First Parish Sermon

Henry David Thoreau concludes his reflections from WALDEN with a marvelous story "of a strong and beautiful bug that came out of the dry leaf of an old table...which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still." The insect could be heard "gnawing out for several weeks" prior to its emergence into the light of day. He asks, "Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?" And then he reflects, "Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness...may unexpectedly come forth...!"

We can well ask ourselves, "Is there some beautiful and winged life within us that has been clamoring to get out lo these many years, gnawing at the innards of our souls, urgently demanding, "Let me out! Let me out!"? Such a resurrection can happen to you, and to me, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty years down the road of life, in a moment of insight, peace, beauty, grace and forgiveness, if we are awake to its possibility. So long as we draw the breath of life there is more day to dawn, but as the sage of Walden reminds us, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

Easter comes 'round every year to remind us that we still have the possibility of breaking through the woodenness in our souls to the winged life within. Jesus called to Lazarus in the tomb, "Lazarus, come forth!" The call is directed also to us to come forth from the well-seasoned tombs in which we have embedded ourselves-- tombs of dead habit and routine, tombs of loveless, lifeless, despairing and uncaring attitudes towards ourselves and the world around us. Moral and spiritual change and transformation beckon to us from deep within, but we have to find the way to break open our souls to the winged life.

Thoreau, however, does not confine his metaphor of resurrection to the individual soul, but applies it to the human collective as well, to the possibility of new life emerging out of "the dead dry life of society", something "heard perchance gnawing out for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board."

Jesus of Nazareth was one who did not hesitate to break through social barriers and to welcome to his festive board people of all sorts--Romans, Gentiles, Jews, Samaritans, tax collectors, sinners, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, the least and the greatest--his was a vision of an open table in which the human family could break bread together in the kingdom of heaven come on earth, a kingdom in which the nobodys have become somebody, "in as much as you have done good unto the least of my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me."

Jesus once said, "When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just."

The resurrection of the just--is that not what Jesus was trying to bring forth in his life and teachings, in his death and hoped for resurrection? But if the resurrection was only something that happened to Jesus and to no one else before or since then it cannot do you or me or the world much good. Whether history or legend, apparition or physical revival, spiritual renewal or soul transformation, if it only happened to Jesus, then it remains a forgotten event in the dead past, not available to contemporary consciousness, interesting to speculate about--maybe it was a miracle, or perhaps just a myth--but since we cannot know, it does not grasp us with an assured sense of reality. What we need and long for are resurrections here and now--multiple, diverse, recurrent, perennial.

John Dominic Crossan, one of the leading New Testament scholars in the new quest for the historical Jesus, asks the question, "How many years was Easter Sunday?" He argues that it is the continuation of a sense of divine empowerment that began after the death of Jesus that constitutes the real basis of the Christian Easter faith. This "was not the work of one afternoon, or one year", but the work of centuries, and is still ongoing.

He quotes the 1st Century Jewish historian, Josephus, who made a brief reference to Jesus as...

a wise man,...who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of  such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called, after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Two thousand years later they still have not disappeared. And even we doubting Thomas heretical Unitarian Universalists, whether we call ourselves Christian or not, whether we may believe in a literal or metaphorical resurrection, trace our free faith heritage back to the life and teachings of the Nazarene. Yes, we honor other teachers and other traditions, eastern and western, scientific and religious, humanist and pagan, but if we remain true to our heritage, we will continue to honor that which was "deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree", from which we have grown and emerged as branches of the true vine.

How many years was Easter Sunday? Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a human lifetime, a millennium or two of lifetimes? We are still seeking for that "beautiful and winged life...buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society." Our prayer is that it may unexpectedly come forth even from the well-seasoned tombs of our hardened and weary hearts, and that we may yet be astonished that for us "there is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."