This
is a Sunday service and sermon that I wrote and delivered to the All Souls
Welcoming Congregation of Kernersville, North Carolina, on April 7, 1996. The sermon’s text contains some outline
headings and notes that I didn’t expand on when I delivered the service; I’ve
retained those to show how I developed the sermon.
Copyright 1996 by Wayne Farmer, Kernersville, NC
Easter has come: a season's renewal;
Flowers and leaves where once there were none.
Celebrate now the new life beginning;
Open your arms to the warmth of the sun!
"Christ the Lord Is Risen Today" by Charles Wesley (1707-1788), English Methodist preacher
Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Sons of man and angels say: Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia!
Lives again our glorious king: Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Dying once, He all doth save: Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!
Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." Peter then came out with the other disciple, and they went toward the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first; and stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." Saying this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rab-bóni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Many cultures have attempted to come to terms with tragedy and loss by developing inspiring myths of hope and triumph. The Easter story is but one of these. Join us for a multicultural exploration of the many meanings of resurrection, both mythic and personal.
Thus reads one of the four accounts of what is probably the most familiar of all resurrection stories to us. As Unitarian-Universalists, many of us have adopted personal theologies that no longer place this story in the center of our faith. Yet the strength of this story and its message have continued to inspire millions of Christian for millennia, and I think that we would do well to come to terms with it; if not to embrace it, then to put it into context and find a meaning within it that we can apply to our own lives.
What do we mean by Resurrection?
How do we cope with the concept?
Where does the idea come from?
Personal experience tells us that there is a natural cycle of rebirth and renewal in the world around us.
Every night the sun, our ultimate source of light, of warmth, of life itself, disappears from view, leaving us cold and stumbling in the dark.
[As city dwellers we are often sheltered from this fact, but a few days spent as a tent camper will quickly remind you of the sudden darkness that our ancestors knew.]
And, as the light fades and dies, we too undergo a small death as we fall unconscious into the uncharted realm of sleep.
Yet, every morning, the sun miraculously reappears and brings us and the rest of the sleeping world back to life.
Every Winter we see the trees lose their leaves, and the days grow short and cold;
yet every Spring the dead land returns to life again:
What had appeared to be dead twigs suddenly bloom with flowers
Birds reappear, and the dead silence of winter is replaced by joyous song
Bees come out of nowhere and swarm about the new flowers, partaking of sweet nectar — abundant food where once there was only a barren winter landscape.
As David Leeming eloquently states in his book, The World of Myth:[2]
"Part of the need for belief in an afterlife can probably be traced to humanity's experience of the cycles of nature. As a functioning part of the organism call Earth, we do not like to be left out. The paths of the sun and the moon, the rhythms of the tides, the menstrual process, and the seasons, all suggest a natural return of whatever is lost, and lead naturally to the concept of life after death, and ultimately, some kind of restoration of life."
Faced with this need to include ourselves, various cultures over time have developed mythologies and philosophies to explain and justify our connection to the cycles of rebirth.
The Egyptians thought of death as the essential prelude of life. To them, death and life were inseparable opposites; one was meaningless without the other, and they alternated in all spheres of nature — among men, animals, vegetation and stars. Death was seen as a passing from one kind of time to another — from life yesterday to life tomorrow, a passage that took place in a physical realm that the Egyptians called the Dat, but which we might best understand as the Underworld. The Dat was completely dark and beyond the reach of man, being located either under the Earth, beyond the stars, or beneath the waters upon which the Earth was believed to ride. The Dat was the place where life was formed out of the dead and the past; where time past met time to come. Here the Sun and Moon traveled at the end of each day, to be reconstituted and reborn for the new day to come. The Dat was also a dangerous place, where demons and monsters, the forces of chaos, were held in uneasy balance against the fragility of new life.[3]
(How familiar this ancient concept seems when we compare it to our nightly journey in darkness through the land of dreams and nightmares, when it seems that our very consciousness dies and is reassembled into a new form. In the morning we awake, either refreshed and renewed, or hung over with the scars of our battles waged in the Underworld.)
The Egyptians placed in command of their Underworld the god Osiris, calling him Lord of the Underworld, Lord of Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. Osiris was the first of their kind to undergo mummification and resurrection, having been murdered by his envious brother Set and his body parts scattered among the marshes of the Nile. His wife and sister Isis searched for these and found them, reassembling his body and wrapping it in linen, then bringing it back to life. Osiris then left the realm of the living to take his place as ruler of the Underworld, from where he would forever judge the souls of all newly departed. Their hearts would be weighed in the balance of justice, and they would accordingly receive the reward of eternal life or punishment.[4]
The story of Osiris also illustrates a recurring myth motif that has been termed "the dying god", in which a god-king dies and is in some sense revived, if not actually returned to the world of the living. We find this motif repeated in many other cultures, including the Greek and Christian. In some of these, the dying god-king is hung on a tree and becomes a seed that is then planted in the Mother Goddess of Earth, from whence he reappears as new growth. In others the dying god serves as a "scapegoat", one who dies for the good of a society, taking on the burden of its shortcomings or sins. We read in the Old Testament:[5]
Leviticus 16: 16, 21-22 (RSV)
16) thus [Aaron] shall make atonement for the holy place, because of the uncleannesses of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions, all their sins; and so shall he do for the tent of meeting, which abides with them in the midst of their uncleanness. ... and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and send away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him to a solitary land; and he shall let the goat go in the wilderness.
In the New Testament, we find in the Book of Hebrews the same perspective applied by a 1st-Century Jewish Christian to the death of Christ[6]:
Hebrews 9: 11-15 (RSV)
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then ... he entered into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred which redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant.
Compare this to the bleak view of death that had been voiced a thousand years earlier, during the reign of King David. I read from the book of Ecclesiastes:
Ecclesiastes 9: 2-10 (RSV)
... one fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As is the good man, so is the sinner; and he who swears is as he who shuns an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that one fate comes to all; also the hearts of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward; but the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and they have no more for ever any share in all that is done under the sun. Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white; let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.
And there was certainly no hope in Sheol. Sheol was believed by the Hebrew people of that time to be a bleak place, not unlike the Egyptian Underworld; a place of shadows, dust, and darkness, but beyond the scope of Yahweh. "There was no desire for Sheol among the people, no reward in it, no return from it." Sheol in fact served no real purpose, other than to give some physical reality to death itself.[7]
Christ died
~AD 30
Paul
evangelized ~AD 32 - 67
Paul's
Colossians 2:8-15 (RSV): statement of resurrection and faith
See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.
Paul's
Colossians 3:1-4 (RSV): Christ's resurrection is also our own
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above... for you have died, are your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is also our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Two thousand years have done little to quiet the controversy over what actually happened following Christ's death. Starting tomorrow, for example, Catholic theologians will meet in New York for a four-day Resurrection Summit, at which a variety of theological and philosophical papers will be presented. And since 1894, Harvard University has hosted an annual lecture on the Immortality of Man, first established by a bequest by George Ingersoll, a Unitarian Minister and graduate of Harvard Divinity School. This week's copy of Newsweek is entitled "Rethinking the Resurrection a New Debate About the Risen Christ", and includes a survey of recent books on the subject, ranging from the traditional to the radical. One of the more unusual texts argues that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, but instead was heavily sedated by a slow-acting poison. He was later revived by a magician and went on to marry Mary Magdalene, sire three children, divorce her, and marry another woman, eventually dying years later in Rome.
So, you see you have a wide variety of approaches to consider in developing your personal understanding of the eternal mysteries of death and man's persistent hope of resurrection. In Unitarian fashion, I will not preach to you of the one true way, for I believe that the Divine manifests itself to each of us in a unique way that appears to our own experiences and values. But I will leave you with some personal observations:
For all of us, death is a transition, a change. As students of the Tárot well know, it may or may not mean the loss of physical life, for we change many times during our lives, and our old and accustomed patterns may be destroyed suddenly or may be gradually, almost imperceptibly, transformed. Sometimes these changes affect only ourselves; sometimes, as in the case of Christ and Osiris, they have far-reaching consequences that echo for millennia.
We can choose to react to changes in various ways. The Greeks tell of how Demeter's grief on losing her daughter Persephone caused her to turn inward and withhold her gifts of fertility and warmth to the farmlands; without them, all the earth became cold and barren. Even when her daughter was restored to her for nine months of each year, Demeter continued to sorrow bitterly the remaining three, bringing winter to the land.
I believe that the stories we have heard tell us that change is not only inevitable, but is a necessary part of the evolution of life. By accepting that death and change have occurred and will occur throughout our lives, we free ourselves to be continually reborn, and fully participate in the cyclical renewal of life, embracing a continuous process of personal resurrection.
"Invocation" by Wayne Farmer
(Wayne)
(Unison)
O Deméter, you who have suffered much,
Yet still bring forth the golden grain
To nourish all who depend upon it
Even though the future is unknowable
And every new day may bring joy or tragedy;
Help me to sow new seed
Knowing that without the sowing
All is surely barren
And that the beauty of one flowering tree
Can outshine all the failures of past and future.
Redirect my sorrow and fear
Into energy that strengthens my work
And increases its chances for success.
I become one with you
And blend my hope with your sorrow.
[1]BWV 1039; MHS 513209T: James Galway, flute; Kyung-Wha Chung, violin; Phillip Moll, harpsichord; Moray Welsh, cello continuo.
[2]The World of Myth, David Adams Leeming; page 64.
[3]Leeming, p. 65-66.
[4]Leeming, p. 148-152.
[5]Leeming, p. 146-147.
[6]Resurrection: Myth or Reality? A Bishop's Search for the Origins of Christianity, John Shelby Spong, p. 121-125.
[7]Spong, p. 113
[8]BWV 1043; MHS 542049H: Itzhak Perlman, violin; Pinchas Zuckerman, violin; The English Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Barenbohm.