March 27, 2016

Kristina Spaude and Matt Alspaugh

Kristina Spaude – Redemption in All Things

My grandfather – my father’s father – always seemed to me a fairly gruff man, even when he was being kind and gentle. In his eulogy, my cousin described him as being like a steel-coated marshmallow. I think I would have called him a steel-wool-coated marshmallow. Even his voice was always scruffy, throaty, unclear. The older he got, with health issues getting worse, the more gruff he seemed to me. In his later years, I was still working at CVS, and when our family visited, he’d always, always, always ask me why the store he went to didn’t have the items on sale in stock, why he could never find them. I’d tried to answer once or twice but then it just seemed silly. This was usually the center of the one-on-one interactions that we’d have, and I could never wait for them to be over. I really wanted to love my grandfather, and I did, but there were plenty of times when I thought he really didn’t make it so easy.

I was 29 when he died. In my cousin’s eulogy, he shared some warm memories of our grandfather, and I wondered a lot about the man that he’d known, maybe I had been too harsh. I’m sure there were some family dynamics playing out – my father had had a strained relationship with his father and that likely clouded my experience.

My dad called me one day and said that while he’d been at my grandparents’ helping my grandma and aunts go through my grandfather’s things, he’d come across an envelope or box that had a small number of papers and things in it – his draft papers, his first driver’s license – things that wouldn’t have had any significance to anyone else. My dad said, “There was one picture in with those papers. It’s a picture of you on the day you were born.”

I don’t remember what I said to my dad but it was probably something brilliant like, “Wow.” I probably cried. It was completely unexpected and even now when I think about it I’m just speechless. I was not my grandparents’ first grandchild, although I was their first granddaughter. It occurred to me when my father told me about the picture that all those times when my grandfather would complain about CVS – over and over, every visit, for minutes at a time – that, in his way – his questionable and deeply frustrating way – that he had probably been trying to find a way to connect. I was angry, disappointed, sad – about the lost opportunities and for all the frustration we must have both experienced.

And I felt guilty that I hadn’t figured this out sooner. How could I have missed this? It seemed so obvious later. I felt ashamed. I still feel my failure. I failed him. Of course, we failed each other is more the truth. Even now, it still hurts. What I had known to be true was no longer the truth.

In that phone call, I was heart-broken-open. In that phone call, I was offered a possibility of something new. I sensed a redemption I’d not hoped for. Redemption, to me, is turning toward each other, giving ourselves to each other, committing and covenanting to our need to be in relationship with one another. We are liberated when we are redeemed. I had been offered the possibility of loving more fully.

“Redemption in all things” is a phrase that has been repeating in my head for weeks. Watching the news, the state of our political system right now, bad things happening everywhere – terrorism, racism, sexism, transphobia, and on and on. People doing questionable, heinous, sad, oppressive, and hateful things. And yet, for me, my Universalist heart has to believe that if nothing else, when we learn from and confront these things and deal with them, however unpleasant they may be – they offer us lessons. When people act out, they’re looking for something, trying to connect, to tell us something about themselves. They teach us and when we struggle with it, we are offered the possibility of a new way, of something new.

Our acts as individuals represent not only how we are with each other – with our neighbor, one-to-one – but how we are with our neighbors, plural. It’s the individual acts taken collectively that mean something greater, something in community.

Between the Sabbaths, the women prepared the oils and spices for the anointing of Jesus’ body. He had died an excruciatingly painful and highly political death, and his followers were scared.

Women, in deep mourning and undoubtedly still in shock, went through the motions of preparing for this sacred ritual. I imagine them working together, carefully, remembering, lamenting, honoring. I imagine their sadness, frustration, anger, maybe despair; I imagine their emptiness, numbness, lostness – that feeling of having the rug pulled out from below your feet, feeling helpless and without direction and falling and flailing. Wavering between the comfort of each other and the despair of great loss. Really, how could they expect a miracle?[1] To return from the dead is more than they knew to hope for. None of them knew the promise that we know of Easter.

They had themselves, and considering the sense of utter despair among the apostles and the disciples, I imagine there wasn’t a lot of hope. And still, the women were doing what they must do. And despite all the ache they were feeling, they continue to love. Their hearts went on beating, as if they were made for precisely that, that the remedy for their hearts breaking was to love still.[2]

The women who discovered the empty tomb knew redemption and were saved – not because they lived by the laws or spoke a creed, but because they did the hardest and most profound thing we can do – they dared to and risked loving again, loving still.² At the empty tomb, they were confronted with the last thing they expected to find: possibility. The possibility of something greater. The possibility of life after death, survival after the grave.[3] They knew then more than ever how love reaches through all time and space and defies death in the way only it can. The possibility of miracles beyond their dreams.

The possibility that the way we are together, one to another and each with all, that is the promise, that when we rise,¹ we roll back the stone, again and again,¹ and marvel,^2,3 blessing the world with our lives,² offering to others the love that we have come to know ‘will not ever let us go,’³ ‘a blessing we cannot begin to fathom but will save us nonetheless.’² It took us a while, but we finally figured it out.¹ We are the resurrection and the life.¹

[1] Quotes from or references to Victoria Weinstein’s “Being the Resurrection”

[2] Quotes from or references to Jan Richardson’s “A Blessing for the Brokenhearted”

[3] Quotes from or references to Barbara Pescan’s “Who Are We at Easter?”

 

Matt Alspaugh – Finding an Alternative Story

Ambivalence about Easter

Many of us Unitarian Universalists have a deep ambivalence about Easter. One the one hand, we love the pomp, the beauty. We have our Easter lilies, many of you dressed up, we pull out the stops, so to speak, on the old organ, and on our music in general. Some of you even long for someone — someone else — to revive the old, admittedly sexist, tradition of the men’s Easter pancake breakfast.

On the other hand, we don’t want to hear about Jesus all that much, most of us. We certainly don’t want to delve into that miracle of miracles, the resurrection. We’d much rather hear about the life of Jesus, if anything. And for some of us, well, can we just skip the Jesus part and stay with bunnies and chicks and the return of spring? For most other churches this is the holiest of days and weeks, and they make a big deal of it, while we muddle by with our mixed feelings about Easter.

Theodore Parker

I trace the source of this ambivalence to one man: Rev. Theodore Parker, and to one date: January 23rd, 1843. [1]

In the early years of the Unitarian movement, Unitarianism was a solidly Christian faith. But Theodore Parker set out the radical idea that the literal words of the Bible do not reflect the truth. Instead that truth was found in the essence of Jesus’ life and teachings.

In particular, Parker rejected the supernatural stories in the Bible, including the miracle of the physical resurrection of Christ. As Parker put it, of these miracles, “some were clearly impossible, others ridiculous, and a few were wicked.”[2] His views were highly controversial, and — let’s face it — embarrassing to other Unitarian ministers.

So Parker was invited to a meeting of the Boston Unitarian ministers on that January evening in 1843, and after a cordial spot of tea, a three hour debate over finer points of Christian theology ensued. Some ministers pushed Parker to resign, but he stood his ground. Finally the debate turned personal, and some of these ministers actually started saying nice, polite things about Parker. He was not expecting this, and ran from the room in tears.

During the debate, Parker had told the ministers point blank, “If [I] did them an injury they had the remedy in their hands, and could pass a vote of expulsion at any time.”[3] But they didn’t. They couldn’t bring themselves to kick him out, to excommunicate him.
As historian Gary Dorrien put it,

“The first Unitarian heresy trial was over. It confirmed that the Unitarians were shunners, not excommunicators. The Unitarian leaders were acutely aware that they were vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy…. They could not invoke a standard of right belief for Unitarian Christianity without denying their opposition to orthodox creeds.”[4]

Over time, Theodore Parker became recognized as one of the greatest Unitarian theologians, ever.

And over time, the Unitarians left the miracles of the Bible behind. The miracles were seen as parable, as metaphor, as stories that explained deeper, enduring truths. And gradually, the Unitarians reached out to other scripture texts beyond the Bible, finding wisdom teaching in other sources, ancient and modern.

Ode to Solomon

In that vein, I want to touch briefly on that most peculiar text we read, “The Ode of Solomon”[5]. This text was written in an early Christian community probably in Syria a century after Jesus’ death. This is one of many books written by early Christian writers that was excluded from the New Testament.

I include this text here because it provides quite a different recounting of the Resurrection than the stories in the Gospels. In this story, the resurrected Christ descends into hell, and frees the dead, restoring them to life.

Now, it’s important to remember that the Jewish idea of hell, or Sheol, was the underworld destination for everyone. No one escaped Sheol. But here we have the radical idea that Christ goes down and saves everyone, starting with the dead, in chains in the darkness of Sheol, and by extension, the living, who would have otherwise been destined to Sheol upon their deaths.

Now I don’t know about you, but this sounds mighty Universalist to me! Everyone gets saved, no exceptions. These early Christians came to the spiritual conclusion that the resurrection was universal, communal, for everyone.

This Ode focuses not so much on a risen Christ returning to meet up with a handful of his disciples and plan some future second coming. It focuses instead on universal salvation, creating a new world bounded only by love and hope. It is an amazing alternative story for Easter.

Change the Story, Change the Future

I just read David Korten’s new book, “Change the Story, Change the Future.” This environmental writer lays out two competing sacred stories articulating our most fundamental values. He believes we need to turn from the current dominant story to a new, alternative story. I paraphrase his words:

In the dominant story, the Sacred Money and Markets story, money, wealth, and material consumption are the key to happiness. Competition is king, may the best man win, and woe to the losers, for they are lazy, stupid, and worthless. Woe to the earth, for it is merely to be consumed. [6]

In the alternate story, the Sacred Life and Living Earth story, humans are born of and nurtured by a Living Earth. Real wealth is living wealth, and life only exists in community. We all do best when we care for everyone, including the Living Earth. Environmental sustainability, economic justice and a living democracy are inseparable. We have all of them, or we have none of them. [7]

I see a parallel between Korten’s two stories, and two versions of the Easter story:

In the orthodox version of the Christian story, we are merely individual bystanders in a great heroic story of Christ’s death and resurrection. Our role quite passive, for we, individually, need only do one thing — accept Christ as our Savior. If we repent, the story goes, God will shed his grace on thee, and the outward signs of blessing will be manifest on us in prosperity and good fortune. Each of us is on our own, in this story.

But in the alternative story, we flip the script, and offer up that Universalist telling, in which Jesus still dies, but his death instead offers a hopeful message that we can all be saved, every one of us. Our salvation comes when we claim Jesus’ radical teachings for our own, in “raging for righteousness in his insistent voice”. Our salvation comes in feeding the hungry — and ending hunger; in freeing the oppressed — and ending oppression, in bringing peace and healing to the Earth. Our salvation comes only when we work together. Salvation is not individual, it is communal. Salvation is not of the future, it is in the present.

May we create, then, an alternative story of Easter, a story of Universal salvation, where we work together, in service of the Sacred Life and the Living Earth. In this story may we be claimed by a love for each other, for the Earth and all its creatures. May this be a story of communal resurrection, of life that maketh all things new. For together, and only together, we are the resurrection and the life.

Notes:

1. John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, 1864, p. 188

2. Gary Dorrien, “Imagining Progressive Religion”, p. 80

3. Weiss, p. 193

4. Dorrien. p. 90

5. Hal Taussig, “A The New New Testament”, p. 430.

6. David Korten, “Change the Story, Change the Future” pp. 23-24

7. Korten, pp. 30-31