This sermon was presented by Rev. Judith Campbell at Stevens Chapel on April 20, 2003.

Don’t Throw Jesus out with the (Holy) Bath Water

When the many of us that came to Unitarian Universalism from other practices finally signed the Membership book, it meant a freedom from being told what to do and think and what would happen to us if we didn’t. (And that was often not a pretty picture!) Many were religions that were based on any number of "thou shall nots" rather than a more Universal "Yes we can"!!!, and I’m OK and getting better! And what can we do to make the world better. And because of that freedom from dogmatic authority, many of us feel distinctly uncomfortable with remnants of those more traditional practices. Here, we don’t often say the "Lord’s Prayer", nor do we have any kind of ceremonial communion, other than a Flower Communion we will have in the late spring. There are, however, Unitarian Universalist churches that regularly celebrate some sort of a communion service that honors the life and work of Jesus, rather than a re-creation of the terrible poignancy of the last supper and the miracle of the resurrection.

And yet while the Christian tradition is one of the many that we celebrate and draw from in that rich tapestry we call Unitarian Universalism, it may be the one that many of us are most uncomfortable with. That could be because so many of us left Christian traditions and we don’t want to be brought back to something that for any number of personal and sometimes very painful reasons we have rejected.

So, the Easter Miracle, the belief in the physical resurrection from death of the man Jesus, is at the heart of all Christianity, and at the heart of what many of us have chosen to leave.

When I was first questioning my own Christianity in my early teens, Easter is where it started. I had no questions or quarrel with the Jesus message, a message of love and forgiveness and hope. (I was already a Universalist and didn’t know it!) I questioned the immaculate conception, the "virgin" birth, and the idea that someone could return from death. loved Easter for the music and the flowers. I even hiked up Great Blue Hill one freezing morning to attend an Easter Sunrise service. (I was sweet on one of the kids in the youth group, and I would have followed him to "well" and back; and that morning I thought I had, but that is another story.)

Easter, in one way epitomizes what Unitarian Universalists DON"T believe! No wonder so many of us have trouble with it and do little dances around all spring festivals and recall the ancient traditions. That is pretty much what I did in the Pansy and Cabbage story. But the reality is that these spring festivals, the death and resurrection ritual is as old as the earth; and I believe there is a visceral yearning within all of us to honor and celebrate it.

There are any number of UU Churches which have combined a Ritual Passover Seder supper with a Holy Thursday or Maundy Thursday ritual in an ecumenical gesture with the Jewish community. Other churches will have a spring festival honoring the re-greening of the earth around them and have a equinox sunrise service, or vernal equinox party to celebrate the season. Just don’t mention Jesus! I don’t buy that!

If we celebrate the birthday of the Buddha, and honor the life and work and dreams of Martin Luther King, and decorate our houses and our churches and ourselves like stage sets for that December holiday that falls conveniently around the winter solstice, why in heavens name are we so antsy about Jesus? The reality is: Jesus did live, and whether it was his idea or someone else’s, his life and his teachings did change the course of history. And it was a good message. Hence the title of my talk: Don’t throw Jesus out with the holy water!

Next year, when I do the sermon series on world religions, Christianity will of course be one of them, and Jesus and his life and teachings are at the center of it.

I think that when we walk away from something because we are dissatisfied with it, there is an inclination to walk away from everything connected to it. A similar thing happens when a couple goes through a divorce. For a long time after a divorce, it is very hard to think of anything positive about the person or the situation that we left. But given time and maturity, we can look back and see, (beyond the broken promises and failed expectations) there were some good things; just not enough to sustain a relationship.

And that’s why so many of us here are religious "come-outers". The promises and the expectations of the tradition we left, just didn’t work, either spiritually, intellectually or even socially or emotionally. It just didn’t work. And we shouldn’t blame Jesus, or the bible, or even our parents. Like the Buddha, we woke up to our own dissatisfaction, and decided to make it better.

When you think about it, Jesus’ message is very Unitarian Universalist. He preached a message of universal love, of our responsibility to the less fortunate, of our need to be nonjudgmental in the face of human differences, and of the power of love and faith to cast out fear. This is worth remembering.

Jesus was a humble hero. History tells us he was an uneducated charismatic faith healer. There is as much myth as there is man in the story, created by those would make him into a God. But the reality is: he did live, and he did sit at the table with lepers and prostitutes. He broke with Jewish law by working on the Sabbath He died an excruciating, humiliating death because he was betrayed by one of his own, and. when apprehended, would not swear allegiance to the Roman Emperor’s Gods, but remained true to his own beliefs. And to this day, I weep helplessly when I read or watch accounts of the crucifixion. It was so tragically unjust.

I believe the resurrection story is part of a tapestry that made the man Jesus into God, a theological construct that will be debated as long as there are believers and skeptics, and I will leave it to them. What is important is his message.

The resurrection story is about the power of life and love triumphing over the power of darkness. But we must have the darkness to have the triumph. Any of us who has come through our own dark night of the soul (and that is or will be all of us) knows with blessed assurance how beautiful is the dawn of our awareness of a new day. And that - dancing angel theology aside - that is the Easter message. Life, returning life, the cycles of our living and dying and living will continue.

For Christianity to work, Jesus had to die. Persephone had to go into the underworld, and the world had to wither and die until her return. Even Snow White had to take a bite of the poisoned apple and go into the hundred year sleep before the Prince would find her. Part of life is the darkness. But the miracle of faith is knowing and understanding that the darkness is necessary for the miracle of new life, how ever we find it or it finds us. It is part of the journey.

The Easter message is as old as the earth, and as new as the dawn. It is retold to us in the story of Jesus’ death and return to life, and it is renewed for us every time we open our eyes to the light of a new day and find the miracle that has been there all along just waiting for us to recognize it.

Blessed Be and Miraculous Easter to you all.