It comes to us with trumpets. All around the world on this day, it's announced with trumpets blaring, full choirs belting out songs of triumph, rooms packed with flowers--sanctuaries filled with beauty, nothing but beauty. People dressed in their best, looking perfect and polished, not a wrinkle or a smear, no stains, nothing worn or torn. "He is risen!" is the message, shouted out with the confidence of a victor. No sign of defeat. What was dead has been restored. What was taken is now given back. What was broken is now made whole.
And though the joy is real, something is off. Just ever so slightly. You can't put your finger on it, but it's there. A small doubt. A nagging discomfort. A tiny voice. Too distant and soft to clearly discern. But loud enough to know that something just isn't quite right.
"He is risen. What was dead has been restored. What was taken is now given back. What was broken is now made whole." It's close, but just not quite right. Something is slightly off.
And so today, we gather to offer each other something different, something a bit less triumphant, something a bit more heretical, but something hopefully more real. Something, it seems to me, that is more like waking up one morning and feeling as though someone has snuck into our rooms during the night and slipped onto our bed... brand new sheets.
Let me explain.
It's not the usual resurrection story, but it's the one I think we need to hear. It's a poem entitled, Gray's First Sober Year, and it's written by a man named William Notter. It's not easy to hear at points, so I ask that we listen with open ears and open hearts.
This new life is better
than a dozen beer-joint romances
or a hundred drunks at fishing camp.
My habit now is not drinking,
and waking up where I belong.
I can see colors again,
and I don't feel like a turd in the punchbowl
whenever I go around people.
I'll mow the weeds for Sharon
and almost enjoy it. She's even given up
checking my breath whenever I come home.
I went shopping for our anniversary
and wound up crying in the store,
but not the kind of tears you cry
when your wife catches you lying in the shed
with your pistol jabbed up in your mouth
and vodka running out your nose.
The only thing she could think to do
was check me into another detox,
and this time it finally took.
This year has made me different-
vodka could never do that for long.
Some days when I wake up early
and listen to Sharon lying there breathing,
it feels like somebody snuck in while we slept
and changed our sheets.
No trumpets. No total victory. No perfect return of what was. Just the simple, wonderfully miraculous feeling of new sheets. If there is a more real resurrection story, I've not heard it.
No one can fault us, though, for wanting more than this. Wanting it all back, just the way it was, is simply part of who we are. Being able to love and invest ourselves so deeply in what is and what we have is what gives life such precious meaning. And so when deaths and losses strike, how could we not want to reverse the clock?
We want our healthy bodies back. Please let this cancer not be real. We want our mama's memory to return. Please let the diagnosis of Alzheimer's be wrong.
We want to hug our little one again. Please let the accident be a dream. We want our marriage to be like it was. Please say this divorce isn't going to happen.
There is no doubt we want the dead body to rise again. What we wouldn't give to see the triumph of empty tomb. And yet a complete return is not what we are offered.
I've mentioned the story of Kevin Kling before and I've found myself thinking of him again this week. He's a nationally known storyteller--one of Kaaren's and my favorites. What gives him power as a storyteller is not just his way with words, but the body from which those hopeful and humorous words come. You see, it's broken.
A few years ago, he made a big mistake. He was born with a congenital condition that left his bones smaller and more fragile than most and with an arm that was neither fully grown nor fully functional. In other words, he was born with significant limits. And while a part of him accepted that, another part of him never has. "Don't you dare tell me I can't!" is a voice and a temptation with which he regularly struggles. That voice, he says, has often been a great source of strength, but also at times, frankly, a great source of stupidity-his "goofus voice" he calls it. And it was this goofus voice that was speaking the day he defiantly bought that motorcycle, as it was the day he threw caution to the wind and left his helmet at home so he could feel the wind in his hair and the rush of speed. He just wanted to feel free, he said.
Everyone who saw the accident was convinced he must be dead. And Kling says, yes indeed, he was darn near close. So close he was in talking distance with death, he says. They had a conversation of sorts. On the doctor's table, he says he had that experience so often talked about. He didn't see a light at the end of a tunnel, but he did feel as though he was heading for this amazing sense of peace, and that that sense of peace gave him the choice to enter in or return to the land of the living, all the while making it clear that if he did return there would be consequences.
Kling choose the consequences and returned significantly disfigured, full of nerve damage and difficultly in walking, and without the use of his one healthy arm.
But what bothered him most, he said, was not the pain or bodily loss or even year-long journey of recovery, but this guy he sees regularly on the bus. This guy saw the accident and was -AND IS-convinced that Kevin Kling died. To this day, this guy goes around telling people that Kevin is walking around as a ghost!
"And how do you argue with someone who thinks you're a ghost?" asks Kling. "I see him on the bus every once in a while," explains Kling, "and I try to talk to him but he looks right through me--as if he is silently telling himself... 'It's just a ghost; it's just a ghost. He's not really there. If I ignore him he'll go away.'"
"Now for a long time that was, as you can imagine, quite disconcerting" says Kling. "But I've finally realized he's right. I haven't completely returned and I can't and so, with his help, I've grown used to the fact that I live now with a foot in two worlds."
"The great classical storyteller, Dante, understood this better than anyone", says Kling. Dante spun volumes of tales about the world of the living and the world of the dead. He is most famous for having created a world in between, an underworld, or as he called it in Latin, "Dis." The land of Dis, which translated means, "the place of shadow and reflection," is a place that is free from the land of the dead, but retains the shadow of it.
Kling points out that it is important to remember that we still use the word "dis" in our language today. Most prominently in the word, "disabled," which, he stresses, doesn't mean "unable" but rather "able in a different way"-able thru and alongside the world of shadow... and reflection.
This, it seems to me, is what makes most Easter celebrations feel slightly off, or as I said at the beginning, "just not quite right." They leave out this world of shadow and reflection. They leave out the part about how walking through the land of the dead, even when we make it out, leaves one with the feeling of living with a foot in two worlds. One foot is just never quite free.
That the miracle of resurrection happens can't be denied. Mysteriously and seemingly miraculously, we are regularly pulled, pushed, coaxed, tempted and lured out of the land of the dead back into the land of the living. But to surround that return with trumpets and words of total triumph is to do a disservice to its truth and real beauty!
What makes our resurrections so stunningly beautiful and humbling is not that our deaths and losses are crushed, defeated or overturned, but that somehow we find a way to befriend and accept those deaths and losses.
Henry David Thoreau has this beautiful passage in which he talks of watching Walden Pond thaw. That amazing time of early spring when, he writes, "the ice of Walden melts and the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the surface." "It is affecting," he goes on, "to see nature so tender,...to see that which was lately so hard and immovable now so soft and impressible!"
That, it seems to me, is so much closer to the truth of resurrection. Not a battle in which a foe is defeated or eliminated, but a process more tender, a process in which something so hard and immovable slowly becomes soft and impressible, a process in which that which feels so dark and cold and dominating, slowly softens into a shadow.
"I never thought I'd escape the painful memories of my divorce" said a friend to me recently, "but now the edges feel a bit more rounded and dulled, enough so that I feel less like I'm fighting with the pain and more like I am dancing with it."
"I've moved," says another friend, "from feeling like my depression is taking over my life, to feeling like I am simply a person living with depression." And she says that with a sweet smile and grateful tears.
We are talking here of course of "imperfect resurrections"-of transformations and returns back to life that are neither pure nor complete. Or to put it another way-maybe even to put it in a heretical way-the true miracle is not that we will someday be resurrected in another life, but that we are constantly being resurrected in this life. As one of our Soul Matters Small Group members put it, "I can't say I've ever felt resurrected, but I do feel like my whole life is a 'resurrection in process.'"
And actually before we go too far in naming this approach heretical, I think it is important to remember that this vision of imperfect resurrections is embedded firmly in the biblical Easter stories.
In the earliest gospel, the gospel of Mark, the original version of the text doesn't include Jesus at all. The women come to the tomb just find it empty. A stranger, who may or may not be an angel, tells them that Jesus is risen. The text makes it clear that the women don't know exactly what this means, nor does it bring them comfort. On top of that, when the women tell the disciples, the disciples doubt them. In the other gospels, where the disciples do see Jesus, you have Thomas needing to touch Jesus' wound because he just doesn't buy it that this is really Jesus risen from the dead. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus shows up and joins the disciples as they are walking to another town and they don't recognize that it is him until hours later as he sits and has dinner with them! Then after that, Jesus goes away for good.
As theologian Fredrick Buechner has pointed out, this is a strange way to declare the miracle of resurrection. "The way the gospels tell it," Buechner writes, "Jesus came back from death not in a blaze of glory, but more like a candle flame in the dark, flickering first in this place, then in that place, then no place at all." And Buechner goes on to say that he thinks the reason the gospel writers tell it in this strange way is that they are trying to tell the tale, not convincingly, but truthfully.
Which is exactly what I think we seemingly heretical Unitarian Universalists are also trying to do when we speak of "imperfect resurrections" and "resurrections in process." It's not about trying to argue against or tear down the traditional view; it's more about trying to honor and celebrate our own experience.
"Some days" says the poet gratefully, not every day, not all the time, but simply "some days, it feels like somebody snuck in while we slept... and changed our sheets."
Sometimes it's only "for a moment" said Anita in her "This I Believe" statement this morning. "Only for a moment" that she notices and experiences a connectedness that saves her. "And it feels," she said, "like a miracle--a miracle that comes in fleeting, simple and easy to miss moments, like when a baby smiles at me or when I see a child's delight at blowing dandelion seeds."
"Love said over and over, like a needle stuck on an antique phonograph" said Vicki in her statement. Not a great, all-powerful love that breaks into existence and saves us once and forever, but littler loves, softer and subtler that offer themselves to us over and over, and thereby bring us back to life, over and over and over.
Kevin Kling credits his very ordinary Midwestern brother, not a divine, other-worldly son of god, with the miracle that helped bring him back to life. After the motorcycle accident and during the year-long rehabilitation process that followed, Kevin felt like giving up. His jaw was locked tight with wires holding his face together. A liquid diet was sustaining him, but Kevin lacked the will needed to do the exercises that would enable him to transition to being able to eat solid foods. And without solid foods, his recovery simply wouldn't occur. So one day, in an act of great love, his brother whispered into his ear, "I tell you what, Kev, a cocktail weenie in bar-b-que sauce sure would taste good right now!" Within two weeks, Kevin was on a solid food diet and within three weeks his brother walked in with a plate of those weenies.
"We have all known," writes UU minister and poet Victoria Safford, "dead hope, dead courage, dead caring, dead will, dead faith, dead vision, dead power, deep winter, and we have felt, perhaps when we least expected to feel anything at all, our own slow blood stir in the vein like maple sap, and something very small and tight within begin to swell and open up."
Again, friends, it happens slowly and in ways that are hard to notice. Not all at once in easy-to-recognize miraculous moments.
And so in the end my message about resurrection is this:
Not the traditional "Have faith and believe," but rather: Be gentle with yourselves and keep your eyes and hearts open. There is a love built into the fabric of life that sneaks into our days and continually offers us little graces that feel as normal as new sheets, but that have the power to bring us back to life. Our job is simply to notice them and allow them to wash over us.
It's not strictly speaking an Easter story, but I still think it counts. A friend tells me she and her choir went caroling door to door last Christmas and as they sung, an elderly man stepped out alone into his doorway, and within moments began to sob. He kept crying after they stopped and no one knew exactly what to do. They all stood in silence. After a few moments, the man looked up and explained that his wife of over 50 years had died earlier in the month and it had been weeks since he felt like leaving the house. He said their singing made him want to get up and come outside. "You all have no idea how much this means," he said, "how important it is." And then he asked them if they'd sing again, just one more time.
Be gentle with yourself friends, resurrection is something that happens slowly, comes to us in subtle ways and is never complete. Our task is simply to notice and let it wash over us when it comes.
So be it. Amen.
return to main page