Bar Kochba fomented a rebellion that managed to kick the Romans out of Judea entirely for three short years, before they returned and annihilated every element of resistance once and for all in a savage, merciless campaign. There are still coins minted before the Roman retaliation commonly found today in modern Israel that proclaim tragically; year one of Bar Kochba, year two of Bar Kochba, year three of Bar Kochba. And then they stop.

Jesus was one of many Jewish, Judaean messiahs believed in during a time of great upheaval and suffering. Many were healers, prophets, leaders. But of all of them, he stands apart because of his belief in peace, his ministry to the poor, the sick, the outcast; by his own poverty and self-sacrifice, by his rebellious preaching and abjuration of political concerns or power, by his lowly death, and by the extraordinary devotion of his followers. His death became transfiguration, his pain: the redemption of the world; and his humble messages about the importance of generosity, of forgiveness, of attention to the meek, the poor, the sick: recorded for all time, the rallying cry for extraordinary good and evil done in his name in almost every language of the world, in almost every country, in every century since he lived for 33 short years in a small province in a barren part of the world under an oppressive regime.

Not everything he did was wonderful or even admirable, not everything he said was even kind. But he was a mortal on this earth, struggling with his own inconsistencies and weaknesses and failings, tired by his work, weakened by his self-sacrifice, burdened by his vision and commitment. He knew he was bucking the system, and he knew it was dangerous; to travel with men and women together, to minister to the low as well as the high, to condemn wealth and political power while others starved and died, to rally the countryside and cities of his province to calls for change, reform, resistance, not only towards the Romans but also towards some established Jewish leaders and temple practices and traditions. Like Gandhi, Jesus' way was hard, and he was a difficult person to follow, a difficult person to love, hard on his family, demanding of his friends. Like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus was ahead of his time, he paid with his life, a redeemer for whom the charge of redeeming his life lies with we who survive him, who heard his words, learned of his vision, and now must do the long hard work of living up to the goodness he offered the world.

None of us is too good for Jesus, too enlightened for any of his messages, too intelligent for any of his doctrine. He was a great and good man, a passionate, incendiary man, a Jew, an idealist, a man of patience and impatience, generosity and prejudice, love and judgment, a teacher, a person like a lot of us. He died around the year 30, almost 2,000 years ago at the age of 33, on a hill, in pain, on a cross, for his beliefs and his life's work.

With Christians on this day, we mourn the pain and loss and injustice evident in his death, and know that we too, because we are religious liberals, may draw inspiration from his concern for social justice, for mercy, for fairness to all people Samaritan or Jew, man or woman, adult or child, leper or civic leader, rich or poor. On Easter may we try to roll away the stone of our prejudices and concerns and hurt, that the work of a profoundly good and courageous man's life may live on.

Amen.