“A Liberal Religious Understanding of Easter”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
April 4, 2010

 Readings

 From the Gospel of Matthew…

 "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want."

 From Martin Luther King, Jr….

 “If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.”

From Mahatma Gandhi…

 “Let us all be brave enough to die the death of a martyr, but let no one lust for martyrdom.”

From the Gospel of Matthew

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."

 From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, from the scene in which Tom Joad is saying goodbye to his mother…

 “Tom,” she said. “What you aimin’ to do?”

He was quiet for a long time. “I been thinin’ how it was in that gov’ment camp, how our folks took care a theirselves, an’ if they was a fight they fixed it theirself; an’ they wasn’t no cops wagglin’ their guns, but they was better order than them cops ever give. I been a-wondering’ why we can’t do that all over. Throw out the cops that ain’t our people. All work together for our own thing - - all farm our own lan’.”

“Tom,” Ma repeated, “what you gonna do?”

“What Casy done,” he said.

“But they killed him.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “He didn’t duck quick enough. He wasn’ doing nothin’ against the law, Ma. I been thinkin’ a hell of a lot, thinking’ about our people livin’ like pigs, an’ the good rich lan’ layin’ fallow, or maybe one fella with a million acres, while a hunerd thousan’ good farmers is starvin’. An’ I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together an yelled, like them fellas yelled, only a few of ‘em at the Hooper ranch - - “

Ma said, “Tom, they’ll drive you, an cut you down like they done to young Floyd.”

“They gonna drive me anyways. They drivin’ all our people.”

“You don’t aim to kill nobody, Tom?”

“No. I been thinkin’, long as I’m a a outlaw anyways, maybe I could - - Hell, I ain’t thought it out clear, Ma. Don’ worry me now. Don’ worry me.”

They sat silent in the coal-black cave of vines. Ma said, “Ho’m I gonna know ‘bout you? They might kill ya an’ I wouldn’t know. They might hurt ya. How’m I gonna know?”

Tom laughed uneasily, “Well, maybe like Casy sais, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one - - an’ then ----“

“Then what, Tom?”
            “Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere - - wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Whereever they’s a copy beatin’up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ - - I’ll be the way kids  laugh when they’re hungry  an’ they knows supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build - - why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes.”

Sermon

            Some of you may be surprised to hear me talking about Easter this morning, especially to hear me talking about the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

            You see, more than a year ago, a retired colleague of mine, wrote the following in an email that I received: "Deep down I have thought for many years that the only reason I celebrated Easter with the congregations I served is that I did not have the nerve not to.”

            This retired minister thought it would be better if Unitarian Universalist congregations simply forgot about Easter all together and instead had a big celebration on the first Sunday in spring. It would be more honest, he thought.

            Without a doubt, Easter is the most problematic of all religious holidays for Unitarian Universalists. Though we look for wisdom and inspiration in all the religions of the world, when most of us don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, get the heebeegeebees at the thought of Jesus suffering and dying on the cross to placate a wrathful God for the sins of humanity, and are skeptical about the literal truth of biblical miracles such as resurrection, it’s hard to find wisdom and inspiration in the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

            Many Unitarian Universalist ministers and congregations skirt the Jesus stuff all together by celebrating the Flower Communion on Easter morning, and some just mix up the Jesus story with so much talk about spring, flowers, bunnies, and rebirth that you would hardly think that Easter had anything to do with Jesus at all. However, to me, this somehow feels inauthentic at best - -  like joyriding on somebody else’s holiday - - and wishy washy at worst - -  like sitting down in a brew pub, ordering a stout ale, and being served near beer.

            I don’t have anything against celebrating spring, and in fact, I think we should, but I’ve come to believe that the story of spring and the story of Easter are two different stories.

            My fear is that too many Unitarian Universalists celebrations of Easter fall into the inauthentic or wishy washy category. The Unitarian Unitarian minister William Schulz tells about seeing a cartoon picturing two churches across the street from one another - - one Episcopal and one Unitarian Universalist - - each publicizing the title of the upcoming Easter sermon on their sign boards. The title of the Episcopal rector’s sermon: “The Truth and Power of the Risen Christ.” The title of the Unitarian Universalist minister’s sermon: “Upsy Daisy.”

            With all this in mind, I asked all of you in my January newsletter column about the possibility of skipping Easter for at least this year, asking more specifically, “How important is it to you that the Sunday service at Saltwater Church on Easter morning be about Easter in some way?”

            Many of you responded to this question - - by phone, by letter, by email, and on the blog I created, and the most common answer I got back was this: As long as there is still an Easter egg hunt for the children on Easter morning, you don’t care what I talk about on Easter, but cancel the Easter egg hunt, and somebody around here will get nailed up on a cross. With one notable exception, most of you said hearing about “something Easterish” on Easter morning wasn’t important to you.

            So I honestly thought about skipping Easter this year.

            However, there was just something within me that didn’t want to let the Easter story go. There was something within me that wanted to continue to wrestle with the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection until I could wring some wisdom and inspiration in it from a liberal religious perspective. It is a story with which I have honestly struggled, as some of you know, for the past ten years, and I wasn’t quite ready to give up struggling with it, so during the past few months, I have studied about and reflected on this story a great deal.

            This morning, I’m ready to share with you a liberal religious understanding of the Easter story, and I’d like to explore two specific questions with you. First, how can we as Unitarian Universalists, as religious liberals, positively understand the story of Jesus’ death as symbolized by the cross? Is there any way that we can reclaim the symbol of the cross as a meaningful symbol for ourselves? Second, how can we as Unitarian Universalists positively understand the story of Jesus’ resurrection?

            First, I need to ask you to at least temporarily set aside everything that you ever learned about Jesus’ death and resurrection - - especially what might be called the orthodox interpretation of those events - - that Jesus, the divine son of God, died on the cross for the sins of humanity to placate a wrathful God, that he was physically resurrected from the dead three days later, and that because of this, anyone who now believes in Jesus as his or her personal savior will have eternal life. I want to suggest that this interpretation arose in the decades and centuries following Jesus’ life and death, but the best scholarly research suggests this is not how the historical Jesus understood his own life and death or how the very earliest of Jesus’ followers understood his life and death.

            Before answering those questions about Jesus’ death and resurrection, I also want to explore with you the social context of Jesus’ ministry, because I don’t think you can understand anything about Jesus without understanding this context.

            You see, by the time that Jesus became an adult, the Jewish homeland where he lived, with Jerusalem as its capital, had been oppressively and exploitively ruled by foreign empires for several centuries. It had been ruled by the Roman Empire since 63 BCE.

            However, when the Roman Empire conquered new lands, Roman authorities didn’t like to spend too much time and effort in directly governing those lands. Instead local leaders, most often coming from the wealthiest families who had the most interest in maintaining the status quo, were given the task of day to day governance.

            In Judaea, there was a governor named Pontius Pilate, but much of the responsibility for daily governance - - which included the collection of a heavy tax burden that was paid in tribute to Rome - - was given to the temple authorities - - the chief priests, scribes, and elders at the Jewish temple, who themselves came mostly from wealthy, aristocratic, families. Thus the temple was not only the center of religious power, but economic and political power as well, and the temple authorities became, in fact, local collaborators with the Roman authorities in the oppression and exploitation of the population, most of whom were peasants.

            Life as a peasant in an agrarian society had never been pleasant, but history shows us that during this first century of the Common Era, social inequality was becoming even more severe with the military, political, economic, and religious elites growing richer and the poor growing poorer.

            After falling into debt after a bad harvest, many small farmers were forced to sell land that had been in their families for generations to larger landowners. Sometimes they became sharecroppers, but often they became landless and their lives became even more desperate. As the land holdings of the elites became larger, not only did their lifestyles become more lavish and opulent, but they also stopped growing grains and vegetables and started growing crops that could be exported for cash. There’s a story in Christian scripture in which Jesus curses a fig tree, which seems to be an arbitrarily mean thing to do. I know it’s a story which has confused many people, but the story is easier to understand if you realize that figs, which were a cash crop, were symbolic of the economic changes that had driven so many people into poverty.

It was in this context of increasing oppression and exploitation that Jesus lived his life and practiced his ministry, and, finally, before answering those questions about Jesus’ death and resurrection, I also want to explore with you Jesus’ ministry itself.

As I’ve said before, if you want to really understand what the historical Jesus was all about, there are three important things to know.

            First, Jesus practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love, saying that everybody should love everybody no matter what. Jesus also spoke of the possibility of a society based on that kind of radically inclusive, unconditional love, and he called this society the Kingdom of God. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was not about pie in the sky when you die. It was about compassion and justice here on earth.

            Second, Jesus was opposed to anything that oppressed or exploited the human spirit, but what he was most against was any kind of social system in which the military, political, economic, and ideological elites were able to use their power to exploit and oppress others, especially the weakest members of society.

            Sadly, in most churches, Jesus’ more radical social teachings too often get totally ignored, though they’re really obvious to anybody who actually sits down and reads what the bible actually says. As the social commentator John Fuglesang recently said, “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus."

            Third, Jesus understood the best way to bring about the Kingdom of God was not through violence, nor through passivity, but through active, non-violent resistance.

            These are the three most important things to know about Jesus, and Jesus spent most of his public ministry - - which was three years at most - - wandering the Judean countryside talking about these three things.

            It was only during the last week of his life that he went to Jerusalem, the center of military, political, economic, and religious power in the region.

            Why did he go to Jerusalem?

            Jesus went because he knew that if his dream of a society based on compassion and justice - -  his dream of beloved community, his dream of the Kingdom of God - - were ever to become a reality, like the Jewish prophets of the Hebrew Bible, he would need to confront the powers that be in Jerusalem, especially the temple authorities who stood in the same Jewish tradition that he did but had abandoned that tradition’s centuries old insistence on compassion and justice for all in their quest for power and greed.

            Did Jesus go to Jerusalem to start a popular uprising? Maybe. Jerusalem was full of political insurgents, and many people would have been in Jerusalem at the same time as Jesus to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover.

            Did Jesus go to Jerusalem knowing that he would die? No, I don’t think so. But it was a task for which Jesus was at least willing to risk his life.

            What happened? As Christian scripture says, Jesus did confront the authorities in the temple. Later, he was also betrayed, arrested, tried, tortured, and crucified, and on the third day rose from the dead to walk bodily among the living.

            Now let me try to answer the first of those questions I spoke of before. How can we as Unitarian Universalists, as religious liberals, positively understand Jesus’ death as symbolized by the cross?

            In fact, I have a cross right here. [Hold wooden cross up in hands.] I know some of you may be surprised to see me holding one. I suspect that many of you didn’t even think we had one around here. In fact, we didn’t. I had to go out and buy this one. I know that some of you may be even having a visceral reaction seeing me holding this cross because I know a lot of us have a lot of baggage about the cross. In fact, the reason I went out and bought this one was to help me confront my own baggage while I was writing this sermon.

            But is there any way that we can reclaim the symbol of the cross as a meaningful symbol for ourselves?

            Somebody once said that Unitarians are a lot like vampires. We have roots in Transylvania, we cringe at crosses, and we’re always looking for new blood. But is there any way that we might come to embrace the symbol of the cross?

            Here is my own answer, but let me also give credit where credit is due, because it has been several books written by the biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan that have help me most in developing my own liberal religious understanding of the cross.

            According to Borg and Cross, Jesus taught the two biggest challenges humanity faces are egoism and injustice, and the cross symbolizes Jesus’ response to both of those problems.

            What do they mean by this? Here’s my take…

Jesus taught that those who want to save their lives must be willing to give their lives up for something greater than themselves.

However, this is something that not only Jesus taught, but that almost every religion of the world teaches. Almost every religious tradition in the world teaches that the path toward salvation involves a transcendence of the self, or even the death of the ego. This is true not only of Christianity, but of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Islam, and other traditions as well. Tom Joad even speaks about this in our reading this morning from The Grapes of Wrath - - “a fella ain’t got a soul of his own but on’y a piece of a big one.”

            And here by salvation, I’m not talking about angels and harp music.

            I’m saying that the path toward personal transformation in this lifetime involves learning to love something else as much as or more than ourselves.

            I’m saying that living the deepest, fullest, richest, most abundant life possible is only possible when we choose to commit ourselves to some cause beyond our selves, something that we care about so much that we are even willing to make sacrifices for it or, in rare cases, even die for it.

Too often in the Christian tradition, the cross has come to symbolize a “Get of Hell Free” card: “Jesus died for your sins on the cross, so as long as you believe in Jesus as your personal savior, you get to go straight to heaven, feel free to pass purgatory, don’t worry about collecting 200 good deeds on your way.”

But I want to suggest that how the earliest followers of Jesus most likely understood the cross - - and how we might understand it today - - is as a symbol of Jesus’ love and commitment to something beyond himself, his willingness - - if absolutely necessary - - to sacrifice himself for something beyond himself, and his teaching that this is the path of personal transformation for us all - - to love something as much as or more than yourself..

            This is an understanding of the cross which I can embrace because it focuses on the reall passion of Christ - - a passion for a society based on compassion and justice - - not his suffering and death on the cross. From my perspective, suffering is rarely redemptive in any way, and as Napolean Bonaparte said, “It is the cause, not the death, that makes the matyr.”

            However, beyond this more general understanding - - the cross as a symbol of the more abundant life we experience when we choose to love something beyond ourselves  - - Borg and Crossan say the cross can be understood as a symbol of Jesus’ political struggle against the oppression and injustice of the Roman Empire.

            You see, in the first century of the common era, crucifixion wasn’t used as a form of punishment against common, ordinary criminals. It was used only as punishment for one kind of crime - - for those who denied imperial authority.

            This is also an understanding of the cross which I can embrace.      

            What do I mean? On the one hand, we certainly do not live in a society under imperial occupation. But on the other hand, the Kingdom of God on earth of which Jesus dreamed has certainly not yet become a reality, even with the passage of health care reform legislation.

            How I also wish this understanding of the cross, this early understanding of the cross, were more widely accepted.

            How I wish that putting up a cross on a building or wearing a cross around one’s neck still symbolized what it did to the earliest followers of Jesus - - and to be fair, what it still symbolizes to some Christians today - - a willingness to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and stand against anything that oppresses or exploits the human spirit, especially social systems that benefit the elites of society while taking advantage of the least fortunate among us.

            How I wish that everyone who said that Jesus was their personal lord and savior, also accepted Jesus, to borrow a phrase from Borg and Crossan, as their political lord and savior as well. In fact, the next time somebody asks you if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior, you might ask them, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your political lord and savior? Have you committed yourself to following Jesus’ example - - not by loving Jesus but by loving what Jesus loved, by committing your life to creating a society based on compassion and justice, and by being willing to sacrifice for that? Because if you haven’t, you’re only going halfway!”

            If this is how we as Unitarian Universalists, as religious liberals, might understand Jesus’ death as symbolized by the cross, how might we understand the story of his resurrection?

            I know that no matter what we believe happens after death, when people we love die, they are no longer part of our lives as they once were, but they do not completely disappear from our lives. Our memories of them live on in our hearts, and their love for us, their faith in us, and their hope for us live on in us continues to shape our lives.

            I am sure that for Jesus’ apostles it certainly felt as if his spirit was still amongst them after he died.

            There is also this…Throughout history, there have been people who have embodied or incarnated a belief, an, idea, a cause, with their entire being.

            Jesus was one of these.

            In more modern times, so was Mahatma Gandhi. So was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was James Reeb, the Unitarian Universalist minister who died in Selma. So was Oscar Romero, the assassinated Archbishop of San Salvador. So is Nelson Mandela. So is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma.

            Often governments have tried to silence them, or imprison them, kill them, or allowed them to be killed.

            But what history also shows us is that even when they are killed, even when they meet a bodily death, the ideals that they stand for do not die.

            In fact, their ideals sometime become more widely spread. As Soren Kierkegaard said, “The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”

            While I cannot embrace the literal truth of the gospel story - - that Jesus rose bodily from the dead - -  I can embrace its metaphorical truth - - that the spirit of Jesus, especially his commitment to creating a society based on compassion and justice, survived his crucifixion, was reborn in the hearts of his followers, and even survives among us today, in the same way that that the spirits of individuals such as Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., also survive among us today.

            Here I speak of no ghostly apparition. Christian scripture says, “Whenever two are more are gathered in his name, I am there,” and I understand this statement to be true in the same way that Tom Joad spoke the truth in the Grapes of Wrath when he said, “I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere - - wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.”

            But even more than this, even if the name of every single person who had ever stood for compassion and justice were wiped from the history books - - as the Texas State Board of Education actually did last month with Oscar Romero - - I believe that there is a yearning in every human heart for compassion and justice that can never be destroyed, no matter how people are imprisoned, tortured, or killed.

            As a Unitarian Universalist, this is how I find meaning in the story of Jesus’ resurrection. The story reminds me that while the individual Jesus may have died, that no earthly power can kill the ideals for which he stood.

            To sum it all up, my friends, the story of Easter reminds us that the best hope of living the deepest, fullest, richest, most abundant life possible is when we learn to love something beyond ourselves, especially when we commit ourselves to creating a world that is more compassionate and just.

            The story of Easter also reminds us that while many have suffered and died in the pursuit of a kinder and fairer world, the dream for such a world can never be killed because it is reborn anew within us when we the stories of those who have come before us and reborn anew in every generation.

            May we there be enough love, hope, and courage within each of our hearts to pursue that dream ourselves.

            So may it be. Amen.