Rev. Nancy D. Dean

March 6, 2005

Celebrating You, Celebrating Me

Today’s sermon is offered to you courtesy of Ginger Stein, a member here, who bought a sermon topic at our Service Auction last January. Many of us here will understand the depth of emotion and the spiritual significance of this topic, for Ginger and Jeff Stein, especially those of us who have been here for them during the transitions that they have gone through with their younger child, Nathaniel.

This Unitarian Universalist faith of ours is an ethics-based religion, and we are guided by our Seven Principles (always printed on the backs of your orders of service). These are the ethical or moral precepts that we would be guided by, but we believe also that they are the ethical principles that all free societies would be guided by.

All the Principles are preceded by the line that states that we affirm and promote, which is more significant that to just say these are the Principles. To affirm is to say yes, this is my belief; to promote is to carry that belief in our lives and into the world.

So we affirm and promote in the First Principle respect for the worth and dignity of each person. That is a tall order, but it is where one should start with every person, unless we are to be ruled by bias or prejudice. Which is not to say that every person will be able to maintain our respect, if, for instance, they themselves violate our ethical principles. Yet, we still maintain that there is a basic dignity owed to every person, regardless, which is why the acts of humiliation and abuse at the Abu Graib prison, for example, were so objectionable to people around the world. Put the suspected terrorists in jail, interrogate, use some forceful methods, all this could be accepted, but to decimate any human being’s dignity is something highly distasteful to most decent human beings.

So this sermon today is in large measure about examining our understanding, our deep understanding, of the First Principle and the Third Principle, which is about acceptance of one another; both always easier to say than to do, which is why they are particularly important.

In the excerpts from article by George Hagen in this morning’s reading, he writes about accepting a son who is different; a son who likes dolls, dressing up, doing things and behaving in a way that most people associate with being feminine; or as our great social commentator Arnold Schwarzenegger would put it “girlie” things. By some great blessing for his son, George and his wife, who do worry about the differences they see in their son--and more importantly the differences they see for him-but, in spite of their concerns, they are able to love him anyway, to celebrate him for the wonderful little boy he is, and not the little boy they might have wanted or wished him to be. This is a too rare quality in parents, this ability to accept our children for who they are, and not what we would prefer them to be.

It is worthwhile to remember the times we have fallen short of our parents’ expectations, and whether we could have done any differently and still been true to our own souls.

Friday night my husband and I went to the Philadelphia Art Museum to see the Salvador Dali exhibition; a wonderful retrospective of work of this most famous of the surrealist painters. (We all have seen the melting clock picture, his most famous.) Dali was thrown out of his autocratic father’s house as a young man because this father did not approve of the subject matter or style of his son’s painting. This, despite the fact that even as a teenager, Dali was already recognized by the great art teachers of Spain as brilliant, a painter of incredible gifts. My breath was taken away by the depth and breadth of his talent.

Yet, it is clear in the paintings, as well as his biography, that the lack of his father’s acceptance set up a life long set of issues and tensions that are reflected frequently in Dali’s work, as well as in his personal relationships with his wife and others.

Dali was what anyone would call a flamboyant character; I recall seeing him on television programs in the 1960s in his famous cape with that extraordinary mustache. He seemed determined to let the world know that he liked being Dali, as is clear from one of his more famous quotes:

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy - the joy of being Salvador Dalí - and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things [is] this Salvador Dalí . . . going to accomplish today?

We find this amusing today, but somehow I feel confident that it took many years of saying this to himself over and over again before he ever said it out loud for others. There are few of us who do not long to be accepted by our parents, especially as in Dali’s case, when the parent is very much loved and admired. But it is not much of a stretch to see that a great deal of the anguish in Dali’s paintings relate to the anguish he felt over his being so different from what his father wanted of him and what one’s culture or society tends to demand of us; that is, conformity. Some people just don’t conform that well.

How very different for George Hagen’s son. For, above all, that boy knows that he is loved by his father and mother, even if the culture does not approve him. But then, most of the great people of history experienced this sort of disapproval, which may tell us that we are dooming our children to mediocrity when we expect them to conform to society’s norms instead of following their own hearts, or as Joseph Campbell termed it, following their bliss.

Dr. Karl Menninger, of the famous Menninger Mental Health Clinic, in Kansas, whose wisdom has often been a source of inspiration to many people, including me, said this profound thing about love: Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it

When we talk about respecting one another, about individual dignity, or acceptance of one another, we are really talking about love. And while we may easily recognize the worth of love to ourselves-after all we all like to feel loved-we may not so readily understand the worth of love we give to others. That in loving each other, everyone benefits; indeed, all of our society benefits when there is more love happening. Love cures people, both those who love and those who are loved. Love is an improving, enabling, healthy, civilizing force of nature. It is no accident that God is called Love; so reciprocally, Love is God.

Love is that broad term, inclusive term, of acceptance, understanding, and celebrating others that covers everything from a simple smile or a simple kindness we give to someone, to the great passion, to the highest form of love which is respect.

To respect and be respected is the ultimate goal of all spirituality; to love and be loved is to say, I am celebrating the best in you and celebrating the best in me.

The crux of this celebrating of you, and celebrating me, comes in the form of the most damaging thing in the world, the negative facet of the human ego--the self-centered self, we might call it. Of course, we need a healthy ego, but this negative ego, is that which creates so much that is ugly, destructive, and evil in the world. For that kind of ego is solely about power and control over others. When Dali’s father kicked his son out for being radical painter (even as parents kick children out of the home for being gay, or becoming part a different religion, or any number of things), it was about exercising power and control. Love is always in a constant struggle with that negative aspect of ego.

Rodney Dangerfield, who died recently, always the self-deprecating comic, talked about how he never got any respect, and once quipped:

When I was a kid I got no respect. When my parents got divorced there was a custody fight over me ... and no one showed up.

We can laugh at Rodney Dangerfield’s comedy, but remember comedy all too clearly lifts up the tragic in society. For many children, and for many adult children, the parents don’t show up when it comes to respect. Don’t show up when it comes to acceptance and love.

There is not a parent among us who has not had high hopes and dreams for their children. That is natural. Not a one of us who has held our infant son or daughter and not had visions of greatness for them. Naturally, as well, those visions are our particular visions, what we would have hoped and dreamed for ourselves, what we would have liked that our parents had nurtured in us; perforce it is an ego-centric vision.

I have a relative who is determined to make his son a baseball legend. The boy is still in elementary school, and quite an athlete by all accounts, but I worry that there is a clash of visions on the horizon. When I hear his father talk about his son, what he expects of him, and see how hard he is on the boy when he does not perform up to his dad’s expectations, I fear for them both.

The aspect of this that is particularly sad is that as parents we can only know only little about who our children have the potential or probability to become as adults. Our vision is limited. Somehow, one feels that Salvador Dali’s father would have been proud of his son’s success, even if he was not proud of his art. Yet, the two cannot in reality be separated. There is so much we do not even have in our conceptual abilities, and we limit our children to our meager knowledge, unless-I repeat unless-we can give them wings to fly beyond us, to go places we could not have imagined. That is really the best work of parents, to give them what we have, then to send them out to learn from others and for themselves.

Part of what limits our ability to accept our own children’s differences, and the differences we see in others, is our own fear. We are afraid of what we do not understand. Most often, fear comes from our ignorance as much as from our experience of any real dangers of the world around us.

To quote Menninger again, he said:

The voice of intelligence ... is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

I am not sanguine about how difficult it is for us to live at the level of loving kindness that is always accepting, respectful, and understanding-especially when it comes to our own children. One of the things that guided me in my own struggles to raise my children in the way they should go (as the Hebrew scriptures teaches), was a quote I had stuck on my refrigerator for years: Raising children is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

There is also the issue of change to be considered. For if we are to be truly accepting, truly respect the worth and dignity of others, then it probably means we, that you and I, will have to change. That is always a struggle. Even people who have to fight for recognition, like Salvador Dali, we often find set up their own biases and prejudices against others.

If I am to be the person I preach, even I will be often tested Save for those rare people we call saints, all of us find that we have walls to climb of our own bias and prejudice. Sometimes we are shamed by the recognition, but just as often we rationalize them. But, what we are really saying is: I will go this far and no further.

We human beings are really most beautiful for our diversity, our differences, but it is often hard to appreciate that fact. I frequently have been grateful for growing up in the rural west where practically everyone was a WASP(a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), in a highly conforming population, for it taught me that people are just as narrow, biased, bigoted in places where there is little relative difference. I feel absolutely certain that if Jerry Falwell were to wake up in a Neverland of nothing but Jerry Falwell clones, the sun would not have gone down before they would have set up a whole class of Falwells to despise and ridicule.

One of the things that happens in learning to stretch ourselves in our ability to accept others for who they are, especially when it is frightening to us, is that often we derive an unexpected blessing from that reaching beyond our ready grasp. Ginger Stein said that she found a deep well of compassion in herself that she might never have tapped had she not had to deal with such a profound test of acceptance in her own family.

Ginger, like George Hagen, had a child who did not conform to society’s norm. A child, indeed a brilliant child, who had her own truth that she could not deny, which was that while all the people around saw a girl, inside lived a boy. As an adult, that boy could be manifest, could be freed, and as many of us who have met Nathaniel know, he is an incredibly articulate and wonderful young man. He is also something many of us are not, he is courageous. He is in many ways a hero.

I often get aggravated with the way the word hero is so casually thrown around these days. To be a hero is to be extraordinary. Every person who is in the military is not a hero, every person who is a fireman is not a hero. A hero is someone who goes beyond the expected, who does something above and beyond the call of duty, someone who risks something significantly more than most would.

All around us are people who challenge our ability to love. As I look down the tube of history, I see how far we, who are humanity, have come in accepting so many more, and so much more than ever before, but even so, we are still in the process of becoming a truly civilized people.

Each generation seems to either forward this process of civilization, or stall it, and occasionally take it backward like the Taliban did in Afghanistan. It seems to me that we in this country hold up a banner of freedom, for some people it is for freedom and democracy in the Middle East, yet many of the people who promote that freedom would also deny it to whole groups of our own citizens. Yet, I believe in that role for our country, of carrying forward our understanding of freedom. Every one of us deserves to be free.

I wonder how many of you can think of a kind of freedom that might have been denied to you had you not resisted. I have spoken often from this pulpit, that the wide circle of my family of origin do not believe anyone should be any but their own religion and that women should not be ministers-just to name two of their many biases. I had to step outside that circle in order to become my own person, to be free to be my own true self. That is a painful thing for anyone to have to do, but we will do it to be free.

So, freedom is not just some ideal of democracy for some nations, but a reality that should be for each of us. If we truly celebrate each other, then we could no more deny that freedom to another person than deny it for ourselves.

Paul of the New Testament often irritates me, but he did write one of the most beautiful statements on love ever compose to his followers in the city of Corinth, hence the name of the book Corinthians, in which he laid out so wonderfully what love looks like to this group who were bickering amongst themselves about what was right and wrong about their particular community of Christians (1Cor 13:1-13):

1: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2: And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3: If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

So Paul is saying: I can have great gifts, do great things, know wondrous things, have a visible religion that looks great, but if I don’t have love in me, none of it matters. Then he talks about what love should look like:

4: Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
5: it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6: it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
7: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Here Paul is teaching us the virtues of love which are tolerance and acceptance, which also means we can never find joy in maliciously saying I told you so, or only loving when it is convenient and easy. Then he says:

8: Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
9: For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
10: but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
11: When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
12: For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
13: So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Paul concludes by saying he knows is knowledge is insufficient, that there is so much none of us can know, and that children are very limited and concrete in their thinking, but when we grow up we come to see that we only ever see a small part of the whole picture. Paul believed in an all knowing, loving God who would complete human knowledge, but we who do not share that belief can still recognize the truth that we are from knowing all that we need to know to judge absolutely others and the world. Finally, he states that while all these other things are important and are needed to sustain us, faith and hope and love, love is the greatest of all human gifts.

The greatest gift we have to give to another human being, especially to our children (who are after all separate and unique human beings) is to give them respect, to treat them with dignity, to believe in their right to be free.

This is what we claim as foundational in our free faith, and though it will test us right and left, top and bottom, through and through, it is the message of faith that we are called to proclaim.

So be it.

March 13, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

March 13, 2005

Honoring Einstein: God is Science

In the past few years we have been hearing a great deal from our brothers and sisters in the more conservative wing of Christianity, often termed the religious right, usually meaning that they are the evangelical and/or fundamental Christian groups who tend to the belief that there is only one right relationship to have with God. Often, the God they define tends to be a God that for many of us lacks both compassion and logic. Naturally, this does not apply to all Christians, nor I suspect even to all in the religious right wing, but it certainly applies to most of the leadership of the groups that make up this faction of Christianity.

It was many months ago, after hearing one such of the evangelical fundamentalist preachers state that even Einstein believed in God, that prompted me to preach on Einstein today. Today, since this Sunday is closest to Einstein’s birthday, March 14, 1879, 126 years ago; and this year celebrates the 100th anniversary of the development of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity which describes the motion of particles moving at close to the speed of light. In fact, it gives the correct laws of motion for any particle.

I was a bit put out that this preacher had the gumption (or gall) to couple his condemning, sin-focused God with the Jewish scientist Albert Einstein. But I have noted this trend is on the increase, this trend to use three or four word phrases lifted from scientific literature, speeches, etc, to bolster what by any real understanding of science can only be very shaky logic, not to mention frequently wholesale distortion. All in the effort to couple science with religion so as to give greater support to what can only be understood as a matter of faith. The language of creation science is a part of this trend. But even the name creation science gives the lie to the term, for which story of creation do they mean? After all, there are dozens of creation stories. I rather like the one from the Algonquin tribes that tell of the earth being born on the back of a turtle.

Religion does not need science, for religion is about faith in the great mystery and meaning of human existence. And science does not need religion, at least not any one variety of religion, though science does need the ethics and morals which human beings have as creatures of community.

Yet, this misuse of Einstein’s statements did give rise to the need in me to know precisely what Einstein did have to say about God, and what kind of picture or understanding of God that he was talking about when he did mention the word God.

Much of what I discovered comes from the work Einstein: The Life and Times, by Ronald W. Clark. Therein Einstein is quoted as saying:

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

Here Einstein was setting forth his basic precept that we live with mystery about the source, which he called an invisible piper; but he was speaking metaphorically about this mystery, not saying the invisible piper is the Christian right wing’s understanding of God. It was this passage that I heard used to state that Einstein believed in God. Einstein’s God as the conservative preacher was saying, and would have his hearers believe, was the same as the preacher’s God. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What is true is that Einstein, a non-practicing, cultural Jew, used the term God for mystery, pure and simple. And, like the Jewish culture from which he came, Einstein understood the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, that Christians call the Old Testament, as metaphorically derived, and for the most part to be understood metaphorically. God in Hebrew is neither male nor female, but spirit, as I use the phrase Spirit of Life.

On April 24, 1921, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue, New York, famously asked Einstein if he believed in God, and Einstein replied:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

Which leads us to ask, who or what was Spinoza’s God? Spinoza was the 17th Century Spanish philosopher, also of Jewish birth, credited with furthering rationalism in the period known as the Enlightenment. Spinoza wrote at the very beginning of his Ethica:

By God I mean a being absolutely infinite-that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality. [and] Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived

Like many who had gone before him, notably the Spaniard Michael Servetus, our Unitarian spiritual founder, who was burned at the stake by Calvinists for heresy (though they themselves were heretics as well), Spinoza suffered persecution for his writings, and they were banned in various places, like England, for a time. So the fact the Einstein stated categorically that he believed in Spinoza’s God, he was saying that he believed in a rationalist understanding of God as some Ultimate Reality, as the 20th Century theologian Paul Tillich termed God.

As with many of us Unitarians, Einstein was not afraid of the term God. There is no single, unquestionable understanding of the being or existence of God. God, as you so often hear me say, cannot be put in a box. Anyone who claims they know what/who/how God is, is claiming that which they can only hope or wish for, for there is no proof that cannot be questioned. Unlike, for example, our need to drink water or eat, which no one can deny. We can prove, indeed it has been proven manifold times that human beings die without water or food. God, on the other hand, is something we either believe exists, or we consider that it is possible God exists, or we do not to believe God exists. All these beliefs sit comfortably side by side in this sanctuary at this moment.

I often wish a God existed that would banish all pain and suffering from the world; or at least banish all the pain and suffering that is inflicted on the young, the innocent, the poor through no fault of their own. But, for me at least, this is a wish, not anything I believe, nor would ever be able to prove if I did believe it. Einstein would no doubt have been as horrified as any of us here this morning to hear someone say that any death was directly caused by God-he would find that ludicrous. For that would make God a monster. And, equally ludicrous, is to hear as we often do on a news report where a whole town or neighborhood has been laid waste by some natural disaster, to hear the lone survivor say that God saved them. That means God killed all the others; again, such a God would be a monster.

To use the vernacular, the common language, to speak the word God as mystery is a far cry from the God that many people believe in and profess as working in human lives. There is a wide and varied understanding of what God is or might be.

Some of us do not see the idea of God as inconsistent with the reality of scientific truth. After all, if God is omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal and without end, would not evolution easily be within his scope? Of course, Bible literalists (who in my opinion bite off what they cannot chew say that the Bible say God created the world in six days, and by gum six days it is. This, despite the fact that the Bible also says that a day to God is as if a thousand years to convey that time is meaningless in talking about God.

Some wit once said: I don't see why religion and science can't cooperate. What's wrong with using a computer to count our blessings? Why not indeed?

I believe, as Einstein stated, that whatever the nature of God, we are given minds to learn, question, discover, and test all that we learn, question, and think we have discovered. Einstein believed that science, the scientific method, was the right and proper-God-given he might have equally said--way to learn and forward the knowledge of human kind, and the process of civilization as well. As for religion or religious thought as a method to do this discovering, Einstein said it was an attempt to find an out where there is no door.

The comic writer Lewis Grizzard stated: In the Middle Ages, men of science tried to recreate bird wings. They strapped their devices onto the shoulders of daredevils and found a tall cliff [to jump off]. [Of scientific interest] Within a hundred years, daredevils were almost extinct.

In Einstein's speech, entitled, My Credo, given at the German League of Human Rights conference in Berlin,1932, he said:

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntary and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore. In our daily lives we only feel that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own." ... "The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is. (Einstein: A Life in Science <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452271460/rpcman>, Michael White and John Gribbin <http://www.2think.org/hii/gribbin.shtml>, Page 262.)

 

Therefore, God is the all that there is, if we are to take Einstein at his word. But he actually gave us a more direct statement as to his religious convictions regarding God when he stated:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein: The Human Side <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691023689/rpcman>, ed. Helen Dukas (Einstein's secretary) and Banesh Hoffman,Princeton University Press)

 

A great scientist of our age, E.O. Wilson, of Harvard, stated:

Every college student, public intellectual, and political leader, should be able to answer the question, What is the relationship between science and the humanities, and how important is it to human welfare?

Religion belongs to that area of study and knowledge classed as the Humanities in the university. In as much as the college and university are meant for learning, for testing, for discovery, religion needs always to be willing to have the light of the common question to shine upon it. What do I believe? Why do I believe what I believe? Where did I learn it? How does what I know measure up to what others have learned? What are the consequences for myself and my community as a result of what I believe? These and any other questions that arise should frighten neither the believer nor the non-believer.

At some point we all settle on certain sets of beliefs about all kinds of things, how to manage our lives, money, health, including our beliefs about the nature of religion and our religious beliefs God. The difference for we UUs is that these beliefs are open to question and to change. My beliefs have varied sometimes greatly, sometimes subtly over the last three or four decades, and I expect them to continue to evolve as my experience and understanding evolves.

For we who are Unitarian Universalists, religion and questioning can feel comfortable in each other’s presence. I believe that we are each a unique spiritual being on a short journey called life. On this journey we have much to see and much to learn, and to me this is our role, our raison d’etre, our purpose in life. Whatever the nature of God, I believe with Einstein and many others, that we do not have to know everything about God or anything else, but we do have these questioning minds for some reason, and it seems a much more likely proposition, or theory if you will, that we were meant to make use of them.

If I were God, that is what I would expect!

So be it.

March 27, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

March 27, 2005

Women of the Easter Story

Hear these different accounts of what happened on the morning that is now celebrated as Easter or Jesus’ resurrection day:

Mark 16:1-10

1: And when the sabbath was past, Mary Mag'dalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salo'me, bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.

The women go to the tomb, worried about getting someone to roll the large stone away from the entrance, but when they arrive they find the tomb opened and an angel, or youth as one translation states, sitting there who says to them:

7: But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you."
8: And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.
9: Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.
10: She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept.

The next oldest of the gospels is Matthew, and at the time Jesus is crucified, he reports:

Matthew 27: 45, 56
46: And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?" that is, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

From my earliest childhood readings of this passage, I was perplexed that Jesus would say these words, for it seemed in even my child’s logical mind, that if Jesus was God, he could not forsake himself. It seemed more logical that this was a man who loved God, and felt abandoned. We are told, that there were people witnessing this event, including at least three women, and are reminded that Jesus’ male disciples had all run away and were not there to see him on the cross.

Matthew 27: 56: . . . among whom were Mary Mag'dalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zeb'edee.

Matthew 28: 1-8

1: Now after the sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Mag'dalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulchre.
2: And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it.
3: His appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.
4: And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men.
5: But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified.
6: He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.
7: Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. Lo, I have told you."
8: So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.

Note that by the time Matthew writes, the story of the women has changed significantly, and they do tell the disciples straight away. With the later still Luke, who the former English teacher in me has always felt is really the best, most persuasive, descriptive writer of the four, the story takes yet another turn:

Luke 23: 55, 56

55: The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and saw the tomb, and how his body was laid;
56: then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments. On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

Luke 24: 1-11

1: But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared.
2: And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb,
3: but when they went in they did not find the body.
4: While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel;
5: and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?
6: Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee,
7: that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise."
8: And they remembered his words,
9: and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.
10: Now it was Mary Mag'dalene and Jo-an'na and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles;
11: but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

By the time of the writing of John, most Bible scholars believe John is writing out of the sadness that the Temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed under the Roman emperor Caligula, and he writes as a prophet of the Hebrew Scripture tradition, hoping for the resurrection of the temple, but in the person of Jesus. The writer of the book of John is dynamic and creative in his use of the nearly century old story: Note how the men are now in charge of the finding of the empty tomb:

John 20:1-11

1: Now on the first day of the week Mary Mag'dalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.
2: So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him."

Much has been made of this phrase, “the one whom Jesus loved,” possibly meaning either that Mary Magdalene was a disciple, or that Jesus loved one of the male disciples in a special way. Some people wonder if Jesus was gay, others wonder if he had a special, even intimate relationship with Mary. Luke goes on:

3: Peter then came out with the other disciple, and they went toward the tomb.
4: They both ran, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first;
5: and stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in.
6: Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb; he saw the linen cloths lying,
7: and the napkin, which had been on his head, not lying with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself.
8: Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed;
9: for as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.
10: Then the disciples went back to their homes.
11: But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb,

 

What is it that is most important in this story to Christians concerning the role of Jesus? Christians would say that his death was a sacrifice for all humanity, so that humankind could be saved. A blood sacrifice to end all such sacrifices, keeping in mind that animals were still being sacrificed in the Temple in Jerusalem according to the directions in the earliest writings of the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament. But, what strikes any serious reader of the gospel accounts of this death and resurrection story is that it is not just one story, but at least three very different accounts, and the major difference in the four has to do with what each writer has to say about the role of the women at Jesus’ crucifixion and death, then the removal of the body for burial, then the subsequent disappearance of Jesus’ body, or resurrection as it comes to be understood by the disciples and later followers of the Christ.

(Of interest, the name Jesus derives from the Hebrew Joshua which mean deliverer or savior, and Christ is the Greek translation of Joshua, so in essence to say Jesus Christ is savior savior.)

The big question for me is: How many women were there? Keep in mind that Mary which is the Greek and Latin translation for Hebrew-Aramaic Miriam, was a very common name. We are told variously that there were Mary Mag'dalene; and Mary the mother of James; and Salo'me. Also that the women were: Mary Mag'dalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph; and the mother of the sons of Zeb'edee. Or it was Mary Mag'dalene and Jo-an'na and Mary the mother of James, and the other women, which women these are we do not have any clue from the texts.

We do not know exactly who was there, but the most consistent piece of information is that from the earliest accounts, the male disciples had abandoned Jesus, and only the women stayed to witness the death on the cross. Either the women were too afraid to tell the disciples, and someone else told them, or they ran to tell them, or they ran and got Simon Peter who brought back the disciple the Jesus loved and they spread the word.

I want to sidestep a minute to point out that in saying the “disciple Jesus loved,” the writer was saying something particular. For, if the earlier scriptures are to be believed, Jesus loved all his disciples in the sense of caring, or friendship, or the special relationship of followers to leader; so, to say that this one disciple was loved was to say s/he was loved more than, or differently, than Jesus loved the others. A good illustration of this is to say we love our aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, but we love our spouses or partners or our children differently than those more distant relations. Love is a word that covers a wide array of positive emotions towards others.

The women of the Easter story seem to me to reflect the relationship that women long before and even today still hold in relation to the family. While more and more men have in the last thirty or forty years come to take a hands on role in the family (I see this clearly in our own congregation), for most of our middle eastern and western history women have been the caretakers of the home, caretakers of the family, while men have been primarily the providers. So, to point in the scriptures to the fact that women stayed and witnessed the execution of Jesus, wept and mourned publicly for him, then took the body to prepare it for the tomb, in all these statements about the role of the women strikes familiar. This is what women have always done.

Of late, Mary has been rising in importance among the Protestant denominations. Most Protestant churches have for the last five hundred years given Mary her due as the mother of Jesus. Perhaps at Christmas read the words given her in the book of Luke, we know as the Magnificat; but, otherwise it has been the Catholic church that has maintained the important role for Mary. Yet, just in last week’s Time magazine, the cover story is about the developing rise of Mary within Protestant denominations.

I do not think this is at all surprising since the role of women in the western world particularly has gone through such a dynamic shift since the 1950s. Women are in the work force in over half of American homes; women are in slowly increasing numbers becoming a more visible part of our branches of Congress. Women are not strictly homemakers as, for instance, they were in my youth. Women also represent half the ministry in our Unitarian Universalist faith, and in rapidly increasing numbers in most of the mainline Protestant denominations. That the role of women would begin to be explored in greater depth is hardly surprising.

Beverly Gaventa, a New Testament professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, has recently written a book devoted to this subject, and several others have recently been published in the same vein, but especially directed to lifting up the importance of Mary as Jesus’ mother. What it meant for his mother to watch him grow up. What it meant for his mother to see him deviate from the path most young Jewish men, even men of faith, followed. What it meant for his mother to see him become the influential leader of a group of disciples, and to witness the power structure label him as subversive and dangerous to the religious and political order.

If we stopped right there, the hearts of every parent must feel a wrench, for parents do not do very well with children who follow their own hearts to the extent of turning away from the accepted norms of society. We parents have a hard time watching our children do things we know other people will judge harshly. Parent struggle to accept that their children are different from other people’s perceived well-behaved children. There is a nothing harder for parents that to watch their children go down a path that will ultimately bring them pain and suffering, even if we believe they are right to follow that path.

Imagine, then, how much harder, how much more painful it would have been for Mary, this mother of Jesus, to see her son nailed upon a cross. Now, I was reared to believe Mary understood that Jesus was God, but the story suggests that she related to him as any mother to son. She wept at his death, wept at the tomb, wept at find the body missing. This is a human story.

Perhaps it was only natural that the followers would turn this story into the story of divine resurrection such as that of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian myth some centuries older. We know that the Hebrew culture told stories, parables, and lifted up greater truths with metaphor. But unlike the later Christians, the Hebrew stories were never meant to be taken literally. They were to be understood as figurative of the time, place, and circumstances out of which they arose.

While we Unitarians do not believe Jesus was divine, nor that he had a miracle resurrection, we do believe that he was a holy man, with a special message of love for all, not just the few or chosen. This is the part of the Jesus story that deserves telling and retelling. That the women were included in this group of followers, were perhaps also disciples in the way the twelve came to be recognized, is also a part of the story that needs to be uplifted. We note also, that while women had a role in Jesus’ time and in the very early church, that was rather quickly taken away from them by the time of the Council of Nicea when the church was institutionalizing and codifying what it would be. And we know this from other accounts in the New Testament as well.

These women were there for the hardest part of the reality of Jesus’ death, but in the vein of the times, most likely had little if anything to do with the actual writing of the stories that were handed down in the various testaments. Remember, few people were literate, even fewer women would have been. It has really only been in the last three hundred years that people in the west became widely literate, male or female.

Women in ministry and theological study, both Protestant and Catholic alike, are seeking to learn more about the women of the Bible, and to have that role honored. My own professor of women in religion at Harvard Divinity School, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, one of the leading writers on women’s roles in scripture, and said in class once that women have come out of the kitchen in this country and in the Bible, and they are hardly likely to go back for good.

Here we are, having broached the 21st Century, that time measured by the death of Jesus, over two thousand years of dramatic, and, all too often, painful change. Nothing, no matter how conservative some groups will try to be, nothing will take us back to the time of Christ, or to some erroneously perceived holier time, nor would most people really want to be there. Like Pandora’s box, the lid of openness, questioning, diversity, pluralism, and acceptance has been removed, and they will not be put back in the box. We will have to face the future with all this as part of our present truth. For those of liberal faith, this is all ultimately to the good, even if painful in the transition.

Perhaps that is really the most important part of the reality shown by the women of the Easter story: that we stick together through the hard, the ugly, the horrible stuff of life and death. That we remember that love does not run away from death, nor does death defeat us. We continue on, to give of whatever our gifts, to make the world around us a world filled with faith and hope and love that does not turn away when the times are hard.

May it be that we remember the strength of the women of the Easter story, and that we each find in ourselves the strength of Mary, Joanne, Salome, Mary Magdalene, and all the mothers of all the disciples named and un-named.

So be it.