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Playing Possumby the Rev. Kerry MuellerService at UUCSS on April 23, 2000
Rolling Away the Stone Sara Moores Campbell In the tomb of the soul, we carry secret yearnings, pains, frustrations, loneliness, fears, regrets, worries. ResurrectionSara Moores Campbell The resurrection isn't the only supernatural event in the Easter story. The disciples of Jesus lived in a world of the supernatural. According to Matthew, when Jesus died, the earth shook and coughed up corpses all over and "many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised." After the resurrection of Jesus, these saints showed up in Jerusalem. Well, if just by dying Jesus could empty all those tombs, maybe his own empty tomb was no marvel. Just The Thing For GeraldBased on Just the Thing for Geraldine by Ellen ConfordThere was nothing Gerald liked better than hanging by his tail from the branch of a tree and juggling a few acorns. SermonBecause God Loves Storiesby the Rev. Kerry Mueller Easter is often a problem for Unitarian Universalists. Easter lies at the heart of Christianity. Historically, we are descended from Christianity. And many Unitarian Universalists are still Christians today. But many others have left Christianity. And many other Unitarian Universalists have never identified at all with Christianity. And those who are UU Christians are usually more concerned with the religion of Jesus, than the one about him. So how do we relate to Easter? As an institution, even today, we more or less follow the Christian liturgical year to give shape to our calendar. Many of us enjoy at least the major Christian holidays. Celebrations like Christmas, after all, are woven into the fabric of our national lives. But our pleasure is somewhat uneasy. Easter eggs and bunnies and new clothes and big family celebrations -- these are fun. We dye Easter eggs and cook a special dinner. We buy chocolate bunnies. So far, so good. But the theological meaning of Easter is difficult for us. We understand that there must be deep significance to a holiday that has lasted so long, even one so layered and encrusted with non-Christian elements. We know that the celebrations of Easter have pagan roots. All those rabbits and eggs, after all, are fertility symbols. In English the holiday even has a pagan name. Easter is named for Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of Spring. The honoring of springtime and the return of fertility are especially appealing to us as Unitarian Universalists. Seasonal celebrations remind us of our deep connection to the earth and the faith of our most ancient ancestors. We are concerned for the future of the planet. The celebration of nature connects with our affirmation of the interdependent web. We could claim Easter as a celebration of the annual rebirth of Nature. But Easter has a special meaning to our Christian neighbors. It begins with the story of Jesus, an itinerant teacher and preacher with a large following among the poor. He was an iconoclast, who urged people to live as if the Kingdom of God were at hand, as if this very week we could simply act on our best impulses towards justice and mercy, and give up worrying about jockeying for worldly power and wealth. Jesus didn't follow the rules. He hung out with the lowest of the low. He sat at table with prostitutes and tax collectors and threatened the stable order of society. Jesus entered Jerusalem the previous week, accompanied by hundreds of enthusiastic followers. He was hailed like a king by the populace. The Roman authorities were worried about his ability to stir up the people. Where would all this lead, this talk of the Kingdom of God? When they received complaints from the equally worried temple authorities, they decided to take action. Jesus was arrested Thursday night, and executed on Friday. The slow, dreadful death on the cross would be a warning to other would-be prophets. And in the ordinary course of events, that should have been that. But Jesus' friends had experienced something powerful and unique in this man who lived life as if God were real and present to him. He could not be so suddenly, simply dead, gone. They needed him to go on with his work. And on Sunday, it is said, a most amazing event happened. Jesus rose from the dead and emerged from the tomb. He met with his followers and inspired them. And that new life became the pivotal event in Christianity. Most of us Unitarian Universalists have no literal belief in this resurrection. We are often inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus, but the religion about him is not ours. So what can we make of this story? Can we continue to enjoy Easter without subscribing to Christian theology and also without completely distorting its Christian meaning and disrespecting our Christian neighbors? And it's not only Easter. We are also in the midst of the Jewish festival of Passover. For some of us, Passover, also called Pesach, is the evocative family springtime holiday. I have enjoyed many Seders over the years. I love to prepare the foods according to recipes from Jewish cookbooks. It is wonderful to hear people talking about their special Passover memories. At one seder, a friend remembered getting off from school. Another remembered finding the afikomen and getting a large reward. Someone else took a deep sniff and said -- "the smells. All these wonderful foods here tonight bring back my childhood." Celebrating Pesach is a time of fun and excitement, with roots deep in ancient seasonal agricultural observations. But Passover, too, has a powerful religious significance. The whole point of the seder is to tell a story, to tell it with words, and songs and symbolic foods. The participants are enjoined to reenact the story, "as though we ourselves" were ancient Hebrews making the escape from slavery in Egypt. And in this story God intervenes in human history. God gives Moses the power to works miracles. With those miracles, plagues upon the Egyptians, Moses persuades Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. And he persuades the Hebrews to leave, despite their broken spirit, the result of cruel slavery. And then he opens the Red Sea to let the people cross. And closes it up again to drown the pursuing army! We Unitarian Universalists may be thrilled by the escape. We may make comparisons to modern events of freedom and escape. Passover is rich with meaning for us. But most Unitarian Universalists don't have any literal belief in these miracles, either. Stories of resurrection and miraculous liberation. How can we disentangle these compelling stories from the supernatural elements in them? How can we uncover the spiritual meaning of the holidays and still be true to the "guidance of reason and the results of science," as our principles call for? I think that the key here is the connection between the central themes of Passover and Easter, between liberation and resurrection. Resurrection is not only rising from dead. As Sara Moores Campbell wrote, resurrection is rising from deadness, resurrection is rising from helplessness and passivity, resurrection is entering life more fully. Humanity did not invent this course of action all by ourselves. It is built into our bodies. The ancestors of Gerald possum have been around for millions of years, unchanged by evolution. The possum is a helpless, timid creature, a marsupial looking rather like a large rat. It has survived by eating just about anything it can find, and by reproducing at a rapid rate. And sometimes, by playing possum. When badly frightened, a possum goes into an involuntary state of collapse. It appears to die. The predator needs to eat freshly killed prey. It often loses interest in already dead food. The predator sniffs about and then goes away. Then the possum rises again to go on with life. Death and resurrection. Countless generations of human beings have taken this strategy somewhat further, into the realm of metaphor. Shut down, turn away from the danger, hide in denial. Deadness is a good trick. It makes us seem harmless. It enables us to confound our predators. It gives us a little rest, and a time to gather strength. Deadness may be only a temporary respite. And then we rise again to reclaim lives. If resurrection means rising from deadness, it means rising up and claiming our power and using it to take a stand for liberation, doing justice and mercy, making the world a better place. This sounds simple, but it takes courage and perseverance. The human courage it takes to rise and act in the face of oppression or depression or simple numbness is miracle enough. In the little village of Holzelfingen in Germany, in the late winter of 1897, little Marie Fromm was looking forward to her tenth birthday. Her mother asked her what she wanted for her birthday. This question wasn't about a new bicycle or even a new winter coat. It was about what little treat she wanted to eat. These were poor people, too poor to have meat or chicken more than two or three times a year. "Oh," said Marie. I would love to have a soft boiled egg." "We'll see," said her mother. February 11th finally arrived. Marie asked about her soft boiled egg. "Well," said her mother, "The hens are just beginning to lay again. I can get a good price for the eggs just now. Couldn't you wait a few weeks?" So Marie postponed her birthday treat. Despite hardships and disappointments, Marie was good at school. She was such a good student that the local schoolmaster wanted to send her to high school. He approached her parents. He said he would pay the tuition if they would cover the expenses of transportation and lunches. But even that much was beyond their means. They couldn't afford to give up the small income she made breaking stones at the local quarry. Marie's hopes of a high school education were dashed. Marie had no future in Germany. Life was too hard, the poverty too great. So when relatives who had emigrated to America came back for a visit, and asked Marie to return to America with them, Marie was eager to go. She was just fifteen. She didn't know any English. Her mother said, "No. You are not going to America. You will leave here over my dead body." Marie thought about it. She thought about her future in the deadness of poverty. She thought about the possibilities of a new life in America. She thought about defying her mother. It was frightening. The sheer weight of her mother's opposition sealed her in as if in a tomb. But pushed aside that stone. Marie stood up and left. Somehow she found the power to change her life. Even as she walked out the door, carrying her little bundle of possessions, her mother was saying, "No, you may not leave. You'll go over my dead body" But Marie continued walking. She came to America. She had a long and fruitful life here. She married and raised a son. She worked in a bakery, and as a servant, and ultimately as a home health aide, earning a state certificate for her training. I am grateful for Marie's courage and willingness to claim her power to roll "away the stone" and emerge from a kind of tomb life, because Marie was my grandmother. You may have noticed that I've been using the word "power." And power is one of those words that often makes us uncomfortable. It makes us think of force and authority and domination and control. We may wish to do away with those forms of power by renouncing power entirely. Yet then we become powerless. And powerless does not mean harmless. Powerless means helpless. If we are powerless, we cannot rise up and take a stand and do what needs to be done. If we are powerless, we cannot heal the planet. If we are powerless we cannot repair our country. If we are powerless we cannot nurture and protect our children. We must not renounce power entirely. We are called rather to reclaim it. Power, after all, first means ability and strength and energy and vigor. It means the simple capacity to do, to accomplish. This is a tricky and delicate matter of course. Power is at least a two edged sword. It can be used for good or ill. It can mean domination or liberation. Our own UU theologian, the late James Luther Adams, reminds us that virtue does not exist in the abstract but must be given a social incarnation. He urges that we make use of the "power of organization and the organization of power." There are different kinds of power. Starhawk is a leader in the feminist spirituality movement. She speaks of power-over and power-from-within and power-with. "Power-over" is the destructive, coercive form of power. It was power-over when Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrews. It was power-over when the Romans executed Jesus. It is power-over whenever repressive governments forbid public discussion and protest. It is power-over when thousands of people are forced out of their homes in an action chillingly called "ethnic cleansing." It is power-over when terrorists kill and maim and disrupt the lives of ordinary people by bombing buildings or hijacking airplanes. It is power-over when children or even senior citizens turn to gun violence when they feel angry and rejected. It is power-over when a domineering spouse or parent tries to control the thoughts and feelings and lives of the rest of the family. This is the form of power to renounce and resist. But a second form of power is "power-from-within." Starhawk says that "power-from-within is akin to the sense of mastery we develop as young children with each new unfolding ability: the exhilaration of standing erect, of walking, of speaking the magic words that convey our needs and thoughts." Thirty years ago, a girl of fifteen lay for a year in a charity hospital as isolated as if she were sealed in a tomb. Visiting days occurred only once a month. Even then, her mother usually couldn't afford the bus fare. The girl was alone, encased from neck to hips with a heavy plaster cast. A nurse found her an old typewriter. It was power-from-within when she taught herself to type. She lay on her stomach and dangled her arms over the edge of the bed with the typewriter on the floor. It was power-from-within when that girl became a grown woman and rolled away the stone of poverty and ignorance and prejudice. She turned that typing skill into a publishing and computer consulting business. It is power-from-within that sustains our lives. It empowers us to live under difficult circumstances, to create art, to play, and connect our authentic selves with other persons. It is power-from-within that enables us to bond together to nurture the third and perhaps most critical form of power, "power-with." James Luther Adams defines this power as the capacity to participate in social decisions. Starhawk calls it the "power of a strong individual in a group of equals, the power not to command, but to suggest and be listened to, to begin something and see it happen." Even in business school I was taught that this power, the power of personal influence often outweighs the power of the titles on an organization chart. Starhawk gives a dramatic illustration of power-with. This might almost have been an event from the last week, as demonstrators came together to reach consensus with each other, and even reached an agreement with the police on peaceable arrests. The scene begins with six hundred women under arrest, being held in a hot and dusty gym after a demonstration in which they blockaded a weapons facility. By the second day, they are tired and irritable. A woman runs screaming into the room. She bursts through the open doorway that leads to the concrete exercise yard outside. Six guards are after her. "Grab her! Grab her!" they yell. The woman dives into our cluster and we instinctively surround her, gripping her arms and legs and shielding her with our bodies. The guards grab her legs and pull; we resist, holding on. The guards and the women are shouting and in a moment, I know, the nightsticks will descend on kidneys and heads, but in that suspended interval before the violence starts we hold our ground. The woman who began the chant had no special authority. She simply felt what she must do. She claimed the power to do it. She was connected to the others, and used her power with them. To know that power, to create the situations that bring it about, says Starhawk, is magic. It is the magic that enabled Moses to lead the Hebrews to liberation. It is the miracle of the resurrection from deadness. So I invite you this morning to celebrate the Easter possum. "Possum," after all, is the Latin word for "I am able." I invite you to reclaim power. In our lives, we may sometimes feel as though we are surrounded by those wielding power-over. We may feel oppressed by Pharaoh. We may be facing the Romans. We may choose to play possum for a while, to feign deadness and lie low and prepare for action. But sooner or later, we must find the power to be resurrected from deadness into liberating life. It may simply be a matter of utilizing the power-from-within to give direction of our lives, as it was for Gerald and his juggling school. Or it may be a not so simple struggle to rise out of the mire of depression. It may require the most extreme effort to live from meaning, to resist destruction, even when we are faced with death. We may draw on power-with to take symbolic action to stand up and march for the rights of those unlike ourselves. Or you may use power-with to grow this congregation into a flourishing and effective community taking its place on the wider stage. Or we may participate in the social decisions that bring liberation to all of humanity. And the miracles of Moses, the resurrection of Jesus? We have no simple answers to those. Scholars and scientists have offered various explanations. Unusual winds to clear a path through the sea for Moses. A near death experience for Jesus. One of these may be correct. Or none. Perhaps nothing unusual really happened on the physical level. Perhaps it was all a trick of memory as the powerful experiences people had with Jesus and Moses were translated through metaphor into story. Perhaps the real miracle for Moses was in persuading the Hebrews to leave the tolerable security of slavery for the dangerous liberation of an unknown trek through the desert. Perhaps the resurrection of Jesus was really the resurrection of hope, nourishing power in his frightened and scattered band of followers. The resurrection of hope enabled them to act as if he was still with them in body, and even more, enabling them to act as if the Kingdom of God were really at hand. Perhaps it is best to think of these supernatural events as myths, myths in the best sense of the word, myths that tell not a bricks-and-mortar truth but a larger virtual truth. Despite oppression, despite death and despair, despite fear and greed and numbness, Moses and Jesus have profoundly influenced generations of people. These are the myths of power-from-within and power-with, and how they ultimately are stronger than power-over. It is through claiming and using these powers that we can end our times of playing possum. We can accept Sara Campbell's resurrection challenge, the challenge to roll away the stone and come out. May we each, this Easter and Passover, step out from deadness, cross the sea to freedom, and use our powers to reach out and bless the world. Amen. Benediction We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, Sara Moores Campbell |