Resurrection Morning: The Dawn of a New Day
Guest Sermon by Julia Corbett-Hemeyer
Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie
Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009

Introduction

If you are wondering what happened to the customary readings, there are three of them, and I have woven them into the sermon. When Markie asked me if I would be able to speak here on Easter Sunday, I was very pleased, and particularly so in that Markie said it seemed better to have a "member of the family" rather than an outside speaker as the guest speaker for Easter Sunday. Not long after that conversation, a comment I'd heard several times from various members of our congregation came to mind. Some people have expressed a concern that all of humankind's religions get their just due here—except Christianity. So, on this quintessentially Christian holy day, I want to honor the concern that some of you in this blessed community have raised by sharing my thoughts on what the Easter story might mean to our diverse congregation of UUs. Some of us are Christian, some of us are not, and many of us grew up Christian. The vast majority of us have grown up in this country that is predominantly Christian, at least in some nominal sense.

Second, I want to honor our Unitarian and Universalist heritage, our foremothers and forefathers. Those early Unitarians and Universalists were Christians. They were not orthodox Christians, by any means—they were indeed often labeled heretics—but Christians they were. Because they were Christians, the Jesus story was at the center of their faith, and the resurrection is at the center of the Jesus story. The early Unitarians and Universalists were people whose lives were deeply informed by the story of Jesus' resurrection.

[First Reading] We hear this very clearly in William Ellery Channing's classic sermon, "Unitarian Christianity," delivered in May of 1819. What Channing says may well startle us somewhat in how very traditional it sounds. I have retained Channing's gender specific language:

I now proceed to the second great head of this discourse, which is, to state some of the views which we derive from that sacred book [i.e. the Bible], particularly those which distinguish us from other Christians.

Having thus spoken of the unity of God; of the unity of Jesus, and his inferiority to God; and of the perfections of the Divine character; I now proceed to give our views of the mediation of Christ, and of the purposes of his mission. With regard to the great object which Jesus came to accomplish, there seems to be no possibility of mistake. We believe, that he was sent by the Father to effect a moral, or spiritual deliverance of mankind; that is, to rescue men from sin and its consequences, and to bring them to a state of everlasting purity and happiness. We believe, too, that he accomplishes this sublime purpose by a variety of methods; by his instructions respecting God's unity, parental character, and moral government, which are admirably fitted to reclaim the world from idolatry and impiety, to the knowledge, love, and obedience of the Creator; by his promises of pardon to the penitent, and of divine assistance to those who labor for progress in moral excellence; by the light which he has thrown on the path of duty; by his own spotless example, in which the loveliness and sublimity of virtue shine forth to warm and quicken, as well as guide us to perfection; by his threatenings against incorrigible guilt; by his glorious discoveries of immortality; by his sufferings and death; by that signal event, the resurrection, which powerfully bore witness to his divine mission, and brought down to men's senses a future life; by his continual intercession, which obtains for us spiritual aid and blessings; and by the power with which he is invested of raising the dead, judging the world, and conferring the everlasting rewards promised to the faithful. . . . .

His resurrection is the foundation of our hope of immortality.¹

So—what are we to make of the resurrection faith of the earliest Christian community? What can I make of it, as someone who is not a part of that tradition but who has been schooled in its language? In what sense, if any, do we ourselves believe in the resurrection of Jesus, whom Christians call the Christ? We could dismiss it out of hand. Lifelong Unitarian Universalist Christopher Gist Raible does precisely that when he writes: "The modern Unitarian Universalist finds much of the old terminology no longer pertinent to the religious needs of people today. Concepts such as the . . . resurrection are of this nature. Unitarian Universalists emphatically reject them as contrary to both scientific and historical evidence."² The concept of resurrection here meets the same fate as the theory that the earth is flat or that illnesses come about because someone is cursed by the devil. It is consigned to the same linguistic slag heap as the thees and thous of King James English

On the other hand, we could sit with the story, and with our doubts about its historical and scientific veracity, our qualms about its usefulness for us as modern day, rational religious people. We might then listen to what it may have to say to us in spite of our uneasiness with it.

My Starting Point

I do make some basic assumptions as I begin to think about the accounts of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, and about the entire question of what those accounts might mean to us, here and now. And you deserve to know these assumptions up front.

• For sake of honesty and being true to myself, I must remain intellectually agnostic when it comes to the question of what happens after the death of this body. But I do not believe that dead, cold bodies can come back to life.
• Religious language is linked to our experience and seeks to reflect that experience; it begins with experience, no matter how far it wanders from that experience as doctrine and dogma develop, are refined and argued over.
• The foundational stories of each faith belong in a very special way to those who are practitioners of that faith. But they belong to all of us, as well, because we're all human and they reflect the human experience of the holy throughout myriad times and places. They're the record of how we humans have tried to name the holy.
• Religious language also strains the capacity of language because it often strives to talk about something that is ineffable, mysterious, remains a mystery beyond our rational knowing. Not anti-rational, but rational plus.
• We are all part of a web of being that extends indefinitely in both space and time, in which everything that ever was, is, or shall be is joined eternally, and which, because our minds are limited, we can never know completely. We do not, cannot, fall out of that web when we die.
• We know deep down, from our own experience, that death is not the end of our relationship with those whom we have loved and who have died, not because we have read a story of resurrection nor an account of a near-death or nearing-death experience, but because we know, as surely as we know anything, that love is stronger than death and that death does not completely sever our relationship with the one who has died.

The Story in Its Context

The events leading up to the accounts of Jesus' resurrection as recorded in the Christian New Testament are well known to most in our culture. The accounts in the four gospels, especially in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are quite consistent with each another. After Jesus shared a last meal with his disciples, after which one of them betrayed him, he was arrested. He was tried in a trial that made a mockery of justice, and then crucified by agents of the Roman government. The gospel authors tell this story in a way that makes clear that what happened to Jesus fulfilled a divine plan. Joseph of Arimathea takes Jesus' lifeless body, shrouds it, and entombs it in a cave-tomb probably intended for Joseph himself. The tomb is sealed with a huge, heavy stone and a guard is set on it to prevent Jesus' followers from stealing his body and then saying he had been raised from the dead, something the authorities feared might occur. This all occurred immediately before the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath.

[Second Reading: The Resurrection—Mark 16:1-9, The Message]³

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could embalm him. Very early on Sunday morning, as the sun rose, they went to the tomb. They worried out loud to each other, "Who will roll back the stone from the tomb for us?"

Then they looked up, saw that it had been rolled back-it was a huge stone-and walked right in. They saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed all in white. They were completely taken aback, astonished.

He said, "Don't be afraid. I know you're looking for Jesus the Nazarene, the One they nailed on the cross. He's been raised up; he's here no longer. You can see for yourselves that the place is empty. Now-on your way. Tell his disciples and Peter that he is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You'll see him there, exactly as he said."

They got out as fast as they could, beside themselves, their heads swimming. Stunned, they said nothing to anyone.

The oldest manuscripts, those that scholars believe to be the most reliable, stop here, leaving the hearer to ponder what it all might mean. However, each of the first three gospels adds accounts of post-resurrection appearances, and believers have come to cherish these accounts as part of the whole story. This well-known account of Jesus on the road to Emmaus is from Luke's gospel.

[Third Reading: The Road to Emmaus—Luke 24:13-43, The Message]

That same day two of them were walking to the village Emmaus, about seven miles out of Jerusalem. They were deep in conversation, going over all these things that had happened. In the middle of their talk and questions, Jesus came up and walked along with them. But they were not able to recognize who he was.

He asked, "What's this you're discussing so intently as you walk along?"

They just stood there, long-faced, like they had lost their best friend. Then one of them, his name was Cleopas, said, "Are you the only one in Jerusalem who hasn't heard what's happened during the last few days?"

He said, "What has happened?"

They said, "The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene. He was a man of God, a prophet, dynamic in work and word, blessed by both God and all the people. Then our high priests and leaders betrayed him, got him sentenced to death, and crucified him. And we had our hopes up that he was the One, the One about to deliver Israel. And it is now the third day since it happened. But now some of our women have completely confused us. Early this morning they were at the tomb and couldn't find his body. They came back with the story that they had seen a vision of angels who said he was alive. Some of our friends went off to the tomb to check and found it empty just as the women said, but they didn't see Jesus."

Then he said to them, "So thick-headed! So slow-hearted! Why can't you simply believe all that the prophets said? Don't you see that these things had to happen, that the Messiah had to suffer and only then enter into his glory?" Then he started at the beginning, with the Books of Moses, and went on through all the Prophets, pointing out everything in the Scriptures that referred to him.

They came to the edge of the village where they were headed. He acted as if he were going on but they pressed him: "Stay and have supper with us. It's nearly evening; the day is done." So he went in with them. And here is what happened: He sat down at the table with them. Taking the bread, he blessed and broke and gave it to them. At that moment, open-eyed, wide-eyed, they recognized him. And then he disappeared.

Back and forth they talked. "Didn't we feel on fire as he conversed with us on the road, as he opened up the Scriptures for us?"

They didn't waste a minute. They were up and on their way back to Jerusalem. They found the Eleven and their friends gathered together, talking away: "It's really happened! The Master has been raised up-Simon saw him!"

Then the two went over everything that happened on the road and how they recognized him when he broke the bread.

While they were saying all this, Jesus appeared to them and said, "Peace be with you." They thought they were seeing a ghost and were scared half to death. He continued with them, "Don't be upset, and don't let all these doubting questions take over. Look at my hands; look at my feet-it's really me. Touch me. Look me over from head to toe. A ghost doesn't have muscle and bone like this." As he said this, he showed them his hands and feet.

They still couldn't believe what they were seeing. It was too much; it seemed too good to be true.

He asked, "Do you have any food here?" They gave him a piece of leftover fish they had cooked. He took it and ate it right before their eyes.

As Robert Tannehill, my Christian New Testament professor in seminary, points out in his book Dying and Rising with Christ⁴,  there were dying and rising gods aplenty in the culture in which Christianity began. We know some of their names—Osiris, Tammuz, Mithra, and others. These were cyclical, seasonal deities, whose death brought the fall and winter and whose rebirth brought with it the rebirth of spring that we're starting to see in our woods even now. They were a part of something larger than they, the on-going cycle of the natural year, the changing of the seasons. In addition to these dying and rising deities, the culture in which the church came into being also knew the idea of the immortality of a soul which was believed to be freed from its unfortunate entrapment in physical existence by the death of the body.

The biblical account of Jesus' resurrection differs in at least three important details:

• The Jesus story refers to the death and resurrection, not of one deity among many, but of the incarnation of the one God, who was the Holy One of Israel.
• Jesus' resurrection as the biblical writers portray it was not an annual event, but a once-and-for-all occurrence. They cast it unflinchingly as a triumph over the natural order of things, not a part of that order.
• Finally, this is not the victory of a naturally immortal soul over physical existence. In its original context, the accounts of Jesus' resurrection point directly to God's intervention which turned the natural order of things straight on its head. And all of the biblical accounts are clear that the resurrected Jesus was an embodied Jesus. He had muscle and bone, and shared dinner with his disciples.

What did Jesus' resurrection mean and how did it function in the context of the earliest Christian communities? Of the many meanings it held, I note three:

• During his brief lifetime on earth, Jesus had been so transparent to the Holy One of Israel that his closest followers came to believe that in knowing Jesus they had known God. They had come into a new and different relationship with the God of their Hebrew ancestors. The empty tomb confirmed for them that relationship did not end with death. In some miraculous way, it continued on. That same belief has flowed through the centuries of the church without interruption, and has paved the way to a distinctive relationship with the Holy for generations of Christians since, a relationship that is felt to transcend death.
• Jesus' resurrection also confirmed his uniqueness for the earliest Christians. Their experience of the living Jesus had lead them to believe that he was the Son of God in a distinctive and special way, and the resurrection accounts confirmed that. They validated who Jesus had been for them during his lifetime. And they continue to validate Jesus' uniqueness for each new generation of Christians.
• Perhaps most of all, Jesus' resurrection assures those who believe of their own resurrection to eternal life. We have to turn from the gospel accounts of the resurrection to Paul's letters to the early churches to get to the heart of what the resurrection story means for Christian faith. Perhaps he says it most clearly in the first of two letters to the Christians at Corinth: "If there's no resurrection, there's no living Christ. And face it—if there's no resurrection for Christ, everything we've told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you've staked your life on is smoke and mirrors. Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of bare-faced lies about God . . —sheer fabrications if there's no resurrection. If corpses can't be raised, then Christ wasn't, because he was indeed dead. And if Christ weren't raised, all you're doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever. . . But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries."⁵

Gleanings From the Story

The narratives of Jesus' resurrection are both particular and universal. I've been speaking of their particularity, their very concrete meanings in their native context. But they are also universal—because they reflect our human experience and as such belong to all people, to all of us and to each of us.

So what can we in our wonderfully diverse community of faith learn from the accounts of Jesus' resurrection? What meanings might those accounts of a corpse come back to life, an empty tomb, startled women, and angels standing guard hold for us? We each will come to our own conclusions, to be sure. These are a few of my thoughts.

For me to get at what this story might mean for me, I have to demythologize it. The biblical writers used a wide variety of metaphors available to them to communicate their faith, metaphors that, like all communication, were strongly conditioned by their time and place. Demythologizing is the exercise of translating those metaphors into language that is more accessible to us now. It allows me to get past metaphors and ways of stating things that simply don't work in my world, and to listen to the story behind the story, the existential point contained within the language of metaphor.

I do not, for example, believe that Jesus' physical body was restored to life. Nor do I believe in angels as those in the early church did. Nor do I believe there was a divine plan that required the grisly death of a good man in order to save us from sin and its consequences. (That's one reason I'm Buddhist.) I do believe the stories of Jesus' resurrection reflect the experience of his followers that his spirit remained present with them even after his physical death. And I believe the possibility of moving from old negative, death-dealing realities into new, life-enhancing ones is available to all of us.

• In the first place, I think the story confirms that the experience of the holy—or of our capacity to find meaning, to live with hope and confidence—is stronger than the worst that can happen. We can face the worst knowing that it does not have to make our lives meaningless, that it does not have to make us bitter, that in fact we can find meaning even in the midst of unutterable suffering.
• One interesting dimension of the New Testament accounts of Jesus' resurrection and post-resurrection appearances is that there isn't much, if any, mention of his appearing to individual believers. Rather, he appears to believers in community, showing up in the midst of those who had been closest to him during his lifetime. He says to those to whom he appears, "Go tell the others." What this suggests to me is that the human communities of which we're a part play a central role in our experience of the holy Ground of our lives and our ability to live with hope and meaning. We hear this weekly here as people share their joys and sorrows in this community. Our experience of the communities of which we're a part is central to how we experience and come to know the holy Ground of our lives.
• The resurrection story urges us to remain open to the miraculous. Not to the idea that an all-powerful supernatural deity intervenes arbitrarily to contravene the well-established laws of nature, but to the experience that there is usually more than we at first perceive, that the supremely natural world is also a world of wonder and mystery. As Charles F. Flagg writes: "Yet still we hope for something more/ A break in the ordinary/ An infusion of the unexpected/ An explosion of glory/ A miracle, revealing more than we hope to understand."⁶
• A closely related point: These accounts invite us to consider the possibility that life may just be bigger than rationality and science can fully comprehend. They encourage us to live life open to mystery and to the wonder that accompanies it. Can we let ourselves be awed, amazed, astonished, our minds swept clear of jaded preconceptions and expectations to experience life afresh? Can we see and celebrate the miraculous right in the midst of the ordinary? Can we begin to grasp that there really is no difference between the two?
• The significant relationships in our lives do not end with death. In some mysterious way, they continue on, blessing our lives with meaning even in the absence of the physical persons we have so loved. As Martha Whitmore Hickman writes, "This delicate dance with . . . the dead is something we don't begin to understand right away. . . . But as we dwell in memory on our experiences with the one who is physically gone, his or her psychic presence, rather than being confined to the body we knew and loved, seems somehow to expand and surround us with its gentle understanding, its compassion and love."⁷
• The resurrected Jesus was an embodied Jesus, according to the biblical accounts. Not some ghostly wraith, the risen Jesus had flesh and bones, ate and could be touched by the disciples. Embodied existence is vindicated by the resurrection. Physical existence and all that goes along with it is not unfortunate, is not evil, even though it brings with it pain and problems as well as pleasure and blessings. We are not immortal souls yearning for escape from the prison of the body, but fully, gloriously embodied beings. And that is good.
• For me at least, the main thing I can glean from the resurrection stories is this: They invite us into a world in which miracles can happen, in which joy rises out of sorrow, hope out of despair, dancing out of mourning, celebration out of grief, forgiveness out of blame, healing out of brokenness. They invite us to consider the possibility that every death, every loss, in spirit or in body, holds within it the possibility of resurrection, of renewal. When we have gone through something that feels as if it's sucking the very life out of us and one morning we awaken knowing deep in our bones that something has changed fundamentally within us, we have experienced resurrection.

Notes

1. If you would like to read Channing's entire sermon, you can find it on line at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/unitarian.html
2. Christopher Gist Raible, "What Is a Unitarian Universalist?" http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~don/philosophy/whatis.html
3. Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs in Contemporary Language (NavPress, 1995). "The Message is a contemporary rendering of the Bible from the original languages, crafted to present its tone, rhythm, events, and ideas in everyday language." (from the title page)
4. Robert C. Tannehill, Dying and Rising with Christ: A Study in Pauline Theology (Verlag Alfred Topelmann, 1966).
5. 1 Corinthians 15:13-20, The Message. For a differently nuanced statement of this point, see Romans 8:11, 34-39.
6. UUA web site
7. Martha Whitmore Hickman, Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief (Avon Books, 1994), reading for December 13th.