…for most this amazing day: The Inside Story of Easter
Sermon by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill
Delivered at First Unitarian Congregational Society, Brooklyn, NY
March 23, 2008
Easter arrives early this year. Actually, this is as early as Easter ever is. By tradition, since the first days of Christendom, the movable feast of Easter has been appointed on the liturgical calendar for “the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox.” (The full moon after the equinox is called the Grass Moon or the Egg Moon. That’s why we have Easter egg hunts and the reason we stuff our Easter baskets full of that fake plastic grass, in case you didn’t know. Indeed the cultural symbols of Easter, from bunny rabbits to Easter eggs to Easter lilies, have nothing at all to do with Christian doctrine. They are pagan Equinox symbols of seasonal fertility, nothing less.)
And thus, this setting of the date for Easter was a canonical statement both solar and lunar. In the Northern Hemisphere, at least, Easter is the feast of the returning sun, of new life that comes with Spring, of resurrection, of transformations.
And so the poet sings to us: “This is the sun’s birth day, this is the birth day of Life and of love and wings…” (e.e. cummings)
The first time I ever really understood the meaning of the Easter story I was ten years old in the fourth grade at St. John the Evangelist School. Sister Davidica, our teacher, asked me to stand and tell the class the story of the Easter miracle. Sure of my facts, and confident that I knew a true miracle when I heard one, I confidently began to tell the class of how the women went to the tomb of Jesus that morning and found that huge boulder rolled away from the entrance.
“Yes,” said Sister Davidica, “and what about the miracle, Patrick?” she prompted. “What about the miracle?” I said. “That was it,” I said. “Jesus was so strong that all by himself he could roll that big stone out of the way!”
Sister tried her best to explain to me that it was Jesus’s resurrection from the dead that was the miracle of the Easter story, not his ability to move giant stones. But to my ten-year-old boy way of thinking, well, for anyone powerful enough to move that boulder, rising from the dead was nothing!
All of which goes to show that the same story can be heard in different ways by different people. Or maybe the true moral of the story is that sometimes the real miracle isn’t happening where you think it is!
It’s always interesting how different people can hear the same story and come away with many different interpretations and understandings. Easter is just such a story for most of us. This is the twenty-ninth year that I have written an Easter sermon, and I can fairly trace my own theological journey by the different ways I have written about Easter over the years. I can see reflected in my Easter sermons, especially, how receptive or searching or resistant or at ease my spirit was in a given year by how I approached the ancient story of Easter.
I remember many years ago, while I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I heard the great anthropologist Margaret Mead tell of an encounter she once had with a South Sea island Medicine Man that almost caused her to give up her early career in anthropology.
She had spent five hours one afternoon listening to the medicine man tell the story of how creation came into being. She was fascinated, transfixed, as the old Shaman wove his ancient incredible story, rich in island imagery and cultural character. And late that night Margaret Mead sat in her hut, scrambling to write down every detail in her journal so as not to forget any of what she had heard. She was startled to look up and see the old shaman standing in her doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
“I’m writing down the story you told today, so I can tell it to others where I come from,” she replied.
The medicine man was laughing softly to himself and shaking his head. “Why do you bother yourself so, Woman?” he asked. “Don’t you know that our story cannot be understood from the outside by someone like you, but only from within? For those who do not live here, from the outside, it is only a story. But from the inside, it is my people’s truth.“
From the outside it is only a story. From inside it is a people’s truth. Margaret Mead had traveled ten thousand miles from the Anthropology Department at Columbia and Barnard, only to have a tribal medicine man who had never traveled twenty miles from his island village point out to her the limitations of her method and the limitations of her vision, and thus the limitations of her understanding.
Oh, she could indeed record the story detail by detail, and bring it back with her across the oceans — but removed from its setting in a culture of belief, viewed from the outside, retold with the cold impersonal pen of the rational academician to a skeptical audience — one people’s most sacred story, a people’s truth, becomes “only a story.”
The same vision by which one group will live and die, find passion and inspiration, find identity, find its place in the order of the universe, set its values, determine its morality, draw meaning, life and substance, educate its children, bury its dead, punish its violators — that same vision, from the outside, becomes “just another story” to those who lack the humility to acknowledge the limitations of their methods and their vision.
From the outside it is only a story. But from the inside it is a people’s truth. Truth is always an “inside story.” Truth is always an inward claim, a claim of experience, before it is ever a claim of understanding. That is something to keep in mind when hearing a religious story, be it a Creation story from the South Seas or a Resurrection story from the Middle East. Religious truth can only be heard from the inside.
Religious truth, in other words, is not something that you grasp, it is something one is grasped by. Religious truth sings to your life in a way that changes you for knowing it.
A Nobel scientist was once asked at what age did he realize that he understood mathematics in a way others did not. And he replied that at about the age of thirteen he knew that he saw numbers differently from the way other people did. “I could look at a complicated equation,” he said, “and I could just tell at a glance if it would work out, by whether or not it appeared beautiful to me. You see, if it had inherent symmetry and balance, it would appear beautiful to me. So I knew, just be glancing at it, if it would eventually work out. For some reason, I discovered, most people just could not see what I saw there,” he said.
Most of us, unfortunately, have to learn how to see the truth and beauty in the world around us. We have to be educated to see the world, perhaps as a ten-year-old sees the world, with the capacity to be awestruck, to be amazed and full of wonder at the miraculous movement of boulders.
Over all the years that I have heard and read the Easter story – both from the inside and from outside as my beliefs have changed – the image of that huge stone rolled away from the entrance to the tomb is still for me the heart of the Easter story, a symbol of wonder and mystery, still the best part of the story. Perhaps I still have a lot of that ten-year-old boy in me, but it seems to me that an awful lot of life’s challenges and struggles can be summed up in that symbolic rolling away of the stone.
Before you talk about resurrections and theological debates, before you get caught up in the maudlin image of Jesus’s victory over the grave, before you make convoluted comparisons between Easter and Springtime, before you see again, or again fail to see the image of a risen Christ — first there is that matter of rolling away the stones which block our entrance to the story itself.
With all due respect to Sister Davidica, may her memory be blessed for she was a great teacher, but she failed to remember at that moment that ten-year-olds do not see the world in terms as abstract as resurrection from the dead.
The good sister was so concerned for teaching us correct doctrine that she completely missed the child’s wonderment at immovable objects and magical strength, of a child’s amazement at the way the world sometimes works in inexplicable ways. She forgot that before Easter can be understood as a religious truth by anyone of any age, it must first be understood as a story — from within.
You know, Easter is one of two days every year when many people who ordinarily do not attend church actually do so, either out of long habit, or to please one’s family, or just because it seems right. And I can tell you that in many liberal churches this morning, there is a fair amount of Biblical criticism cascading down from the pulpits. Ministers have dusted off their old divinity school lecture notes and Koine Greek lexicons, and are having a field day today attacking the “authenticity” of the Gospel accounts, citing every incorrect comma in chapter and verse, “proving” that Jesus did not really rise from the dead, not literally.
So penetrating and devastating will these brilliant Scriptural analyses be, that many people will return home from church today wondering how anyone in this day and age could actually believe in Easter. In the face of such overwhelming literary evidence that Sacred Scripture is fraught with error and imprecision, how can anyone find faith in such a story today?
And many people who go to church only on this day of all the days in the year will return home neither inspired by an encounter with an ancient and familiar story, nor uplifted for their annual visit to a sanctuary, but rather they will actually be made to feel slightly foolish for their groping towards faith.
Scholarly pulpiteers will dissect and denude the Easter story of all its poetry and cultural richness – which is what happens whenever a religious story is viewed from the outside – and hearts hungry for hope, and lives desperate for inspiration, and cynics searching secretly for some glimmer of warmth in a cold and heartless world, will actually leave church this morning unnourished – in truth, the poorer for having made the effort to reconnect with a community of faith.
And you can almost hear it when such preachers hold forth, if you listen very closely you can hear it: the soft mocking laughter of that old medicine man on his South Sea island, reminding us that, for all our scholarship and sophisticated knowledge, from the outside it is only just a story. In his laughter is the warning and the reprimand that our method, however modern and informed, is always limited and our vision of ancient truths is always at best partial.
From inside it is a people’s truth. Hear it from inside then, if meaning is what you seek in the story. Hear it from the inside. Hear what a child hears there, see what a child sees there.
Easter is a story thousands of years old. It’s a story of impossible victory over death; a story of angels appearing and of huge boulders rolling away; of a god who became a man and died and rose up after death as a sign that he was a god. It’s a story of the heart: you won’t find its meaning in literal truth.
When you read Sacred Scripture, whether it be the Bible or the Koran or the Midrash or the Upanishads or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, you must let the scriptures “sing” their truth to you, from the inside. Debating their literal truth is like receiving a love letter and then correcting it for bad grammar! You may have gotten the words right, but you’ve sure missed the music!
Easter is an impossible story written for anyone who has ever felt the sting of death and wished for something more. Easter is a story for anyone who loved life so much that they pray for more life to follow. Easter is a story for people who envision a loving divinity that will not be conquered by evil. It’s a story of love that never dies; of immovable objects tossed aside; of a hopeful ending in a tragic world; of miracles; of faith rewarded, and vision restored, and hope justified. That’s what the Easter story is about.
But before you can ever begin to hear that story with any possibility of wonder and inspiration and sense of renewal in your soul, you will have to roll away the stones that block your access to all such stories.
You’ll have to push aside the boulder of your cynicism – for cynics make better grammarians than they do poets. You’ll have to roll away the stone of narrow thought and closed-mindedness if you want Easter to touch your life – because Easter is only meaningful to those with open hearts and open vision and the capacity to dream.
Before Easter can sing its story to you, you’ll have to shove away, for a moment, the boulder of intellectual snobbery – you’ll have to be as open as Margaret Mead was to the counsels of wisdom from other times and other cultures. You’ll have to recognize that your methods are always limited and even your vision is always partial.
If you can do that, if putting aside for the time it takes to hear the story one more time, one more Spring, the conditioning of a cynical, hyper-rational, hyperactive society – if you can re-enter the story and hear it from the inside once more, then some of the childlike magic of Easter might just be restored for you. You might even understand what the poet means by this being “the birth day of life and of love and wings,” and why he would feel moved to add, “now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”
I wish for you this Easter Sunday a sense of joy and peace and contentment with your life. I wish for you a love stronger than death. I wish you healing and new growth where you may feel stunted and trapped, and new light where it seems dark in your life. In this season of newness, may you find new reasons to sing and new cause to dance. Happy Easter! Happy Springtime to us all, and none too soon!
Alleluia. And Amen.
