Written for and delivered to
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
April 8 2012.
Easter is the highest of holidays for our Christian friends. It is a story forever intertwined with Passover, a holiday marked first by the Jewish people. Passover commemorates the end of their time as slaves in Egypt.
For Christians, Easter marks the central miracle of their faith, the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
For Unitarian Unversalists, this time can be marked by discomfort. We don’t know what to do on Easter.
What many have done in the past is talk about how the Christians co-opted other Spring festivals, or how many similarities the story of Jesus has with other “son of God” myths.
Sometimes this has been done in the honest intent of exploration.
More often, though, I have witnessed this as an exercise born out our less than highest ideals.
Passover and Easter are a cultural force. They are part of the Western Cultural Lexicon. Our own culture is steeped in the stories of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Many of us in this sanctuary came to Unitarian Universalism from some other faith tradition. And we left that faith because it didn’t suit us. It didn’t fulfill our needs, we couldn’t reconcile some part of its practice with our heart and mind.
And then, in order to create safety between ourselves and the old faith, we, as a people, we have said things like “I’m a recovering Catholic.” Or we have gut reactions to words that some people find sacred; God, church, altar, obligation and many others.
I am not immune to this.
Hell is the reason I left Christianity.
I could not reconcile the idea that people who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior, would suffer eternal punishment.
I had one particularly close friend who I lost over this discussion. His name is Jose, and as we started college, he became a born-again Christian. The more he embraced his new faith, the more “inflexible” I experienced him to be, the deeper I dug my own heels into the ground, resisting his new narrative.
I became smug with the best of them.
As my anger with Jose over his new faith grew, our clashes over religion became more intense. He saw his mission as one that expressed love. He loved me, and he wanted to save me from what he saw as an honestly deplorable future. I wanted to convince him that his new friends were the problem, that they were using this threat and fear tactic to brainwash him.
And in the process, I was losing my friend.
I wasn’t self-aware enough then to notice that a lot of my energy was coming from grief.
After a couple of years of increasing divide between Jose and I, we stopped talking. That was 23 years ago. I think about him now and again, and I wonder if he’s still strong in his faith, if it still brings him comfort.
And back then, who knew that I’d be here today, preaching to a faith community, on Easter Sunday?
With apologies, I’m going to quote my younger self.
How could Jose believe such a ridiculous story? How could this very smart, smarter than me, young man, believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead three days later? I was annoyed, I was angry…
And also I was scared. When I first arrived, I spoke about my concern that I might be wrong, and that being wrong, too obstinate to believe, well what if there were consequences?
And this is where I think much our energy in our own relationship with Christianity comes from.
In our fear, we use the potent power of our minds to make distance.
How else can one explain how a people so committed to diversity, can have such short wicks when it comes to Christianity?
I used the term “Sexton” here once in church, and actually watched a person instinctively recoil.
And that’s the thing, these reactions I see are too quick, too almost instinctual to be rational. There is something almost animal in them.
So, this brought me to the question of “Why?”
I love this question. I’ve been asking it my whole life.
A lot.
So…. Why? Why would these people, these Unitarian Universalists I have known since 1995, why would they so easily tolerate faiths like Buddhism, Paganism with nary a batted eye, but the minute Jesus is mention, get all rankled?
I suspect it has to do with pain.
If our rejection of other faiths was based solely on our rejection of their own improbable beliefs, then what chance do any of them have?
Buddhists believe in reincarnation, right? There is no evidence of reincarnation, is there? And yet, many of us will claim to be Buddhist-inspired.
Pagans believe, often, in a Creatrix and her male consort. This isn’t much different than believing in the story from the Jewish Book of Genesis, is it?
And yet few if any members of this Fellowship would react as strongly to portions of these two stories with the energy and venom with which they react to someone mentioning Jesus in church.
In his book 1981 book Stages of Faith, James W. Fowler developed a theory of six stages that people go through as their faith matures based on the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. The basic theory can be applied, not only to those in traditional faiths, but those who follow alternative spiritualities or secular worldviews as well.
The names are somewhat clunky, and if I read the stages to you, it would sound like me reading a book report from up here, and none of us want that. So I’m going to just give you a VERY brief overview of three of the stages.
Stage 4 is called “Individuative-Reflective.” This is a very difficult stage, when people begin to think outside of the boxes they grew up in. Depending on the environment they come from, the very act of entering this stage can be traumatic and leave deep emotional scars.
Fowler’s 5th stage is called “Conjunctive Faith.” It is rare for people to reach this stage before mid-life. This is the point when people begin to realize the limits of logic and start to accept the paradoxes in life. They begin to see life as a mystery and often return to sacred stories and symbols but this time without being stuck in a theological box.
The 6th stage is called “Universalizing Faith,” and according to Fowler, few people reach this stage. Those who do live their lives to the full in service of others without any real worries or doubts.
I’m not just bringing this information forward because I want to prove to you that I actually went to seminary, and we did more there than contemplate our navels.
I think that Unitarian Universalism, as a whole, is stuck in Stage 4, Individuative-Reflective. As an institution, we are not yet “old” enough to deal comfortably with the paradoxes in life. We are not yet ready to let go of our death grip on logic and enjoy the ride.
In some ways, we are like people on a roller coaster. We want to be able to remove our hands from the safety bar, but we can’t quite..yet. We can rationalize that thousands of people have ridden this ride before and few, if any, have died doing so. We might even resent those on the coaster who are able to let go of the bar and lift their hands up and experience the true, deep joy of the ride.
We Unitarian Universalists have our own improbable beliefs.
We believe in things as far fetched as “world peace.” A world were every person will be treated with dignity and have their worth reflected back to them.
We’re comfortable in the knowledge that we, with our efforts, can work toward these goals, even if we think that it won’t take place during our own lifetime.
I have a favorite Chinese proverb on our fridge at home “One generation plants the tree, and the next generation enjoys the shade.”
That, my dear friends, is faith.
It is not the same kind of faith as our friends who are celebrating the central mystery of Christianity today. But I hope that we can see that faith is faith, that it sometimes helps one to endure. That it is ultimately a tool that we can use to get through difficult times, and that can remind us to be mindful and grateful for the joys in our lives.
As we share the beauty of nature this morning in our Flower Communion, see our own faith in humanity expressed here.
Smell the glorious fragrance, in the full knowledge that some are allergic.
See the diversity of color and function, and be glad that we also don’t all look alike
Feel the delicate petals and leaves, and be reminded of the gentle touch of true friends in times of sorrow and celebration.
May we, as a people of faith, remind ourselves and each other, of the beauty of diversity of people, who come in all shapes and sizes, all age ranges, and physical attributes. That our diversity of income, political point of view, gender expression and affectional orientation are a strength to us as a whole.
As the Unitarian heretic and minister Francis David said 400 years ago: We need not all think alike to love alike.
Go forth from this, our sacred space, and spread love.
May it be so.
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