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| What About the Resurrection? The reading is taken from the work of George Bernard Shaw who speaks of the religion about Jesus in opposition to the religion of Jesus . . . the reading closes with these words . . . "the iconolaters have never for a moment conceived Jesus as a real person who meant what he said, as a fact, as a force . . .": I must now make a serious draft on the reader’s attention by facing the question whether, if and when the medieval and Methodist will-to-believe the Salvationist and miraculous side of the gospel narratives fails us, as it plainly has failed the leaders of modern thought, there will be anything left of the mission of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan’s riddle who found that "the more the threw away, the more he had.’ We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is given to pictures and statues of him, and to finished and unalterable stories about him. The test of the prevalence of this is that if you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person, or even as a still active God, such worshipers, as those who turn Jesus into icons, are more horrified than Don Juan was when the statue stepped from its pedestal and came to supper with him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you may reject Christianity for Judaism, Islam, Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen. If you should venture to wonder how Jesus would have looked if he had shaved and had his hair cut, or what size in shoes he took, or whether he swore when he stood on a nail in the carpenter’s shop, or could not button his robe when he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the repartee by which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him into sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will probably produce an extraordinary dismay and horror among iconolaters. You will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences that may flow from this terrifying miracle. It is at such moments that you realize that the iconolaters have never for a moment conceived Jesus as a real person who meant what he said, as a fact, as a force . . .(Mitchell, p. 239) Sermon We I begin with a poem by Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Glück, Heaven and Earth: Glück write about her husband’s deep love of gardening and the rapture it holds for him and how it transports him to a moment when time is forever and the beauty of the moment will never end even though the garden itself is rimmed with the fiery colour of maples: Where one finishes, the other begins. On top, a band of blue; underneath, a band of green and gold, green and deep rose. John stands at the horizon: he wants both at once, he wants everything at once. The extremes are easy. Only the middle is a puzzle. Midsummer - everything is possible. Meaning: never again will life end. How can I leave my husband standing in the garden dreaming this sort of thing, holding his rake, triumphantly preparing to announce this discovery as the fire of the summer sun truly does stall being entirely contained by the burning maples at the garden’s border. "Never again will life end." There have always been such thoughts. Some philosophers speculate that human beings must live as though there is o end because the existential knowledge that we all die produces a crippling amount of angst if it is present in the forefront of our minds all the time. In the developing consciousness of humankind, there was a time when we first became self conscious. Not long after that we realized that death was our eventual lot. Hardly able to cope with the idea, human beings developed ideas about what happened after death. Among the simplest and most ancient of those ideas available to us is the concept of Shoell found in Jewish literature. Perhaps four, five or six thousand years ago, before the Israelites were held in slavery by the Egyptians, well before they were led to freedom by Moses, the concept of an afterlife was found in Shoell. There, under the earth, itself under the heavens, in a dark and musty place, shades rumbled around. They had no ability to announce their being to another, unheard even by God they were as alone and cold as a rogue asteroid beyond the limits of the galaxy, alone, and forever alone. By the time the Israelites left Egypt, their self consciousness had developed important parts of their culture and religion, a strong sense of injustice and a sense of reward in some life after death as practiced by the Egyptians. The sense of justice was strong and helped define them. The idea of an afterlife was more a thought in the folk lore which surrounded them and did not take root until, perhaps two to three thousand years ago. About 2500 years ago the two concepts began to merge. The Israelite people grew to understand the inequities, not only of their own past, but of their own culture under the beloved Davidic Kingdom. The power and greed of some grew and the influence and possibility for a redress of grievances diminished for others. Injustice became a deep part of the prophetic conscience with Yahweh as the broker. We heard prophet after prophet name the injustice and denounce the people for its existence. Along with the Jeremiads came codes for living. Isaiah said: This is the piety I want: that you loosen the knots of wickedness, shatter the heavy yokes, and let the oppressed go free: that you share your food with the hungry, and bring the homeless to your house; that you clothe the naked when you see them, and never hide from your heart. (Isaiah 58:6f.) And in Psalms those words are directly related to Yahweh: He keeps his promises forever and does justice to the oppressed: he gives food to the hungry and sets the prisoner free; he opens the eyes of the blind and lifts us those who have fallen. Yahweh loves the righteous, and protects the rights of the stranger; he defends the orphan and the widow . . .(Psalm 146:6 f.) You can see how deeply rooted in the human psyche our own sense of justice is and for how long this tradition has been concerned with oppression and injustice. While it took a long time in human history for this sense of oppression to be felt, the concept of justice to develop, we did not cast off the ability to feel the older feelings. Louise Glück described those ancient feelings which were with her husband that early fall afternoon in the garden. He was aware of the wondrous life around him and for a moment or more his consciousness was totally in that primitive mode where we merge with the world around us - but are unaware of such disturbances as the Maples turning color at the edge of the garden. One of the incredible joys of being human is that, for all the complexity we have developed, we have also retained the ability to recall the primitive parts of our consciousness. We feel it when we stand awed by the beauty of a sunrise, the starry sky at night, the moon’s path on water, the miracle of birth. The sense of mystery and awe are terribly old in human thought and are the root of so much of what we dream and hope. Let us return to the thread of Justice and a sense of life after death. Over 2500 years ago the two had merged into popular consciousness because of the Babylonian exile. But even under the Davidic Kingdom oppression was real. It was long ago that the practice of forgiving debt after seven years and returning al land to original owners after forty nine years had disappeared. Great disparity had built up in the levels of wealth among the Israelites. This disparity had forced some Israelites to the pagan edges of Judaism, far from the rabbinical centre, and merge their sense of justice with the only remedy available to them. In some life after death, their just God would remedy the injustices. Ideas of a judgmental God became popular along side the more loving father God. Under the Babylonian exile the ideas of an afterlife became even more popular. Ideas were borrowed from pagan cultures and the process of resurrection appeared as a part of this remedy for injustice in this world. Resurrection was not some magical event. It was part and parcel of the development of a range ideas of justice including the complicated formulae of reuniting with a loving Yahweh where all could live together in the Elysian Fields to a God with a sense of retribution where all would be judged and the unjust rooted out. Both strands are present in religions around the world today. When we take notice of the idea of resurrection as part of the early justice movement, I do not offer resurrection as a real solution to the problems of this world. I am much more in tune with the selection from Psalm 146 which I read to you and the selection from Isaiah. It is in this world that justice must be realized. We have a strong rational and humanistic element in our religion. The rational scientific side would say that there can not be a resurrection. It must be argued that this is as much a statement of faith as the belief in the resurrection itself. There is no real evidence for resurrection, and there is hardly any solid evidence that some form of resurrection does not exist. In both cases the belief becomes its own proof. Our rational humanism tends to lead us to believe that supernatural events are not possible. Rising from the dead is not something many Unitarian Universalists believe in. Yet we have many people who believe in heaven and some form of spiritual migration to a place where things are better than they are here. While I like the idea, I have no proof. But I stop there. I do not argue that such a migration after death does not happen. I do argue for the acceptance of and toleration of mystery in our religion. When we drive out all mystery, we make the tacit argument that we know all the answers. I do not believe we do know all the answers. It is just as important for us to honour those who believe in some life after death with its redress of grievances or its uniting of all in forgiveness and love, as it is to pay attention to those who spend little of their faith capital in this direction but believe that it is the mythical kingdom of God, here on the earth, that we must strive for. For me, there is an historical danger in each of these ways of thinking. Slaves in the 19th century on this continent were told that they had to put up with their lot in this world and everything would be ok later on. Hymns spoke of the Elysian Fields and they were mollified. Universal love, a powerful part of our own tradition can lead us to accept injustice here and focus on what comes later. The concept of judgement later on had led to systems wherein people are chosen at birth for this privilege of going to a heaven. Those chosen and living righteous lives were rewarded with material goods, riches and honour. This idea is dangerous because it supports economic injustice. And even the idea of seeking the mythical kingdom of God here on earth is dangerous because it all too often supports an arrogance against those for whom mystery and awe are important portions of the human experience. That arrogance leads to a "better than Thou" attitude implicitly claims larger soul and spirit gifts, more logic, than the pathways which allow for mystery. Such "logical" arrogance is no better than the material arrogance of others. Now that I have put everyone’s belief down, where does this leave us. I believe that for the human venture to be complete in us, we must honour the ancient and the new in ourselves. We must honour ethical resolve in this world and the feelings of awe and wonder. Here is the reason why. I have seen too many people who work for justice become bitter and hardened in this life. Hey have lost the ability to stop by the roadside and look at the snow and appreciate its beauty. They have lost the willingness to waste time with feelings of awe and wonder. They have forgotten the benefits of reverence and thankfulness. They have walked into the face of injustice, heard its terrible cry and the tear in their hearts rules them. Conversely, I have seen too many people find lame excuses to deny their responsibility for the plight of others in this earthly journey. ‘It is not my business." "I am too troubled in my own life." "Let them pick them selves up by their own boot straps." "I don’t do that justice stuff." In honouring the ancient and the new, we will not put down one part of the human experience in ourselves. We will honour the entire pilgrimage. Now, we should ask, does this mean we have to believe in the resurrection. No it does not. But it would mean that we are willing to accept the idea as more than just some magical fantasy that never happened. We would allow the idea of resurrection to claim its roots in the justice movement. We would see resurrection as the early attempts of a people to deal with injustice and know that our longing for a more fair and equitable world is as old as human consciousness. Such a reframing of meaning then allows us to see more clearly what other belief systems have done to the idea of resurrection. While we are clearly Unitarians and Universalists, in part because of our reaction to what others have done to the idea of resurrection, the idea itself, believe in it or not, should be a welcome part of our history - for without it, the justice movement would not have the rich imagery of the prophets to rely on. When our ecumenical partners in the search for justice ask me if I believe in the resurrection, I tell then that I am thankful for the imagery it provides through the prophets for undergirding our search for justice, but that I think the image has been misused terrible by churches for their own gain. Now that answer always leads to an interesting discussion. When Easter is upon us, others will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. We shall celebrate the return of springtime and life’s renewal with all the possibilities it brings us. Like the image of the Phoenix, it is a resurrection. My hope is this. That our understanding of words like resurrection become more complicated and we find the good in the history and in the use of the symbol at the same time as we are clear about the misuse of the symbol. As to what happens after death, I do not know. I might like the idea of something afterward, it could be interesting, but those ideas vary as widely as the human capacity to dream. I am reminded of Woody Allen's question, "If there is life after death, what I should like to know is, if I must bring a change of underwear?" |
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