Probable Improbabilities
Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010—Foxborough Universalist Church
I love being in a Unitarian Universalist church on Easter. There’s always just a hint of tension in the room. Some of you, I’m sure, are sitting there thinking: she can’t possibly preach on the resurrection, can she? I mean do we even believe that? Some are thinking: if she goes all rites of spring on me and totally ignores Jesus, I might lose it. Many of us are remembering Easters from our childhoods and maybe are a little grateful we aren’t sitting there in a white dress or a clip on bow-tie. And there are some of you, I know, for whom our Seder meal last week was at the heart of this season’s religious focus. This day, more than most throughout the year, confronts us with the fact that we are not a creedal religion—that we have covenanted to sit beside each other knowing that for each of us this holiday bears different significance. This is what I love.
Truthfully, Easter is just kind of a confusing holiday, period. The celebration of a primary Christian doctrine got all mixed up with the pagan fertility celebrations that accompanied spring in pre-Christian days. It is supposed to be a celebration, but it comes only days after the Savior’s execution, which is confoundingly called “Good Friday” (a sermon for another day). Then there are the bunnies and brunch and miracles we’re not even sure we believe in. I love David Sedaris’ description of trying to explain Easter to a Muslim woman in his French class. Sedaris was in Paris taking beginning French with a motley assortment of exchange students, nannies, and other adults from all over the world who, for whatever reason, found themselves living in France and therefore needed to learn the language. In the middle of a basic conversational exercise about holidays the teacher asked, “And what does one do on Easter?” in French of course. A Moroccan student interrupted to ask, “Excuse me, what’s an Easter?”
Sedaris describes what happened when the teacher called upon the rest of the class to explain.
“[Two Polish students] rushed in with their best beginning French, ‘It is,’ said one, ‘a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus…’ She faltered and her fellow countryman came to her aid.
‘He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two…morsels of…lumber.’
The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the Pope an aneurysm.
‘He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father.’
‘He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.’
‘He nice, the Jesus,’”
Which is often the most that many people can agree on on Easter.
This awkward explanation of the crux of modern Christianity is only made worse when people eagerly begin to explain to the Moroccan, who by now has to be so confused, what we do now for Easter. Sedaris continues describe the student’s eager attempts to have the Moroccan understand their tradition:
“’Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb,’ the Italian nanny explained. ‘One too may eat of the chocolate.’
‘And who brings the chocolate?’ the teacher asked.
I knew the word, so I raised myt hand saying, ‘The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.’
‘A rabbit?’ The teacher said, assuming that I’d had used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wriggling them as though they were ears. ‘You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?’
‘Well sure,’ I said, ‘He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have a basket and foods.’
The teacher sighed and shook her head. As far as she was concerned, I had just explained everything that was wrong with my country. ‘No, no,” she said. ‘Here in France the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from Rome.’
I called for a time out, ‘But how do the bell know where you live?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘how does a rabbit?’”
This goes on and on without doing anything to enlighten the Moroccan. Later in the story Sedaris reflects, “I wondered then if, without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity…In communicating any religious belief, the operative word is faith, a concept illustrated by our very presence in that classroom. Why bother struggling with the grammar lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn’t believe that, against all reason, we might eventually improve? If I could hope to one day carry on a fluent conversation, it was a relatively short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night, leaving behind a handful of chocolate kisses... So why stop there? If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?”[1]
Why not, indeed? This to me is the spirit of Easter, no matter where you are coming from, that we should have faith in improbability of new life, that we should be ready maybe not to believe that a bell flying into Rome will deliver chocolate (that’s just silly), but perhaps that something else we think might never happen will happen, and often just when we thought it couldn’t possibly happen anymore.
The Christian writer Barbara Johnson has said that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world, which I think is mostly true.[2] We live amongst tremendous loss and suffering and yet somehow manage to resurrect ourselves every morning and go out into the world to do the things we need to do. Again, I am remembering John Cobb’s description of God as “the call forward.” However, sometimes I think we are actually Good Friday people living in an Easter world. That is, sometimes the labors or losses or frustrations in our lives can be so overwhelming that we stop believing that out of all that rubble new life can still emerge, that we WILL finally learn what we have trying to learn for years, that love WILL return, or that the relationship that seems to have trapped to good people in a bad dynamic will change.
One day in Boston, a man was walking across the Common to the T station that’s there for the green line. His full intention was to buy a token, walk down the stairs and throw himself onto the third rail. This one winter of his life had gone on too long. He could no longer see the possibility of new life emerging in his spirit. I don’t know what was happening in his life or in his body at this time, but each of us, I’m sure can imagine any mixture of circumstances that might have brought him to that point.
Just as he was heading down the stairs someone called “Welcome!” to him. It was Sunday morning and the entrance for the T is not five feet from the entrance of Arlington Street Church where the morning greeters were outside the old Unitarian church even in the cold shaking hands and welcoming people as they entered church. One of them had mistaken him for a parishioner. This moment of confusion interrupted the man’s momentum and postpone his suicide attempt long enough to go inside and pray. He stayed for services, and something that was said that morning was enough to make him believe not necessarily that spring had arrived, but that it was coming. Something gave him enough strength to begin looking for new life. He remains a deeply committed member of the Arlington Street Church and perhaps knows better than any of us how life saving a group of people coming together each week to look for signs of spring can be.[3]
This season, the season of Easter, reminds us that life always contains the possibility that it will surprise us…with life! More importantly though, it reminds us that often we are co-creators of those surprises, of grace. As difficult as it may be at times, it is ours to find a way to believe in what seems totally improbable: a healed heart, a sense of belonging, a reconciled relationship, a recovery from addiction…That’s what we come here for, whether we are agnostic, pagan, Christian-leaning, Buddhist-leaning, or whatever. We come to shore up our faith so that we can give improbabilities the benefit of the doubt.
Look at what has been happening these last two weeks. One day it was icy and barren and the next day a bit of sun landed against the house for a couple of hours and a crocus—a FLOWER—busted out of the gravel-ridden dirt next to our driveway. This happens every year and it always catches me a little off-guard. I almost always think the crocuses have jumped the gun a little (the daffodils seems a little more prudent but still pretty gutsy). Still I get sucked in by it. Last week when we got those first truly warm days of the season, it was so great to see people out in their flip-flops and shorts, fussing around in their gardens all goose-pimply and determined. My poor neighbor caught a cold, having spent the whole day outside cleaning her car in a tank top and shorts. This is a beautiful thing about human beings, that we are ready to BELIEVE the crocus when it says spring is coming, despite the forecast for the next week. It’s strange because in the midst of the icy cold of winter, I think it is hard to believe that it will ever happen, but as soon as we get the first hint of it sometimes our whole beings rise up to meet the possibility, especially if we are out looking for the signs.
In Luke when the women from Galilee go to the tomb to properly prepare Jesus’ body, they are met by two men in dazzling clothes who are standing by the tomb. Here I can’t help but think of the tomb as flanked by Elton John and Lady Gaga. And then they ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” What a great question. Why do any of us? I don’t think these women actually thought this is what they were doing—looking for the living among the dead. They were following their love for their teacher and their friend, wanting to honor him by caring for his body. But when we are following the breadcrumbs left by our love, we ARE looking for the living among the dead. Why do we do this? Why are we out there pulling out brown leaves and cutting back dry branches looking for the green? Because we are following love to faith, we want to believe that it will come back despite the mess. In our gardens, we believe it because we’ve seen it year after year. I wish we could see how that works in other parts of our lives as clearly…that we are surrounded by the possibility of rebirth. Unfortunately, the cycles of the rest of lives tend to not be so regularly timed and it’s hard to remember that things can (and usually do) get better.
Here's an example I always lean on when my faith wanes: when I was twenty, if you had told me that I would have a relationship with my father that was mostly relaxed, affectionate, and playful, I would have laughed at you. I would not believed you, yet would have hoped that you were right. I’m not sure when it happened, but it may have been a summer when I was living at home and my mom was away and it was just the two of us, my dad and I. Something shifted. I know I was different that summer, that I was looking for openings more than usual. I think he was too. Something I thought would never-ever change just shifted. I give us both credit for sticking with each other, but then there’s this mystery piece that I can't explain and can only be grateful for that finally allowed the ice to break.
Things can change. Things do change. This is life. Whatever keeps sending you late season snow storms in your life, whatever it is you cannot believe will ever change, could change tomorrow. Today we celebrate probable improbabilities. We embrace the grace by which our lives are constantly renewed. May it be so for you.
[1] Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day. Boston: Little, Brown and Company; 2000.
[2] Quoted in Lamott, Anne. Plan B—Further Thoughts on Faith. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. p. 140.
[3] As told in a sermon, "Telling Stories of Hope" delivered March 31, 2002 by Rev. Rob Hardies at All Soul’s Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C.
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