Never Too Early for Easter

A Short Sermon for Easter Sunday, 2008

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, March 23, 2008 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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It seems too early to be celebrating Easter, doesn’t it?  I still have a little un-melted snow in a corner of my backyard.  Heck, until this week, Jim and I still had our Christmas wreath hanging on our front door.  Officially, spring began three days ago.  But we still feel so precariously perched on the cusp of warmth and returning life.  Shouldn’t Easter be more . . ..definite, more secure, more indisputable?

Artist and poet Rod MacIver recently wrote:

“We’ve had a stormy winter. We’re looking forward to the new season.  Winter, then spring. It will happen. It will be more beautiful than you remember.  So much of what really matters in life comes with sticking with it and allowing things to come at their own pace.”

So much about life…and death…and renewal . . . is bigger than we are.  There is so much that is beyond our control.  In our self-individualized and self-realized ‘do-it-yourself’ world, we don’t necessarily want to hear that. It makes us vulnerable, unsure, perhaps even inconsequential.  So much is beyond our control.  We want spring to come when we want it.  We want Easter to look like it should.  We want life to go according to our plans.  We want death to go according to our plans.  Life and death will come, but each in its own way.

My Mom is in the process of dying, after living a very long life.  She is in the midst of what we lovingly are referring to as “her slow fading away.”  But eight months later, she’s lived longer than the doctor said she could.  She’s frail and subsisting on a few spoonfuls of soup.  The hospice nurse shakes her head and says in twenty-four years, she’s never seen anything like it.  At a time when my Mom should be in severe pain, she is fine with an occasional Tylenol.  And she has absolutely no desire to release herself into death, at least not today. And so, we wait, we watch, we love, we laugh, we sing (we sing a lot) we cry, we pray, and we treasure this moment, just as it is given to us.  We treasure each breath as the gift it truly is. 

Poet Mark Nepo writes:

There is a timing
larger than any of us, a
readiness that comes and goes
like the heat that makes
our secret walls melt.

In the ancient days, our earth-based ancestors looked out and tried to make sense of what it meant to live in a world where everything is tenuous and temporary, where even heat and light and green growing things come and go to a larger and often indeterminate rhythm.  Those ancient ancestors created stories about beautiful Goddesses who were stolen away to the underworld.  In her absence, those ancients waited and prayed for her return, they waited and prayed for warmth’s return.  And they created a festival, a holy day, to remind each other to not stop waiting, to not stop praying, to not stop being present with life. 

In the early Christian days, our Jesus-focused ancestors looked out and tried to make sense of what it meant to live in a world where the promise of peace on earth and peace of mind seemed so out of reach.  These Jesus-followers created stories about a special man, a divine man, who brought great love into the world.  When he went away, they waited and prayed for his return, they waited and prayed for love’s return.  And they created a festival, a holy day, to remind each other to not stop waiting, to not stop praying, to not stop engaging in life. 

And now it is our time, and we look out and try to make sense of what it means to live in a world where we still haven’t learned to care for each other and our fragile planet, where the economy and security fluctuates like the New England weather, and our connection to our loved ones can seem so rushed, so temporary.  But in these days where science and soul so intimately intertwine, we still need stories about warmth and love’s return.  We still need festivals, holy days, claimed moments, such as this, to remind each other to not stop waiting, to not stop praying, to not stop reaching, to not stop acting, to not stop laughing and singing and crying and loving, to not stop living.

Acclaimed African-American writer Alice Walker has faced challenges in her life and in her love.  She was blinded and disfigured in one eye in a childhood accident.  She felt forced into an abortion in college.  In 1967, just forty-one years ago, she married a white man at a time when marriage between people of different colors was still against the law in some states.  She watched her marriage and her writing dissected by racist critics.   Today, Alice Walker is living as a proud woman and a proud person of color in a nation where it is still difficult to be one or the other, and even harder to be both.  When asked how she holds onto her hope, Alice Walker thinks for a moment and answers: “I like to say that as long as the earth can make a spring, a spring time, I can do that also, because [the earth and I] are one.  I can’t give up because nature has not, not even in places that have been battered beyond recognition of what was there before.  I can’t give up because nature has not.  That sustains me.”

We do not know when death will come.  We do not know when life will come.  But we do know that we are here, today, together.  We do know that somehow, somewhere, someway today might become our Easter.  And if not today, then tomorrow, definitely tomorrow.  And if not tomorrow, the next day, or the next.

Winter, then spring. Despair, then joy. Death, then life.  It will happen. It will be more beautiful than we remember.

Blessed Be.  Amen

©Copyright 2008 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.