Arise and Greet the Day

Happy Easter!
We haven’t given up on ourselves or the world
or we wouldn’t be here.
Your very presence here
shows belief in your self, in others, in life.
I’m glad you are here!

You could be elsewhere.
Over the weekend newspapers carried ads for Easter Services.

Rev. Daniel Budd relates that when considering
what their Unitarian Universalist church’s Easter ad might look like,
one of the members offered,
“Join us. We’re not sure what happened.”
 
Budd goes on:
“We’re not sure what happened.
But, we know what it’s like when someone appears
whose message we feel offers hope;
who inspires us with new ways of living
which touch our hearts and lift our spirits…
 
We’re not sure what happened.
But, we know what it’s like when someone has grown
profoundly into our own lives,
who seems as much a part of our living as our own breathing,
whose presence lives in our souls…”
 
We’re not sure what happened,
but we’re pretty sure that, as Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote,
“Jesus calls human beings, not to a new religion, but to life.”

In 1841 Unitarian minister Theodore Parker preached
a sermon on the transient and the permanent in Christianity.
Jesus didn’t start a new religion, write a book,
found an institution, appoint an order,
“he only bids his friends give freely the truth
[as] they have freely received.”

As Parker said, “Jesus told what he saw-the Truth;
he lived what he felt-a life of Love.
Jesus’ words and his actions were congruent.

Words matched with action give health, wholeness and life to us always.
We can meet our selves, and whoever or whatever comes our way.

Jesus’ words have been used and abused,
distorted to further causes and gain.

All the varying theological notions, forms and doctrines get more attention
than the new life offered through honest words

Theodore Parker praised the beautiful example of the word made flesh,
the truth lived out in Jesus’ life.

And Parker said that the truth of Christianity is true
whether Jesus lived or not.
Religious truths, he said, rest not on their revealer
any more than the truths of science rest on the person
who makes them known first or more clearly.

Jesus summed up what was of lasting importance.
Love God as you love your neighbor as you love your self.

The honest word is to be made flesh in each life,
the truth is to be lived out in each of us.

Live a life of truth and love.

In the thick of life, in the midst of death,
despair, depression, busyness, boredom, repression,
there is always the possibility of new life.

Morning comes and we are given a new day.

Whatever has been going on,
if we’re dragging, driven, or drifting,
our story isn’t completed.
We’re alive. Possibility is promised.

We humans have this capacity, if we only allow it,
to be touched, moved to new openness.

Someone talked with me who recently has faced death.
He’s had a lot — pain, fear, concerns for his family.
There’s all the bureaucracy of finance and health care,
He’s honest. He admits he doesn’t like how he looks
and how people react when they hear the word cancer.

But he tells me it’s a good day.
He has some energy,
He’ll be able to read a little, have conversation with his wife.
He looks forward to going back to work and to good years of living.
“I’m grateful,” he says.

And I want what he knows for my self, for each of you.

No matter what, it is still possible for us
to wake up to what’s most important.

You have some energy, you can take in some good words,
have good conversation, look forward, be grateful.

A woman is grieving the death of her mother.
The mother once was vibrant, vivacious and accomplished.
She had early dementia. Her mind began to diminish years ago.

The daughter has cared for her mother
through the many years of her slow decline.
From childhood on, she remembers longing to be seen by her mother.
Her grief is for all that she has lost and all she never had.
Now she is seeing her self, envisioning the next chapter of her own life.
She is finding life after death—for her self.

A couple are grieving the loss of her father.
They loved him and they love him still.
The new life for them is seeing that people die,
but relationships continue.

Just about everybody you know has been through a lot.
Just ask what’s been going on and listen.

Violence happens to us, by us, and around us.
It can close our hearts and shrivel our spirits.
Pain runs deep.
To survive, sometimes we human beings shut down,
go into hiding, cover up, try to pass, act as if everything’s okay.
When we speak the truth-
to our self,
to someone we risk trusting,
we begin opening, growing.
We tend our own tender new life.

Recovering your self and the depths of your being
makes real meeting with others possible.

In the midst of it all, pain and sorrow, joy and beauty,
there is always the possibility for new life.

Set a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall,
the movie The Lives of Others follows two men.

Wiesler is a ruthless state security service agent in East Berlin.
Wiesler lives in isolation, in depravation in a gray, bare apartment.

Georg is a playwright whose words are pretty true to his living.
Georg lives with his girlfriend in an apartment
filled with books, paintings, sculpture, music, friends, and love.

Upstairs in the rafters above their apartment,
Wiesler sets up surveillance, listening through the wires
to everything that goes on in their lives.
He hears what they say, what they praise, what they love.

Wiesler arranges it so Georg discovers his girlfriend’s sexual association
with a sleazy government official.
Wiesler expects fireworks, but Georg doesn’t blow up.
He holds her. He comforts her.

When Georg learns a blacklisted friend has hung himself,
Wiesler listens. Maybe he expects to hear Georg curse the state.
What he hears is music.
Sitting down to the piano, Georg plays Sonata for a Good Man.
Wiesler hears this soulful music.

Listening in on the lives of others begins to change Wiesler.
He steals a copy of Bertolt Brecht from Georg
and as we watch Wiesler read, we see the power of words.
A tear forms in his eye and drops down his face.

By the way the totalitarian state crushes his friends and his ideals,
George changes too.
Both men come to see each other’s wholeness and goodness.

The story may be simplistic.
Can compassion really be stirred by beautiful music, truthful words?
Can listening to the lives of others-
their heartaches and their passion-be all it takes to turn a life around?
What else ever has?

We come here on Sundays
to be stirred by beautiful music and truthful words.
We come to be with and listen to one another.

What a joy it can be to be companions on this journey.

We have this amazing capacity
to be awakened by music, by words and by each other.

Week after week we strengthen ourselves and one another.
We have something to draw on,
as the poet Marge Piercy says,
when defeat and despair “muddy our resolves,”
“when we forget what we saw we must do.”

Being true to our words brings self-respect, self-worth.
Respecting ourselves we can respect others and respect life.

Being together readies us for the coming day
so we can greet the day with gratitude.
We can rise and praise.

What shall we praise?
We’re alive.
The blood, the water that winds through our bodies flows in the sea.
Our heart beat, our pulse is the rhythm of life beating in all earth’s creatures.
The wind, the breath within us, shapes words that matter.
Our bodies are a collection of elements belonging to all creation.
In our depths there is a holy fire, a divine spark.
Energy and passion can rise in us.
We are connected with all that is, all that was, and will be.

What shall we praise?
We can praise our partners, our children, our brothers and sisters,
our parents, our friends, our co-workers.

Praise the people who clerk at the places we shop,
the staff in the back room who support all that happens in front…

If this were your last Easter, how would you be with this day?

Let the people you love know you love them. Now.

Thank the ones who have taught you, helped you,
met you for who you are.
Appreciate them now.
Wonderful things can happen between and among human beings.
We can love one another for who we are now
and that love buoys us up for who we are becoming.
Make loving encounters happen today.

Jesus died having fully lived.

If you think you aren’t ready to die
because there is so much more you want to do,
want to say,
love you want to give,
well, today’s your day.

Trust, respect, love, forgive, be in touch.
There is life before death.
Praise life.

Poet Marge Piercy notices pain and human limits
and still finds promise, possibility and much to praise.

When old life gradually changes to new,
when night gradually changes to day,
perhaps we can say with her-

When the night slides under the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
then [may] we rise into the day and greet the day with gratitude.

Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted…

We are given the salty river of our blood winding through us,
to remember the sea and our kindred under the waves,
[we are given] the hot pulsing that knocks in our throats
to consider our cousins in the grass and the trees,
all bright scattered rivulets of life.

We are given the wind within us, the breath to shape into words …
that [can] touch like hands and pierce like bullets,
that waken truth and deceit,
sorrow and pity and joy,
that waste precious air in complaints, in lies…
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.

We are given the body, that momentary [gathering]
of elements that have belonged to frog and polar bear,
corn and oak tree, volcano and glacier.

We are lent for a time…a morning every day,
a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, our throats, our knees,
[our hands,] our brains, our tongues.

We are given fire to see against the dark,
to think, to read, to study how we are to live,
to bank in ourselves against defeat and despair
that cool and muddy our resolves,
that make us forget what we saw we must do.

We are given passion
to rise like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.

We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all of one flesh with us,
[see under the trash, through the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us.]

Fill us as the tide rustles into the reeds in the marsh.
Fill us as the rushing water overflows the pitcher.
Fill us as light fills a room with its dancing.
Let the little quarrels of the bones
and the snarling of the lesser appetites
and the whining of the ego cease.
Let silence still us so you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.
       ( (Marge Piercy, “Nishmat,” Available Light, 1988)

If you think you aren’t ready to die
because there is so much more you want to do,
want to say,
love you want to give,
well, today’s your day.

Trust, respect, love, forgive, be in touch.
Arise and greet the day.
Blessing

The life that makes all things new
flows from hand to hand,
eye to eye,
heart to heart.
Speak the truth you know.
Live the love you want.
Amen.