First Parish Cohasset

Chalice Reflection
of
Beverley Burgess
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday
April 4, 2010

Good beautiful and glorious morning. My name is Beverley Burgess and the morning’s Chalice reflection is a symbol of this Easter and Spring season.  In my ever more frequent walks these past weeks, my thoughts kept turning toward this chalice lighting.

I considered writing about a movie I saw that moved me to jot down some notes, and then there was the jarring change in weather with this most amazing transformation of browns, tans and grays into nearly neon blues, greens, purples, yellows. But overriding those ideas were 3 R words (possibly redundant this morning) which prompted these thoughts:

Of Rising Rivers
Of morning’s Rising sun
And of Rising flowers in all their brilliance

Of Raising pledges
Of Raising Cell towers
And of raising expectations (and maybe a few eyebrows)

Of Raising voices
Of Raising healthy, happy children
Of Raising awareness and consciousness

Of the Resurrection each day of Jesus’ teachings:
Compassion, understanding, caring, selflessness and love.
Have a most joyous Easter.

The Amazing Daffodil Story
of
Jim FitzGerald
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday
April 4, 2010

When Ryan and Katie lost their grandmother in early autumn, their parents told them the story of special flowers — the Amazing Daffodils.

“Plant the amazing daffodil bulbs in the ground – and when the daffodils bloom, you’ll know grandma’s spirit will still be here with us – blooming happily in the sun!” said their mom.

With hope and anticipation, Ryan and Katie rushed out into their backyard with three bulbs and a special tool for planting them. With great care, they dug a hole into the soil next to the garage and one by one, placed the daffodil bulbs into the earth.

They filled the hole and looked at one another with excitement.

The following morning, they rushed out to see if a flower had yet appeared — but there was nothing.

“Maybe tomorrow,” said Ryan.

The next morning before breakfast, Ryan and Katie ran out to the side of the garage despite the gray rain and the chill in the air. Their faces couldn’t hide their disappointment from their dad as they returned to the house.

“Be patient, this will take a lot more time,” their dad said gently.

Weeks passed with no sign of a flower.

Halloween came and went.

Thanksgiving came and went.

Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa came and went.

They missed their grandmother who had celebrated these special times with them. And there were still no flowers, not even a speck of blossom!

Ryan and Katie now believed that those bulbs weren’t so amazing after all. Surely the flowers that promised to bloom with such radiance was just a story their parents told to make them feel better about losing their grandma, something adults say to kids to get them through difficult times.

More weeks passed. Snow flew throughout the winter.

Valentine’s Day came and went, and they missed not exchanging valentines with their grandmother.

Ryan and Katie got involved in other things and for the most part forgot about the amazing daffodils.

The early spring rains kept them inside for most of the Easter school vacation. From Tuesday through Saturday – dreary rain forced them to come up with fun activities to do indoors.

But Sunday morning, the temperatures soared to create an unseasonably warm day –

Bright sunshine filled the day, no need for a coat. It felt as if the world had been set free of its rainy sadness.

It felt so good to run through the bright warmth that soaked the backyard that both Ryan and Katie ran right past it. How could they miss it?

The sun made the flower’s yellow color beam like the sun itself – as if it were trying to scream to the children – HERE I AM!

Hours passed on that Sunday from morning to early afternoon. Ryan and Katie’s playing in the backyard was interrupted only by their mother’s repeated calls to come in for lunch.

Katie was the first one to see her Mom out of the corner of her eye. She immediately thought her presence in the backyard was because she and Ryan hadn’t come quick enough when called. But when she saw her Mom’s smile, she knew her Mom was there for a different reason.

“RYAN!!!” Katie screamed in excitement. “LOOK!”

At their mother’s feet, standing as majestic as their parents said it would – the yellow daffodils beamed against the white wall of their garage.

“We didn’t think they would grow!” Ryan shouted as he and his sister ran toward the beautiful sight.

Their mother knelt down to be eye level with her children, and gently said – “Sometimes, the most wonderful things that happen are not within our sight. You two thought the flowers weren’t growing, but they were – you just couldn’t see them. And grandma’s spirit is here even though you can’t see it.”

Ryan and Katie spent the entire lunch staring out the window, their eyes fixed on the yellow flowers that swayed in the early spring afternoon breeze. And they wondered – what other wonderful things are happening right now – that they just can’t see.

“Hope Rising”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Easter Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
April 4, 2010

It seems right to have prepared this message on Good Friday. As a child I went with my parents to our Presbyterian church and sat through the whole marathon of sermons and prayers and passages from the gospels about Jesus’ suffering and death. It was grueling, but I was a fairly serious kid with a vivid imagination, so I listened and wondered. I knew what was to come—a Sabbath Saturday and then Easter Sunday, when Mary and others went to the tomb where Jesus’ body had been carried. They arrived to find it wide open; someone had rolled away the huge stone intended to seal it. They walked in and found a young man dressed in a white robe, who according to the Gospel of Mark told them not to be surprised. He knew they were seeking Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t there; he had risen. This stranger then told them to go and tell the disciples that Jesus was on his way to Galilee, where they would see him. Understandably, they ran off in fear and trembling.

I’ve thought a lot about the story of Jesus—at least the story as we have it in just a few versions. As a young person, I didn’t have access to those gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible. The only sources I knew were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and the letters of the first Christian missionary, Paul, who after all had fallen off his donkey on a trip to Damascus. Even these sources had been passed on and translated into so many languages and so many versions in English alone. Yet I believed that Jesus quite literally rose from the dead and did indeed appear to Mary and her friends and the disciples.

Years passed. I began to wonder. Did it happen? Did Jesus really walk out of a high-security tomb alive again, even though the Gospels don’t have him staying too long? As people of faith and doubt, we tend to be skeptical to say the least. We tend to raise our eyebrows and wonder at such a story. We also tend to be literal and, trapped by our literalism, find it easy to throw the transformation experienced by Mary and her friends and the disciples right out the window along with the notion of an honest-to-goodness resurrected Christ. From the many vantage points of our liberal religion, we too easily blur the distinction between the miraculous and the moving, the magical and that which stirs our souls.

As an impressionable and imaginative child, it was the miraculous and the magical that I found so appealing. I didn’t pay much attention to biblical contradictions or the notion of metaphor, an image set forth or a story told to communicate a larger truth. I didn’t pay much attention to how the biblical gospels differed from one another. Nope, it was the incredible that I embraced!

But the Bible does hold contradictions; and the gospels do differ from one another; and metaphor is powerful, soul-stirring, and life changing. So I find it fascinating that Mark, the earliest Gospel, has nothing to say about Jesus actually appearing to anyone after his death. When Mary and the other women visit the tomb, they’re greeted by what Mark calls “a young man.” Granted, this figure tells them that Jesus isn’t there because he’s risen and that they should go and tell his disciples and that they will see him. But when the women hear this, they flee from the tomb, absolutely terrified. And Mark’s story comes to a halt. The other Gospels have Jesus making appearances. John, the latest Gospel, even had the risen Jesus presiding over an early morning feast of bread and fish, miraculously caught by the disciples after Jesus told them where to drop their nets. Mark tells nothing of the sort.

“Strangely enough,” writes the Christian theologian John Shelby Spong,

“there is a minimum of supernaturalism in Mark’s account of the resurrection, which is the first biblical narrative of that experience. The raised Jesus…never appears in Mark’s text.”

While later Christians added to Mark’s seemingly abrupt ending accounts of how Jesus did after all make an appearance, Spong contends that Mark probably ended his gospel with the women fleeing the tomb in fear. It was enough to have told the story of this extraordinary man who preached a gospel of love amid a social and political climate that was about as anti-love as it gets. It was enough to tell the story of Jesus’ life and teachings and death.

So what’s the big deal about Easter for Mark? What’s the big deal about Easter for those of us who hold to a religion of faith and doubt? What’s the big deal about Easter if Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, but stayed dead? Prophetic women and men such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who died 42 years ago today, preached a gospel of love and paid with his life. To our knowledge, King stayed dead. The gospel of love is a message that threatened the powers that were in Jesus’ time and in King’s time; the gospel of love is a message that threatens the powers that be in our own time. What’s the big deal about Jesus that brings us here this morning to celebrate Easter?

The message, the teachings, the life, the love, and the hope that the young man Jesus brought and left with us is a big deal. Against all odds, he fed the most down-trodden with hope. With healing presence, he touched soul and psyche, and perhaps bodily healing followed suit. He restored a belief in the possible and claimed that there were ways other than violent rebellion to resist the forces of imperial Rome. He befriended the outcast.

“Is it possible?” we wonder, for someone to live like this? How many of us spout principles that we stumble over day after day? How many of us trust that in our own time, we can be compassionate to everybody? How many of us take to heart the teaching of Jesus to love our enemies and, in his story of the Good Samaritan, to let our enemies love us?

On Easter, hope is reborn. On Easter, we remember and tell the story of Jesus’ resurrection in all its forms and wonder at such a life. On Easter, we recall the transformation of his friends from despairing to hopeful—with or without appearances of a risen Jesus. On this Easter morning, we behold the daffodils, just a few weeks ago invisible, wriggling in the tomb of soil, now waving at us from earth and altar and your very laps. On Easter, we receive a story of two young children who had lost their grandmother in the autumn and who missed her dearly and whose wise parents told them to plant daffodil bulbs. On Easter, we hear how those bulbs worked all winter long out of sight of the children, who wondered if anything would come of their planting. On Easter, we hear how, hope against hope, sun-yellow blossoms burst through the ground, radiant as the spirit of their grandmother, alive as their love for her.

On Easter, we tell the stories of Jesus; so many different stories there are to tell. On Easter, we tell the story of the amazing daffodils and love and hope that rise and last. On Easter, we tell the story and sing the songs and open our hearts to hope rising. On Easter, we hold that hope—in our hands and in our hearts.

May the hope of Easter spill over into this day and every day of our amazing lives. May the spirit of Easter be with us all. Amen.

Sources:
Jim FitzGerald, “The Amazing Daffodil Story,” 2006.

The Gospels According to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

John Shelby Spong, “The Original Christ: Before the Theistic Distortion,” from  A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying & How a New Faith Is Being Born, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.