Every year about this time the tone on the Unitarian Universalist ministers' email list gets just a bit minatory. We are reminded of the significance of Easter in the Christian tradition and warned against trivializing it with eggs and bunnies and even flower communions. Actually, the flower communion warning has two prongs. First they think it should only be used as a memorial to its creator, Norbert Capek who was murdered in Hitler's gas ovens; and second, Easter, to them, should be celebrated as one of the two greatest Christian religious festivals rather than a seasonal festival for which flowers are appropriate. Capek was certainly a true Unitarian hero, but I know nothing about his ego-involvement in the flower communion. I suspect - indeed I hope - that he would rather see it celebrated according to his intentions when he created it than have it used without its inherent meaning as a remembrance of himself. If I am mistaken in this, he himself will not be required to come back to haunt me since he has enough committed memorializers to take up his cause.
The other question of whether Easter should be celebrated as a commemoration of the story of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection or a spring festival with bunnies, eggs, and yes, even flowers, is perhaps more complex. Clearly it is seasonal. It is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox. Its name is even that of an ancient fertility goddess. The rabbits and the eggs may be even more ancient symbols of fertility, and flowers are an abundant sign of this season of renewal. All that, of course, can be ignored in favor of a focussed emphasis on the empty tomb and the story of Jesus' resurrection, but to do so ignores another fact, that those stories of resurrection, of the overcoming of death, are common to many if not all religions and are always tied to the season of resurrection and renewal, spring after winter. Just in passing, I do hope that those stern colleagues of mine are not so stern or so determined to be consistent as to refuse to give their children Easter baskets. Actually, I'm sure they do prepare those baskets if they have children. None of us is so closely tied to our Puritan ancestors as that.
Here in Florida, of course, we're a little smug about our winters. Though we have a day here and there of chill to remind us that it isn't summer, our primary realization of it is that we host so many refugees from the privations of the season. Even in the north, of course, human beings have been able to make winter quite a different thing from what it was when our ancestors lived in less comfortable dwellings and we lacked salt and snow plows. Now we suffer little as we go from heated home to heated car down roads that have been cleared of snow to buy the food that has been provided for us from all over the world where winter may occur at another time of year. Yet even cut off as we are by place or by our technology from the rhythms of the year the memory of them and the need to recognize them seem to be embedded in our very bones - or at least our nervous systems. So, at least, it is with me. Even here we recognize the lengthening days, the new green on the cypresses and some few other trees - even the live oaks are pushing off their old leaves and adding new - and even here we need to be reminded that there is no death.
Death has been too close to us this year as we have lost those who are so deeply loved and as we fear for the lives of others who are beloved. Much has been made - I have made much myself - in the accounts of Jesus' resurrection in the gospels of how different each of the stories of his appearances is from the others. It seems clear, at least to me, that without such consistency there is even less evidence for his having risen from the dead than for the other stories of his life. Yet I often see Dorothy Gallas sitting at the table in the office chatting with Bridget or standing in the foyer with her clipboard buttonholing each of us to attend an event. I often see Niels sitting on the patio catching his breath, driving the tractor, or walking up and down the aisles counting the house. They and others continue to live in my mind and heart. In that sense the resurrection is surely real.
And this time of year is surely a good time to celebrate it. Even we here in Florida are not so cut off from the changes the seasons bring that we are not often reminded. It was perhaps indelicate and certainly disrespectful of us to watch the black racers' mating orgy on the walk outside the Religious Education room last Monday, but it was irresistible. Seldom do we see more than a disappearing tail or at least only a few seconds of undulating body, but that day there were four of them, unconcerned with any outside presence, celebrating the ritual of renewed life. The fertility rituals of spring are not confined to humankind but are celebrated by all living things. Even here where snakes do not hibernate completely through the winter, they hear the call of springtime, the rhythms of nature which are heeded by all living things. Though the sleep may merely be a gentle doze this is the time of awakening and renewal of life.
Some of human history has prided itself on not being subject to such rhythms, and today at least we often so comfort ourselves, remembering our technologies that often keep us from feeling the discomforts and dangers of nature's dance. Yet even we, perhaps without fully realizing it feel springtime's call. Tennyson put it this way in "Locksley Hall":
In the spring a livelier iris
Gleams upon the burnished dove;
In the spring a young man's fancy
Lightly turns to thoughts of love.
We respond to the rhythms of the body but also those of the spirit, and perhaps the celebrations of Easter, even those that seem most earthy, the bunnies and rabbits whose seeming innocence is most blatantly reproductive, are those of the spirit. I had a colleague who divided people into spring people and autumn people. The autumn people he said were of a serious nature, understanding that for a rich harvest there must have first been much labor. They reap and glean and prepare for a less bountiful future. Spring people, on the other hand, are creatures of the moment, reveling in the beauties of the day after springing with smiles from their couches at dawn, doing their vigorous exercises, and then entering upon their lives with a laugh and a shout and no fear of the morrow. I don't know that people can be so easily put into boxes and categorized as this or that, though they clearly are born with different temperaments. I even admit that there are some people who get up early, full of good cheer, ready to greet the day with no time spent shuffling around frowsty and blear-eyed before being able to face it. Such people do exist. I have irrefutable assurance of it.
Nevertheless, I don't think that lovers of spring or dawn are necessarily of this sort. However cheerful or not they may be at awakening, they are not unthinking. It is rather their deep awareness of the fragility of life and the reality of tragedy that intensifies their response to the renewal of life and to the warming and lengthening of days. We no longer fear the winter, though there are still some reports each year of tragedies in blizzards or bitter cold, but think what it must have been like for our ancestors. Not even as far back as when we were living in caves when there was little to hunt and nothing to gather, but later when there was no guarantee that enough harvest would be gathered in to outlast the death of winter; when huddled together in cold and want disease would attack; when the old and the weak were almost assured that they would not survive. No wonder they celebrated the turn of the year at the solstice, at the darkest time of year, knowing that days had ceased to shorten. And then when spring actually came, when flowers appeared on the earth and the time of the singing of birds had come, no wonder they went nearly crazy with joy. All living things did and still do the same. The fertility magic our human ancestors practiced simply mirrored the burgeoning fecundity they saw around them. Now for this little time until the following winter, they were safe. No wonder, too, that they told stories of death and resurrection of their gods, because that, too, they saw all around them. No wonder also that the hope of eternal life seemed justified as they watched the earth's rebirth.
It is highly unlikely that very many people in this room today have any belief in the efficacy of sympathetic magic, that the symbols of fertility will increase the fertility of the earth. It is just as unlikely that many will believe in the literal truth of the Christian story that is celebrated at Easter. You would probably be amazed at how few confessing Christians believe in its literal truth. We know so much more these days. We know that at the time this event is said to have happened Palestine was a center of unrest in the Roman Empire. Crucifixions were very common, and many people considered dangerous to the Empire were executed in that way. We also know that the very shape of the cross was different from what tradition tells us. The one used for execution was an X rather than a T. It was Emperor Constantine's vision more than 300 years later that changed the letter of the alphabet. We know, too, that it was a time of apocalyptic fervor and that there were many messiahs and many mystery religions of a killed and risen god vying for supremacy in that area in particular but also in the Empire as a whole. We also know that scientifically speaking it is most improbable that the dead could be brought back to life, and that the stories of Jesus' reappearance are less than convincing. Worse, the theological explanations are often distasteful to us. The idea that another's brutal sacrifice, even that of a god, would atone for my sins if I simply accept that gift is, to put it mildly, extremely distasteful. Even should such a sacrifice be efficacious it could never be accepted.
Nevertheless, with little experience of winter's fatal blast or fear of want from idle winter fields we celebrate the fertility of spring, and with little simple belief we commemorate the story of one who gave his life for others and who did not die. The welcome of the turning of the year is in our blood and bones, and we know from experience that there is no death. Though bodies are committed to the ground or burned to ashes, yet those we love remain with us. The earth recovers from its dying again and again, each year, never failing as it turns toward summer. The spirits of those we love are in our hearts and minds and our grief itself overcomes death. So let us celebrate Easter with all our hearts - no, all our spirits - both the flowers, bunnies and eggs, and also the sureness of renewal both of the earth and of joy, and the love that stays with us beyond the loss of death.