A Time to Begin Again
A Sermon for Easter 2009
Jan K. Nielsen

Easter has come again.
It’s a day for lilies and alleluias,
colored eggs and candy,
good food and celebration.
We celebrate
spring’s return and the rebirth of the earth.
After winter’s cold,
our bodies and our souls are ready
for warmth and for color and,
perhaps especially this year,
a chance to begin again.

Each year,
we sing the old hymns
and tell again the Easter story.
Most of us, whether or not we call ourselves Christian,
know the story by heart:
Jesus, sentenced to death by crucifixion,
nailed to a cross, died on a Friday,
but on the third day, rose again to new life.   
After the sun had risen
on that first Easter Sunday morning,
Mark’s gospel tells us,
the women went to the tomb
to care for Jesus’ body.
When they got there,
they saw that the stone
that had covered the opening to the tomb
had been rolled away.
They went inside and found, not Jesus’ body,
but instead an angel, who said to them something like this:

“Hey, don’t be afraid.
You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth,
who was crucified.
Jesus has been raised.
He is alive.  
Look – there is the place they laid his body.
Go tell the others
that Jesus has already gone on to Galilee.
You will see him there.”
The women left,
in amazement and fear.
They were astonished;
they didn’t know what to think
about the empty tomb and the words of the angel.

Maybe when you hear the Easter story
you feel a little like the women at the tomb –
amazed, astonished, not sure what to think.  
It’s a wildly improbable story,
this tale of a body that dies and comes back to life.
It’s a hard story –
hard to accept,
hard to understand.

“How can it be true?” some of us may wonder.
“It can’t possibly be true,” others among us might insist.  
 When we sing those words,
“Jesus Christ has risen today,”
 we know that there are, among us,
differing interpretations of what those words mean.
As we sing, we trust
that if all of us aren’t so sure we believe
in the literal truth of those words,
the heavens won’t break apart
and come crashing down around us.   
 
For years, I struggled with the Easter story.
As much as I loved Easter as a celebration of spring’s rebirth,
I couldn’t quite accept the story of Jesus coming back to life.
It seemed -- unbelievable.
And the idea that God sent Jesus
so that he could die
in payment for everyone’s mistakes and missteps –
the world’s sins –
well, to me that just didn’t seem to make sense either.  
What loving God would will a brutal death?
And how, I wondered, could a loving God essentially say,
“If I forgive, someone has to pay.”  
I couldn’t accept the Easter story as true
nor could I understand its meaning.  
When I heard the story,
it seemed like a story for someone else,
but not a story that spoke to me.  
Today, I hear the Easter story in a different way,
and now, I will tell you, the story does speak to me.
Before, I heard the story with ears
that insisted on facts, evidence, proof.
I thought truth could only be found
in whatever could be proven to be literally, factually true.
But over time, I began to see that
a story can be “true,”
and teach us truths about life,
whether or not the story matches all the facts.  
Some of the deepest, most profound truths
can be expressed only in story and song,
parable and poem.      
What I finally came to understand
is that my insistence on literal truth
kept me from hearing the deeper meanings of the Easter story.   
 
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
Some think he did.  
Some think it could not have happened.  
Others of us aren’t so sure;
we have our doubts but, perhaps we allow for the possibility.
These days,
whatever the question,
I try to keep an open mind and an open heart,
and I side with the poet, Mary Oliver:
“Let me keep my distance always (she says)
from those who think they have the answers.”
Whatever the facts,
we do know that something happened that first Easter,
something happened in the hearts and minds
of Jesus’ followers that led them
to keep telling people about his teachings.    
It doesn’t matter
whether the story of Jesus’ resurrection is literally true,
writes historian and Jesus scholar, Marcus Borg.  
What does matter, he says, is what the story means.   

To help us understand
what the Easter story might mean for us and our lives,
Borg points us toward the historical record,
the story of what life was like in the world
in which Jesus lived and died.  
To understand the meaning of the Easter story,
we have to start with the Palm Sunday story,
the story we heard last week
about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey
followed by a parade of poor people.  
It was a protest march:
Jesus, the rabble rouser.
again was making trouble for the Roman authorities.

Jesus was all stirred up over the injustices he saw in his world.
All around him, he saw people without enough to eat.
Women were treated as property.
People lived in fear of a government
that ruled by force and violence.      
Jesus rode into confrontation and conflict
that first Palm Sunday
not to declare himself
the Messiah or the Son of God or the Savior of the World.
Jesus died instead for his passion,
his dream of what his world could be like,
the Kingdom of God –
a world where everyone might have enough,
no one would live in fear
war would be no more,
a world of peace and justice for all humankind.   
Jesus died, Marcus Borg tells us,
not to pay for the mistakes and missteps of people
but because of the sins of the world –
injustice, hunger, slavery, oppression, war.

In our world today,
we have not yet overcome these wrongs –
too many still have too little,
not everyone lives in freedom,
we still fuss and fight,
we still don’t always treat other people
the way we would want to be treated.
The dream for which Jesus died –
what he called the Kingdom of God –
has not yet come to our world.
And that is why, every spring,
we tell the story and sing the hymns.

The Easter story, you see, isn’t finished.
Easter is not just something that happened over 2000 years ago.
Easter can happen, and needs to happen, again and again,
in our world and in our hearts.
Easter is a time
to renew our promises,
our promises to one another,
and to ourselves,
about how we live.
On this Easter,
think about your life.
What promise do you want to renew?
Do you want to be more loving, more kind,
to be a better husband or wife, sister or brother,
a better parent, a more caring friend?
Do you want to share more of what you have?
Do you want to speak up
when you see or hear something that is unfair?
Listen to your heart.
Your heart knows what your Easter promises need to be.

Our Easter promises
can bring new life to our hearts and to our world.
We can, in the words of the poet, Wendell Berry,
be like “ . . . the first flowers of the year,
the assembly of the faithful, the beautiful,
wholly given up to being . . .
(with our)
small human acts of compassion, acts of care,
work flowerlike in selfless loveliness.”
We can, the poet teaches us,
“. . . receive these beauties
freely given, and give thanks.”
And on Easter, and all through the year,
we can be the givers.     

The meaning of Easter
is more than the promises we make,
as important as they are.
The meaning of Easter is also about mystery.
Over time, I have learned to make peace with mystery,
of all kinds.  
We don’t know for sure
what happened on that first Easter morning.
Whatever the question,
I still like to probe for facts, evidence and proof.
But I know, like the poet, Mary Oliver,
“Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.”  

And, in this life, the mysteries are many.
The poet reminds us of but a few,
like: “How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.” --
truly, a mystery.
I think of the stories of our lives.
I look out today at your faces
and I am reminded that Easter does happen.

Your stories are Easter stories.
You have known the depths of despair,
but your spirit rose again to new life.
Your known habits
that tried to pull you down
and take your life away,
but you rose again and life won out.
You have known the heartache of grief
but you have walked on --
toward love and life.  
There are, among us, still more Easter stories,
all of them sacred,
all of them full of mystery.
What was it that pulled you through?
Your own inner strength, to be sure,
the support of others, of course,
but ,as so many of you have told me,
there was something more at work,
some greater presence,
picking you up, pushing you on,
leading your spirit to rise again to new life.
“Mysteries, Yes,” says the poet.
“Mysteries, Yes,” I say.
Easter does happen.
New life is born.
Our spirits rise.
Love wins out over death.  
In this springtime of the year,
make your Easter promises.
Keep your hearts and minds open to the mysteries of life.
And, like the poet,
“. . . keep company always with those who say,
‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment
and bow their heads.”
It is time to begin again.

The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
April 12, 2009