A sermon for Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church, Adelphi, Maryland Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016
The Rev. Evan Keely, Interim Minister

I have never believed with generations of Christians in the literal resurrection of Christ, nor have I been motivated to adopt a faith that believing in that resurrection is my own hope for life eternal — at least not in the doctrinal particulars in which those beliefs often manifest themselves. I also have never had any interest in what seems so fashionable among some Unitarian Universalists: the disdaining of those beliefs as foolish and misguided. Johann Sebastian Bach, Desmond Tutu, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in those things in some way, not to mention our own ancestors Julia Ward Howe and William Ellery Channing, Clara Barton and Hosea Ballou, and I fail to see what spiritual and moral benefit I might derive from supposing that they were wrong and that I am somehow wiser and smarter and better than those inimitable geniuses. We can disagree with something without denigrating it; besides, denigration is usually rooted in an insecure ego that needs to tear someone else down to foster the illusion of building oneself up, and there is too much good work to do in this beautiful, broken world to waste time on that dry-as-dust futility.

I myself have never professed any form of the Christian faith. In my heart, in my intellect and in my conscience, I have never felt called to adopt and live out a religious life in which Jesus Christ is at the center. I have no objection to anyone else’s doing so; I simply must follow a different path. But though Jesus is not at the center, I will be accursed and an accursed fool if I am gonna have spiritual and religious life with no Jesus at all. No thank you. I have not the slightest interest in a spirituality that says that the Noble Eightfold Path the Buddha taught has really nothing of value to teach humankind; and I would have no respect for a perspective that dismisses reverence for Gitche Manitou as “primitive;” and I am glad to be indebted to all three Humanist Manifestos, especially the 1933 one which says, very wisely, “The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained”; and I fear I am running out of patience with my fellow citizens who have such disdain for Islam, especially when they have not read a word of the Qur’an or the Hadith or formed genuine relationships with actual human beings who perform salaat faithfully five times a day and pay the zakat and who have had what is to me, frankly, the incomparably enviable experience of making the hajj; and I can’t approach with anything but a wondrous yearning to know and learn and understand from that spectacularly vast complex of beliefs, scriptures, rituals, stories, art and values that goes by the name of Hinduism, a living tradition now of a billion living people that has roots of continuity stretching back possibly as far as six thousand years or maybe more; and I love the beguiling tales and enduring truths of Kwaku Anansi and his closeness to Nyame, the God of All Things; and I am not ever, ever going to turn my back on Jesus Christ, not only because the Christ has some truth and light to reveal to all of us, but because I am not persuaded that there is really any benefit to be accrued in the willful and willfully dangerous act of deliberately forgetting our own heritage — especially when that heritage is so fantastically rich and complex and flawed and contradictory and beautiful and enduring and maddening and consoling and bad and good. I would not deliberately deprive myself of those riches, however tainted with human folly they may also be (with which all religions and all human endeavor are tainted), any more than I would refuse to drink a cup of cool, pure water if I were parched with thirst. And the truth is, we’re all thirsty. All of us.

Over the last hundred years or so, Unitarian Universalists have actually gotten quite good at a mass act of pretending. Our theology and practices have collectively evolved beyond a mutual commitment to forms of Christianity, but too frequently we therefore pretend that that past has vanished, that it never took place, that it doesn’t matter anymore. As Falkner memorably intoned, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” We love to brag about how our ancestors in early nineteenth century New England threw off the shackles of a rigid, stultifying Calvinism, and having cast aside the gloomy clouds of predestination and salvation of the elect, our wise forebears ushered in the bright sunshine of freedom, reason and tolerance in our religious life in which we bask to this day. None of this explains why some of the most dogmatic people I know are Unitarian Universalists, and none of it explains why that dogmatism is often most visible when it comes to our heritage and pretending that intentionally forgetting our heritage is a good idea, something we would tolerate under no other circumstances from anyone else, ever — nor should we, nor should any people of conscience.

We’re willing to put up with Jesus once in a great while. On Christmas Eve, Unitarian Universalists flock to their congregations, very often in greater numbers than on any other day of the year, and sing the old carols and light candles and maybe even read from the Bible — and not just from the Bible, but from the Gospels! But even there we soothe ourselves and hold the baby Jesus at arm’s length, and with our ever-so-rational alchemy we transform him every December 24 into the archetypal baby, and aren’t babies wonderful and beautiful and so full of promise? Well, of course they are. The story of the nativity of Jesus is actually full of a very particular set of promises applicable to no other newborn, but as we sit in the glow of the “Silent Night” candles, which actually are amazingly beautiful and wonderful — well, we don’t worry too much Jesus’s post- nativity story, because we know after Christmas Eve we are not going to spend much time on it anyway. And certainly when it gets to Easter, we are very glad to welcome the return of spring, and we might pause to admire Ostara or Eastre or that Norse goddess of many names for whom the holiday is named (even though very little is actually known about her), and if we have to grudgingly drag Jesus into it at all because some annoying divinity school graduate (God, they are irritating!) insists on bringing him up — well, we are glad to remember that Jesus was a prophet of justice, and that he was a political prisoner executed by the remorseless machinery of imperialism, and we kind of like that stuff. But then there is a certain matter of an inconvenient tomb. The story of this prophet of love and justice also happens to reach its spectacular climax not with a victorious labor strike, or of a people casting off the yoke of a foreign oppressor and having their first free and fair elections (with universal suffrage, of course), or of unjust laws being overturned by well-organized nonviolent resistance — no, the story of Jesus hinges on a scientific impossibility, almost like something out of some old Monty Python sketch (“He’s not quite dead!”), so… Easter, Schmeaster; let’s just enjoy the flowers and appreciate our children’s delight in unabashedly pagan rituals involving colored eggs, because in point of fact, flowers and children and eggs actually are pretty darned miraculous when you get right down to it.

Yet so much of the time, we Unitarian Universalists treat Jesus like an embarrassment. We think if we can distance ourselves from him, somehow we will succeed in also distancing ourselves from all the stupidity and cruelty and ugliness that has gone on in his name, a list of crimes and idiocies so long and so rank that if Jesus himself could see only a fraction of it, he would never stop weeping; none of us should desist from our tears, but we have work to do besides crying, and pretending that the sins of our forebears will somehow roll off us like water off a ducks back if we just say, “Oh, that wasn’t us, we are so much better than they are!” is not going to cleanse us any more that it gets us out of answering our calling to make the world more compassionate, starting with ourselves.

Of course, when you get right down to it, we should be afraid of Jesus. Every human being on the earth should be, because as with so many of the great sages of human history, his story is an indictment of the selfishness and cowardice and callousness into which all of us fall far too easily and too frequently. Only a fool isn’t afraid of Jesus, who decries the evils of private wealth, who urges forgiveness even of the most heinous hurts, who tells us what we all already know and don’t always want to know, which is that the way of abundant life is to feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick and the imprisoned, to love our neighbor as our self: do this, and thou shalt live.

It’s quite interesting to ponder and to study and to do rigorous research on that puzzling and fascinating phenomenon we call the Historical Jesus. Some very diligent, very capable people have been doing just that for a long time, and good on ’em; I hope that will continue in perpetuity. For my own part, as interesting as those endeavors are, I personally have never given them a great deal of attention. I am more drawn not to the Jesus of history and archeology and philology, but to the Christpower of the imagination, the son of Mary who is a hero in a story, a very ancient and a very compelling and baffling and thrilling and maddening story. I do not need to see documentary evidence to prove or disprove the existence of a solicitor in late eighteenth century London named Sydney Carton who bore a strong physical resemblance to an Anglo-French aristocrat in order to be edified by the moral truths and moved by the heartfelt passions of A Tale of Two Cities. I do not fault Mr. Dickens for his imagination; I don’t read what he wrote and note the absence of historical data to back it with an indignant cry of, “Hey, what is this? It’s like this Dickens guy just made the whole thing up!” I read the Bible; I know there is abundant evidence that there really was a King David, and no evidence at all so far that there really was a Moses; I am actually not entirely convinced that there ever was a prophet born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth who bore even the slightest resemblance to this dude we call Jesus. Whether or not such a person really existed is an interesting question, but ultimately for me and my conscience and my spiritual life it is not really all that important, any more than the empty tomb of his unforgettable story needs to be some kind of historically verifiable and biologically reproducible reality in order to be truth. The resurrection story is just what it is and always has been: a wild, audacious, magnificent, gorgeous absurdity. I can’t dodge the distinct possibility that that is precisely the point. The empty tomb is a subversion of everything we think we know. We know that life consists of birth, living and death: that is the one unbreakable rule of our mortal existence — except maybe when what we thought was inescapably real turns out to be ultimately less important than something ineluctably true.

Let’s admit it: we sometimes like to congratulate ourselves on how much smarter we are than other religious peoples; let’s admit that with a willingness to laugh at ourselves about how wrong we are about that, and let’s maybe have some humility this Easter Sunday and maybe even some self- reproach and, dare we say it, atonement for our hubris, and as we remember that smugness is almost always a salve (and a pretty shoddy one) for a nagging insecurity, let’s notice on this Easter Sunday that somehow, despite our much-vaunted UU open-mindedness and rationality, if we’ve rejected a literal interpretation of the empty tomb, we suddenly find ourselves with so little else to say about it — as if we have to admit, however grudgingly and however silently, that the fundamentalists and literalists have it over us on that one, and that it’s therefore best to just back away slowly; best to just tell ourselves that we have better things to do than think about and talk about one of the most astonishing, creative, life-affirming stories ever told among

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages;
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe; All lives and deaths—all of the past, present, future;*

this magnificent, insane, triumphant, incomprehensible, spectacularly bizarre, glorious resurrection story which — oh, by the way — happens to be the central story of the one religious tradition that is our inescapable inheritance. Oh, no — let’s not amble in the direction of an inconvenient tomb that, despite the scientific imperialism of our own stubborn, joyless, rigid, dogmatic rationality, stubbornly remains an empty tomb, deathless and open, as deathless and as open as we yearn for our hearts and minds to be, if only we could remember that we already have enough courage, we already have enough creativity, we already have and have always had enough humility and hunger for justice and lovingkindness to open our hearts and minds just enough to remember that the empty tomb doesn’t have to be anything more or anything less than what it has always been and always and forever will be: an empty tomb, emblem of a steadfastness indefatigable, a devotion inexhaustible, a righteousness incorruptible, a hope imperishable, a love indestructible. The stone rolls away this Easter and every Easter and every day to reveal a compassion unkillable, a place where bright morning stars are rising, bright morning stars are rising, bright morning stars are rising: day is a- breaking in our souls. The whole human race, regardless of theology, heritage, skin color, language, or any other distinguishing mark, can stand step into the empty tomb of Easter morning and find a message there echoing in the chamber in which neither death nor pain are to be found: echoing infinitely and eternally just past the stone that has been rolled away forever: the empty tomb says that the foundations of the cosmos are laid upon an unconquerable love. If we hear that message, then how must we live our lives? How must we live our lives if the fundamental, unalterable, eternal essence of reality is grounded in an unyielding, abiding, deathless righteousness and steadfastness and devotion and hope and love?

* Walt Whitman, “On the Beach at Night Alone”