Challenge and Paradox: An Easter Sunday Sermon
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, 4 April 2021
First Words/Opening Words
Welcome to our second virtual Easter service. Let us hope that gathering virtually on this day does not become an annual tradition.
As a spiritual community we welcome and nurture, we inspire and challenge, we take action in the world.
Many years ago, when we first hammered out our mission statement, we struggled over those words “inspire and challenge.” To inspire, that was okay. To challenge, that was too rough for some. Yet our tradition, from its very inception, has been a call to challenge assumptions, to question and to search together for truth and meaning. We do this while affirming that no one of us will ever have the final answer or the final say about what is ultimately truth.
That’s what I love about the challenge of Easter. It stirs up a lot in me. After all, as I tell you ever year, I come from this mixed Christian and Jewish background. This time of year is spiritually heavy for me as I confront the two central stories of the two faiths that have formed who I am.
There is the Passover story of a people once enslaved remembering the blessing of freedom and reaffirming our responsibility to continue the fight against oppression in all its forms. It’s a responsibility that we all fall short of, year after year. Yet in the remembering, we are called to do better.
Then there is the Easter story that we, as Unitarian Universalists, often struggle with. We are challenged. For us, this is not a holiday of celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ. So what do we do with this day that mattered so much to our forebears of the Unitarian Church of Montreal? After all, they began by calling themselves the Church of the Messiah. They even enshrined an Easter communion into our by-laws — a tradition we’ll observe immediately following today’s service — which is open to all and entirely optional.
You know the old joke (how many times have I told this?). A visitor drives into town and sees two church signs announcing the sermon for that Easter Sunday. The one in front of the Anglican Church says, "Christ Is Victorious over Death: He Is Risen!" while the one in front of the Unitarian Church says, “Upsy-Daisy!”
How do we face the challenge of this day? As far as I’m concerned, the answer has always been to seek the wisdom of Jesus. A wisdom that can be both challenging and paradoxical; a wisdom that we are still struggling to understand; a vision of being on this earth that calls us to love our neighbour as ourselves, to live with compassion, to seek justice for the most marginalized. This is what mattered to our forebears: the teachings of Jesus, the life he lived. It’s another way of being called to a higher responsibility, to remember the justice we have yet to realize.
This is our focus today on this Easter Sunday. To reclaim the wisdom of Jesus that has been taken hostage by others.
Reflection Part I
I know it’s Easter. But there’s this Christmas story I love, told by Rev. Carl Scovel, minister emeritus of the famous King’s Chapel in Boston. Scovel says that he’s always believed that a cool house is a healthy house, even in the coldest winter months, much to his two daughters’ frozen frustration while they were growing up. One Christmas Eve, for the first time at King’s Chapel, Scovel set up a crèche with a nativity scene: Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus and all the others. Such a move was a bit over the top, since King’s Chapel’s members are Unitarians and Puritans.
Just as it was time to go home, the church’s custodian came to Scovel with a worried look. “One of the pieces of the crèche has been stolen,” he said. Jesus was gone, and in his place was a ransom note clearly written by Scovel’s daughters: “We’ve got Jesus. Turn up the heat and you can have Him back for the morning service.”
Musical Interlude 1: VI from Six Studies in English Folk Song, R. Vaughn Williams
Reflection Part II
It may not have been for ransom or for heat, but ages ago Jesus was taken hostage. Maybe it happened days after his death. Maybe it happened later, as the gospels were written or as Paul wrote his letters to the earliest gatherings of Jews and Gentiles who eventually became known as Christians within the Roman Empire.
There are some who say Jesus never really lived; that he is a composite of several prophets who were giving radical voice to a growing movement in Galilee around the time of the first century. Whatever you understand Jesus to be, he left behind no writings in his own hand. The first fragments of gospel that can be dated scientifically go back to the second century, maybe a hundred years after his death. What was left behind was an oral history that got passed along in many versions, and written down by scribes who may or may not have been accurate, and who, in some cases, may have added their own spin.
There were many gospels written by the earliest followers of Jesus, perhaps hundreds. There are certainly many more gospels than just the four we know as the New Testament, which my conscientious Christian friends now call the Second Testament (in comparison to the Hebrew Bible, which they call the First Testament, to replace the pejorative term “Old Testament”). Many of those earliest gospels were destroyed or hidden, and some, like the Nag Hammadi library, were only discovered near the second half of the twentieth century.
Scholars who study Christian scripture have unraveled the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, finding evidence of those earlier writings, such as the gospel of Q and the gospel of Thomas. As a result, they, the scholars, mark up the gospel texts until they look like archaeological excavation sites or complicated math problems. Sections within sections are marked with the letters Q, T, M, L, or J, as the scholars try to locate the original sources within each text. If you are into puzzles, this is great stuff.
In 1985, a group of scholars called the Jesus Seminar began working on a project to find the historical Jesus. Their work lasted until the mid-2000s. Drawing upon scholarly work, they tried to come to agreement on what Jesus actually said. They developed a complicated voting system for what they believed to be real or false. Red: he said it for sure. Pink: a strong maybe. Grey: not so sure. Black: definitely not. There was a fair amount of agreement within the Seminar about what may constitute the words of the historical Jesus. Their work has been continued by others, but there’s still much that remains a mystery.
The point is, Jesus was taken hostage long ago, his words and his story often made to fit into the agendas of others. That is certainly what our forebears would have said. Jesus got taken hostage, and the lessons he taught lost their force. Christianity became the religion about Jesus rather than the religion of Jesus. The teachings of Jesus mattered more to the early Unitarians and Universalists than the meaning of his death. This was, in fact, one of the reasons they came into being. Although they didn’t have the archaeological findings of later centuries to draw upon, they read their Bibles attentively. They used reason to understand the message of the carpenter who walked along the shores of the Galilee.
Musical Interlude 2: II from Six Studies in English Folk Song, R. Vaughn Williams
Reflection Part III
The Unitarians spoke of Jesus as a teacher. They did not see him as God, but as a human son of God whose teachings provided the most persuasive moral example of how to live. Jesus demonstrated the perfectibility of human nature. His teachings rested deep within the Jewish wisdom tradition. He told stories that taught that the Kingdom of God was possible on earth through love, charity, forgiveness and tolerance.
The early Universalists saw Jesus as representing the infinite goodness of God. He was the son sent to renew humanity’s love to its creator. They believed that in the end, all souls would be restored to paradise, whether or not they had known or accepted God or Christ. Still, as with the Unitarians, what mattered most to the Universalists were the teachings of Jesus: his gospel of justice and love.
More than a century later, when the Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961, they agreed that the official purposes they now shared as one religious body were to “diffuse the knowledge and promote the interests of religion, which Jesus taught as love to God and love to man,” and to unite “for more and better work for the Kingdom of God.”
Over time, we shifted from that purpose. Perhaps we quietly retained its spirit through our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, or our dedication to justice, equity and compassion, or our statement that our living tradition draws from “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbours as ourselves.” Still, since the 1960s we have grown increasingly uncomfortable with anything that reminds us of our Christian roots. We are more comfortable hearing or teaching just about anything else. Many of the members of our congregations throughout North America come to us rejecting a Christianity they found filled with intolerance and fear. For some, this has meant an understandable need to completely let go of the past in order to begin anew, unburdened and free. But I wonder if we may be losing something valuable.
Musical Interlude 3: III from Six Studies in English Folk Song, R. Vaughn Williams
Reflection Part IV
A number of years ago, there was a movement that called itself “Saving Jesus.” These were liberal-minded Christians who wanted to reclaim the religion and image of Jesus from what they saw as a reactionary, fundamentalist Christian Right. They feared that too much emphasis had been placed on personal salvation and not enough on the teachings of Jesus that called for creating a socially just world. They asked, “Ever feel like Jesus has been kidnapped by the Christian Right and discarded by the secular Left?”
One of their proponents, the progressive Christian minister Rev. Robin Meyers, offered these prophetic words more than ten years ago: “Everybody knows something is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you talk to liberals, conservatives, Unitarians or Pentecostals. Do you think we are on the right track? No. Are you worried? Yes. Our society has divided itself into camps and we’re all warring against each other. We’re not talking to each other. We’re not listening to each other. We’re hunkering down, circling the wagons and lobbing shells at one another. That has no future.”
I’d like to believe that he’s right that there’s no future in these divisions. But the divide has grown even wider since those words were written. Is it irreparable? I don’t know. But one way to fight fundamentalism is to be armed with literacy and wisdom.
We have the freedom to draw upon a wide range of wisdom sources for inspiration. Yet we lose a powerful tool when we leave out Christian teachings as one of our options. Our challenge is to reclaim our roots, to take what we read and put it into its historical context.
Much of what we can learn from Jesus is found in his parables. These are stories that speak of a radical vision of society that is more than just turning the other cheek. The project of the parables of Jesus was to get people talking, to throw them off balance, to get them thinking and questioning. In other words, his teachings were intentionally meant as paradox.
Here’s one example: The parable of the labourers in the vineyard found in the gospel of Matthew (Mt 20:1-16), a story that Jesus tells to his disciples.
A landowner goes to the marketplace to hire some labourers to work in his vineyard. He goes twice in the morning, again at noon, and at five o’clock, each time to hire more workers. When he asks the five o’clock group why they have been standing idle all day, they respond, “Because no one has hired us.” At the end of the day, the landowner instructs his manager to pay the workers their wages, each the same amount, beginning with the last and then going to the first. Of course, those who worked all day grumble bitterly. Why are they being paid the same amount as those who worked for only an hour? This is unjust and unfair.
The landowner responds, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So, says Jesus to his disciples, “the last will be the first and the first will be the last.”
Musical Interlude 4: IV from Six Studies in English Folk Song, R. Vaughn Williams
Reflection Part V
“The last will be the first and the first will be the last.”
There’s a common reading of this parable that the owner is God and the workers are the faithful. The wage is salvation and those converts who come last (even at the moment of death) are as favoured as those who have been faithful all their lives. Others say that the first hired are the Jews, and those hired at 5 p.m. are the Gentiles.
But Jewish scholar Amy-Jill Levine says that this is not how the story would have been interpreted among first-century Jews. For one thing, Jesus was speaking to one people, a community of Jews. If you read the Greek, it is clear that the landowner is giving a fair living wage, as was the expectation of the time. And the landowner may simply be a landowner. Sit with the parable long enough and you might see a message that people are to be rewarded for their needs and not for their talents or luck. Think about that. It may be a hard pill to swallow, and if it is, that’s exactly what was intended. We are called to be generous, even when it may seem unjust or unfair.
Place this parable within a modern-day context and it is hard not to think of corporate managers who make salaries a thousand times greater that their workers’. Jesus does say the poor will always be with us. He doesn’t exactly begrudge the rich their wealth per se, but he does admonish them for being unwilling to give away what they have. How often do we grumble because someone has gotten more than us, or because we feel we’ve worked more or contributed more? Maybe we feel we’re justified in our complaints, but maybe we’ve also lost sight of the bigger picture. We’ve forgotten that we may not know the circumstances of others. Think of what we’ve learned during this time of pandemic about the value of the government paying people a living wage.
Maybe what really matters is the health of the overall community, and not justice from an individual perspective. Maybe the kingdom of heaven is a place where everyone receives a living wage, whether they are able to contribute equally or not.
Parables give us something to chew on, and this is but one of many. There’s a rich tradition that we lose if we leave Jesus hostage to the interpretation of others. Whether we know it or not, the teachings of Jesus remain central to our tradition of radical hope. We have yet to realize the promise, we have made mistakes and failed many times, but we keep our sights on a more just future, here in this life, not in heaven.
Years ago, our minister emeritus Rev. Charles Eddis asked me whether Unitarians should help save Jesus. To this day, my answer is still yes. It’s OK to turn up the heat.
Amen. Blessed Be. Namaste.
Musical Response 5: V from Six Studies in English Folk Song, R. Vaughn Williams