Reverend
Emmy Lou Belcher:

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March 27, 2005

What If It Didn’t Really Happen?

Easter, 2005

Imagine a room full of male ministers. The year is 1843. The gathering of men is deeply concerned because one of their members has issued a radical statement about Christianity. Many of the ministers in the room would like to kick out the radical minister from their midst. The argument goes on for hours. They ask the minister to resign. He says “No.” They finally decide that, because their denomination has no creed, they cannot force the minister to resign for disagreeing with them. And the minister refuses to resign because he believes more deeply in the freedom of speech, in the power of truth to be revealed over time - he believes more deeply in these than he wants their friendship.

This, my friends, was a meeting of Unitarian ministers. They were debating whether they could continue to regard Theodore Parker as one of their number.

Today, Parker’s view of Christianity is the norm within Unitarianism, a defining aspect of our tradition as it now stands.

What was so abhorrent to these usually tolerant ministers?

Parker had preached a sermon at the installation of a minister. That sermon was titled The Transient and Permanent in Christianity. In it he declared that it did not matter if Jesus had performed miracles or not or even if he had risen from the dead. The important thing was the permanent part of Jesus’ message – that the words he spoke contained the truth about life, about justice, about right relations among people – that his words spoke to the transcendent truth that overrides acts of the moment. It did not even matter, Parker said, if he lived in Jerusalem or in Athens. What mattered was the permanent truth that his words framed. And that is what we should live by, Parker said. Not whether he revived the dead, cured the sick or arose himself from the dead,  but only by the truth of his observations and communications.

Parker was a good friend of Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody. They had also been saying the same thing. Their movement was known as Transcendentalism, because they emphasized it was one’s relationship to the overarching truth of life that mattered, not the rituals or source of the stories one used to express it.  Their ideas brought them in direct conflict with the established Unitarian denomination of their times, a denomination of which Emerson observed, “tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory and not of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not what is necessary and eternal.” 

So what I am preaching to you this morning is not new Biblical scholarship, although new scholarship continues to seek through the clouds of culture and time to find the same fundamental truths in the Christian material that Parker was seeking in 1841.

The March 28 edition of Newsweek arrived at my door last week. On the cover is a picture of the risen Christ and the words: How Jesus Became Christ: From Resurrection to the Rise of Christianity.  But I found the article, by Jon Meacham, to be exactly what Parker and Emerson objected to in the 1800’s. It is a history of the beginnings of Christianity based on and bounded by acceptance of a belief that Jesus rose form the dead and that is what made Christianity grow so fast, what made it become the major religion in the world.  As I read the article my disappointment grew because it seemed to be coming out of the memory and not out of the soul.  It almost never questioned the validity of what is in the Gospels. It is an article that says the usual, and not what is necessary and eternal.  Or, in modern language, more of the same old stuff.

The same old stuff is what most people will, on the surface, be celebrating this morning.  Most of you know I give the most credence to the work of a group of scholars called The Jesus Seminar, whose work to uncover the historical Jesus has been anything but the same old stuff.  The Seminar was founded so that Biblical scholars would be able to meet and discuss what they really thought, not what the seminaries that employed them wanted to hear. The Seminar began as an independent press designed to print the truth behind the acts of Jesus – who was this person almost lost in the mists of time, and what might he have been trying to say to us?

Several times a year over a hundred scholars working from all over the world come together to discover what each really concludes from their studies. They represent the breadth of what goes into Biblical studies – language, history, culture of the ancient middle east, the disciplines of reason and logic, and a passion to know who the person we call Jesus really was. The members of this seminar are the successors to the scholars that mentored Theodore Parker.

It is the conclusion of this seminar that Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead. It is also their conclusion that Jesus was not an apocalyptic thinker – not a predictor of a world that was coming to an end.  At the time Jesus lived, Judaism was fascinated with the Book of Daniel and its apocalyptic imagery. But Jesus seems to have ignored that focus. One of the statements Jesus Seminar scholars think originated with Jesus is found set in a discussion with the Pharisees who are asking in this vignette when God’s imperial rule would come – when would this world cease and the world of Eden be returned? The answer Jesus gives is  “You won’t be able to observe the coming of God’s Imperial rule. People are not going to be able to say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or   ‘Over there!’ On the contrary, God’s Imperial rule is right here in your presence.” (Luke 17:20-21)

The Gospel writers heard that statement to mean that Jesus was God and was bringing the imperial rule. But that’s not what the Jesus Seminar scholars think he meant. They think he said exactly what he meant – that the power that we call God is already present in the world. It is not coming by magic nor is it itself a form of magic. Time and again Jesus parables and words say “It is already here – and it is about justice and love. The problem is not when it is coming, but rather when are you going to see it and live by it?”

                            (Funk, Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels, Macmillan Press, 1993,

page 364, references and commentary throughout)

These scholars are saying what Theodore Parker emphasized over a century ago: it isn’t about miracles.  It’s about whether the words of Jesus spoke the truth about life, spoke the truth to our human fallibilities and before the misguided powers of his time. That is where his enduring magnificence lies – in speaking the truth about life.

The power that Jesus had in his time and the power that has made Christianity such a dominant religion in the world is not the result of Jesus rising from the dead. His power came because he spoke about the foundational truths of existence. Similarly, what matters for my life is not whether I will go to heaven when I die, but that I search for the same truths to guide my life.

When I attended Scott Winfield’s service yesterday I was not moved by whether or not he was going to heaven. I was moved by the power of his friendship in the lives of so many people, how it changed their lives directly and indirectly. I was moved by his love of living – that his living brought beauty and graciousness and genuine inclusive love into life. I sorrowed at the loss of such a human being from our midst. Yesterday was a re-living of the story of Good Friday, the death of a good person.  The power of the Easter story is its combination of death and life, and its assertion that life ultimately overcomes the grip of death.

Resurrection is a truth. But what it means to me is quite different than those who believe that Jesus rose, complete in body, from the dead and ascended bodily into a place called heaven from where he is preparing to come back and rescue the rest of the earth from death. Resurrection is, to me, one of the transcendent truths of life. Nothing ever really dies; nothing ends without further consequence. Instead we live in a web of life where Life loves itself, keeps itself forever turning and growing. And our goal on Easter morning is to connect with that transcendent truth, a truth that supercedes the stories that happen on earth, that

precedes and exceeds the existence of human beings, much less my personal life, a truth that even encompasses the story of Jesus’ resurrection. Or, in Parker’s language, it is not the act of Jesus resurrection that makes resurrection true. It’s the truth behind the act. It’s for that truth I seek this morning.

I’m going to start with some works that speak to me with the power of scripture – the poetry of Mary Oliver. Time and again I am drawn to Mary Oliver because I believe her words capture deep, fundamental truths, and they speak those truths with profound beauty similar to the weight of the twenty-third Psalm in our poetic memory. Her words capture both a longing and a truth in the same poem.

Mary Oliver’s poetry often speaks a Good Friday theme, the darkness and suffering of the world. But again and again, usually in the same poem, she turns to see the abiding of life behind, beside the death. This poem is called The Terns:

The birds shrug off

the slant air,

they plunge into the sea

and vanish

under the glassy edges

of the water,

and then come back,

as white as snow,

shaking themselves,

shaking the little silver fish,

crying out

in their own language,

voices like rough bells –

it’s wonderful

and it happens whenever

the tide starts its gushing

journey back, every morning

or afternoon.

This is a poem

about death,

about the heart blanching

in its folds of shadows because it knows

someday it will be

the fish and the wave

and no longer itself –

it will be those white wings,

flying in and out

of the darkness

but not knowing it –

this is a poem about loving

the world and everything in it:

the self, the perpetual muscle,

the passage in and out, the bristling

swing of the sea.

                                          M. Oliver, House of Light, Beacon Press, 1990, page 64

We are the fish, the terns, the wave of the sea. We are part of the perpetual motion that moves even them. Whether knowing now or unknowing after death, we will always be part of this. Struck by awe, the poet invites us to hear this as a song of love for life, no matter what part of it we are. The poem does not offer us solution to our grief for the loss of what we may cherish because of its temporal form.  Mary Oliver, instead, invites us to put that suffering into the largest context – the world and everything in it, its perpetual passage in and out of the bristling swing of the sea.

In another poem, Oliver more directly expresses our grief over the constant changing of temporal form. She uses the image of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld. Once Osiris was a part of the world of light. But he died. However, instead of remaining part of the misty regions of the lost and only-remembered, he set up a kingdom for himself in the underworld. There he reigns again, tall and beautiful, with power equal to that of Ra, the god of the sun and upper world. Every Egyptian pharaoh dreamed of living in the kingdom of Osiris after death, as beautiful in death as in life.

In the poem I am about to read, Mary Oliver brings us to the grief of Good Friday, the inexorable sadness of a mother holding the broken body of her son as in the pieta of Michelangelo.  She speaks our grief and frustration that a person such as Scott Winfield should have died too soon. In her poem, the broken body is that of a tree. This poem is called The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond

Everyday

on my way to the pond

I pass the lightening-felled

chesty

hundred-fingered, black oak

which, summers ago.

swam forward when the storm

laid one lean yellow wand against it, smoking it open

to its rosy heart.

It dropped down

in a veil of rain,

in a cloud of sap and fire,

and became what it has been ever since –

a black boat

floating

in the tossing leaves of summer,

like the coffin of Osiris

descending

upon the cloudy Nile.

But, listen, I’m tired of that brazen promise:

death and resurrection.

I’m tired of hearing how the nitrogens will return

to the earth again,

through the hinterland of patience –

how the mushrooms and the yeasts

will arrive in the wind -

how they’ll anchor the pearls of their bodies and begin

to gnaw through the darkness,

like wolves at bones -

what I loved, I mean, was that tree-

tree of the moment – tree of my own sad, mortal heart-

and I don’t want to sing anymore of the way

Osiris came home at last, on a clean

and powerful ship, over

the dangerous sea, as a tall

and beautiful stranger.

                                                                                                                (Ibid, page 52-53)

Good Friday empowers the Easter, the resurrection celebration, because it casts beauty and grace against the facts of death. It reminds us that what is precious can so soon, so quickly be lost. Without Good Friday, Easter would be a song of innocence, not a song of mature and knowing living.

The kind of resurrection of which Oliver is speaking in these nature-focused poems is that of the nitrogens that return to the earth again. It is the story of resurrection on a horizontal plane, so to speak. This concept of resurrection as a self-enclosed act of life is the earth story, but not the complete truth. The Easter story takes one more step in reflecting the truth of life. It takes us beyond horizontal interconnectedness to embrace the vertical aspect of life. The Christian Easter story talks of Jesus being transported to another life. But my Easter talks of transformation of another sort.

Human beings are capable of transformative work. We can create what was not here yesterday.  We can create new forms out of old nitrogens, not just the same forms over and over and over. We can create justice from a world where suffering exists side-by-side with joy. We can move aside the arms of death and see the life beneath, then create a way to that life. Human beings have the power to drastically alter life in good ways as well as unfortunate ways. And the choice to see the good and live it is what Easter calls us to.

We do it every day in our creation of love towards one another. Words of Jesus call us to look at what is around us, to abandon our clinging to the temporal and see the transcendent in which we live. “The Kingdom of God is all around you. Just look and you will see it.”

It’s the same thing that the Buddha said – awaken, and you will see the true life that exists beyond the life we erroneously cling to when we lose faith. The stories of a bodily assumption – of Jesus appearing to disciples after his death and floating away before their eyes - these are later Christian attempts to add power to what he did bring to us because the Gospel writers missed it. Even in the Gospel stories, Jesus often chides his followers for not seeing and not hearing what he was really saying….that the power of transformation is in our hands, hearts and minds. In her poem called The Gift, Mary Oliver takes this transformative possibility seriously, yet tells the story with the simplicity of a parable.

I wanted to thank the mockingbird for the vigor of his song.

Every day he sang from the rim of the field, while I picked blueberries or just idled in the sun.

Everyday he came fluttering by to show me, and why not, the white blossoms of his wings.

So one day I went there with a machine, and played some songs of Mahler.

The mockingbird stopped singing, he came close and seemed to listen.

Now when I go down to the field, a little Mahler spills through the sputters of his song.

How happy am I, lounging in the light, listening as the music floats by!

And I give thanks also for my mind, that thought of giving a gift.

And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.

                                                                                                  (Ibid, page 36)

The power of the Easter story is not whether Jesus was the Christ, whether or not he rose to another life beyond this life. The power of the Easter story is that it takes us from the real temporal grief of Good Friday to assurance of the transcendent arc upon which this world revolves. It reminds us that whatever truly lives never dies. And that those who transform the world with their love shall, in the image of God, have created the life that gives life.

Yesterday morning I awoke as the light of that day began flowing into my room.  Along with the light came the songs of birds – some quick and lively, others, like the doves, cascading from a triplet to a throb of three distinct low notes. Between their familiar sounds I heard another, one I didn’t remember hearing in the days before. It cascaded through several full notes, was silent, then cascaded again. Perhaps it was a new bird in my window’s world; or perhaps it was notes from Mahler spilling through the known spring songs.

Open your ears to hear and your eyes to see. Outside the window of this room, there are snowdrops blooming, crocuses pushing aside the leaves that autumn dropped, refusing to let the weight and the stillness of the leaves stop their movement toward the sun.

The life that breaks through the winter’s grasp now calls to you, to remind you that love, that goodness, does rule over the suffering of this world. We are called to see that the presence of death does not thwart life – to hear that Life ever breaks through in old and new song. We are asked to cast our lot with this eternal world, to make not an idol of our temporary human life, but instead use it as a vessel from which to pour forth the power of love.  Hear its music, and take it seriously.  You are called today to spin the bright spirit out of your self and

with it name Love the ruler of the world.     

AMEN

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Last updated March 29, 2005

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