Unitarian Universalist Meeting of
“Follow Me Home”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
Follow Me Home
Each
Easter I follow the ancient tradition of beginning this sermon with a joke –
for today is a day of Joy. (Of course, I
can’t help but tell a morbid joke.)
“Three friends die in a car
accident, and they go to an orientation in heaven. They are all asked, “When you are in your
casket and friends and family are mourning you, what would you like to hear
them say about you?”
The
first one says, “I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor in my
time and that I loved my family.”
The
second one says, “I would like to hear that I was a wonderful spouse and a
school teacher who made a huge difference in the lives of our children for
tomorrow.”
The
last one replies, “I would like to hear them say, ‘Look, Terry’s moving’!!”
We
don’t want to die. No – whatever our
faith is, we would rather stay right here – not the object of the conversation,
but part of it, and engaged in love and meaning.
Easter
is the most meaningful, holy day of Christianity. Most of the time when we
talk about Easter we focus on death and life, re-birth and being raised to new
life. And most of the time, we
overlook an amazing truth at the center of this great event.
If you are a Biblical
literalist, you might think it’s about a dead body being re-animated. And by Biblical literalist, I’m not talking
about fundamentalists or any Christians ‘out there’ – some of them are Biblical
literalists – but I mean the people who reject something in the Bible because
they take it literally and decide it is not rational. Unitarian Universalists
tend to be very rational, a good thing, and many of us are at least tempted to
be Biblical literalists.
The
Bible is not rational; it is poetry. The
Bible is not history; it is faith. The
Easter story is not about a dead body being re-animated, which isn’t all that
exciting anyway – it happens regularly in our modern hospitals. My vitals plummeted in a hospital over 20 years
ago, and I entered the process of dying, only to be wrestled back – it’s
marvelous, but it’s not the center of faith.
I don’t see anybody starting a religion about me – there’s no Kathianity. Being
brought back from death is not enough. People
are always hearing something to the effect, “Look, Terry’s moving, Bob’s
breathing again, Pat’s pulled through!”
There
are many ancient stories of people being brought back from death, the brink of
death, in other religious scriptures, and even other stories in the Christian
scriptures – people are brought back from death and dying by Jesus, by the disciples,
by shamans of all stripes. My mother
helped bring me back from that ultimate leaving which I knew I was beginning,
and she also kept my brother and grandfather around far longer than seemed at
all possible – she was a large force.
Large spirits do not take no for an answer, do not take death for an
answer, and go the extra distance with you until the rest of the world
realizes, “Look, Terry’s moving; Kathy’s back; she will live, alleluia!
The Easter story is the beginning of the Christian faith, and it goes like this: Jesus was a large spirit, so enormous that people followed him and hoped that he could save their lives from meaninglessness, and redeem the brokenness of their world. Then he was betrayed and tortured. He died. His followers thought that was the end of the story. They were frightened and brokenhearted. Some of them hid. A few went to tend his dead body. And then a miracle happened. (No, not that miracle.)
Stay with me, it’s still not about a re-animated dead body – that’s not the Good News. Some have faith in a physical resurrection, and I don’t dispute that faith, but a different miracle is at the heart of the Christian story.
Let’s go back to the Gospel of Mark for the clues. This is the oldest gospel, by quite a bit, and the part we heard was the end of the gospel. Much later on, a few more verses were added, but this is the oldest ending we have of the Christian story. Do you remember how it ends? …. The women fled in terror and amazement, and didn’t tell anyone, “for they were afraid.” “For they were afraid”? That’s not an ending.
It’s not an ending, but it is a beginning. That’s the first clue to the miracle. Like most folks, Jesus’ followers are messed-up, don’t handle catastrophe and death very well, and even when amazed by glory, let fear have the upper hand, at least at first.
Do you know that
if you visit
Who was this young man? He seems like a vision. He’s never explained and he doesn’t need to be – this is a story of faith, not a historical account. This visionary young man tells them everything they need to know, everything the early community of faith needed to know. He names their fear and tries to reassure them. He acknowledges they are looking for Jesus of Nazareth – not the Messiah, not the Christ – they are looking for the man they have known and loved and lost. He tells them, “He has been raised; he is not here.”
At the end of the Christian story, a vision tells the followers that Jesus is not in the tomb – the tomb is empty. Whenever someone we know dies, whom we mourn deeply and crave, that person is not at the cemetery, even if the body is six feet under. He is not here. Don’t go looking for the one you mourn in the place you last saw him or her. Even the body six feet under or in a burial cave will no longer be there in a few years. He is not here. Your grief is here, but he is not here.
He is raised. Some of you have heard me talk about the word “raised” before. This Greek word in the Christian scriptures does not mean to re-animate a body, does not mean that a physical body comes back to life. Being raised up is the expression most used in the oldest scriptures about what happened to Jesus when he died, and it means rising up to a higher state, and is used to imply that something, the best something of life, continues after death, is raised up. The scripture tells that they did not experience the old, perishable body of Jesus. Even the accounts added decades later of a physical experience of the Risen Jesus make it clear that this Real Presence was different from Jesus before death, and from any other body.
The story that the
early Christians heard was that they don’t have to go to the tomb, to the
cemetery, to find Jesus, that his raised up spirit is
in a different place. Where is this
raised up Jesus? Here comes the third
clue. The vision says that Jesus is
going ahead of them to
Do any of you know the old labor organizing song, “Joe Hill”? It goes like this, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me. Says I ‘But Joe, you’re 10 years dead.’ ‘I never died,’ says he. ‘I never died,’ says he.” And the song goes on to explain that guns cannot kill a man, that Joe Hill has gone on to organize, and is by the side of all workers who strike and organize. The song continues, “Where workers stand up for their rights, it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.”
Ten years ago, I heard “Joe Hill” sung at the funeral of a gay man who died of AIDS. The woman who burst spontaneously into this song was old enough to have heard it sung when it first came out, and she sang with gusto, punctuating the verses with her cane, as though she were standing up for justice right then. At the time, I thought that this old union organizer had made a strange choice for the funeral of this young Latino man, but actually, she sang the truth – he didn’t die, not Joe Hill, and not Leonel. And the struggle for justice hadn’t died either, whether for miner’s rights, or for the rights of those stricken with AIDS.
Whoever dies is
raised up in the lives of those who are left behind. Whoever dies and has a large spirit is a
force for years to come in the world.
You all may believe differently about life beyond life – I believe that
a part of me, my soul, does continue after death and does go home to God – but
you may not believe that. The early
disciples probably did not believe that their souls continued after death –
they were Jews at a time when that would have been an unusual belief. They believed that at the end time, they had
a chance of coming back - a restored
What the disciples
experienced was that Jesus was raised up among them and they called this
miracle the Body of Christ – and they were the Body of Christ. The Church was the raised-up Jesus. They knew that his spirit continued and that
they could still follow this large soul, this so-close-to-God being that they
called him the Son of God – he called himself the Son of Man, or in other
words, an everyday person. Jesus was
bigger than Joe Hill or any prophet who has ever returned in the spirit to a
people; Jesus was bigger than anyone’s dead father or mother in the ability to
return to folks personally. They
experienced his Real Presence among them.
Jesus was so large to his followers that he could go on and on for them,
and they could find him in their everyday lives, at home, in
What did the gospel, good news story tell the followers of Jesus? The Gospel of Mark said that even though they were messed up, dejected, and scared, (in other words, normal), that first clue, they could begin again, and again, and again, in hope. The story said that Jesus is not in the dead body, the missing body, the empty tomb, or any other place that reeks of our brokenness – the second clue. He is not here. His spirit is raised. Death and evil do not have the final power – love and life and spirit do.
And as for the third clue – it is the Christian map, the Way, and it’s there at the end of the Gospel of Mark. Go, follow Jesus, follow him home and he will be with you.
For as long as Christianity has been around, a person has been known as a Christian because they follow Jesus, or follow the Gospel, or follow the Way, or follow Jesus’ teachings.
The amazing miracle that
happened after Jesus died was that his followers, his scared, cowering
followers, still followed him. They
found that the raised up Jesus, whom they called Christ – which means ‘Anointed
One’ – was still saving their lives from
meaninglessness, and still redeeming the brokenness of their world, only now it
was them – they were the Body of Christ.
This Church, this Body, knew that evil and death were conquered by love
and life, and that if they followed Jesus, the Way of Jesus, then they were the Risen Christ, and that made them unbelievably
powerful and free. The world hasn’t been
the same since.
This is what I believe the
Gospel of Mark meant to the early followers of Jesus. They felt he was calling to them, “Follow me
home. You will find me in your ordinary
lives. You will be raised up. You will be at home with yourselves and the
world.”
The center of the Christian
story is this: if you follow the Way of
love and life, then you will be raised up, freed, and ready to redeem the world
from brokenness. The miracle continues
as lives are transformed. This is one of
the ways home. Jesus’ Way is not the
only way home, but it is a spacious way.
I want to leave you with the
thought of Albert Schweitzer, who was a Unitarian and a Lutheran. He wrote that Jesus, “comes to us as One
unknown” just as he did “of old, by the lake side” and he says to us also, “Follow
… me!” and this means to do whatever is needed today, and in that hard work, we
will know the fellowship of Jesus and experience his Spirit for ourselves.
Happy Easter!
Pastoral Prayer
Holy Spirit, whose divine presence resounds everywhere in the interdependent web of all existence, especially in the eternal re-birth of life and the springtime return of light, bless our spirits as we gather here today. May we be grounded in Faith, enlivened by Hope, and sustained with Love.
Beloved, it has been a difficult winter for many in this community who have faced physical, mental and emotional challenges, who have suffered, who still suffer. May their lives be made whole, hale and free. We are grateful to travel this journey together in a community of caring and compassion – open our hearts and hands even wider, that we may embrace here the Beloved Belonging.
O Wisdom, our comfort can never be
complete while those beyond our community live in misery, enduring warfare in
their neighborhoods, knowing the bitter herbs of poverty, the salty tears of
economic slavery, and the unleavened lives expelled in fearful flight. We pray for liberation for all our brothers
and sisters, but especially for the exiles of the
Source of Joy, we follow you in all
thy ways of goodness. On this holy day,
may renewal be born in all our lives. May our spirits be raised up in Transforming Joy. Alleluia,
alleluia!