April 8, 2007
Easter Sunday
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Calmly Plotting the Resurrection
If this sermon had a structure, Ira Gershwin and Broadway could give it. The beginning would be "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" - focusing on how overstated the Easter claims often are. The middle would be "Fascinating Rhythm," which is to say, OK, so the claims are overstated but hyperbole and halleluiah do sometimes dance. The end would be "Who could ask for anything more?" Overstatement meets its rhythm in understatement.
For the more linear among us, consider a strung together structure. The string outline is this: the Easter story makes huge claims based on very little evidence, so "let's call the whole thing off." Nevertheless we hang, by a string, for dear life: "Fascinating Rhythm." Finally, the Easter claim of resurrection is a string itself, a modest, small, persistent power. Who, I want to begin and end by saying, could ask for anything more?
Overstatement, please dialogue and dance with understatement. Here ends the introduction.
Listen to the lament: "I am just hanging on by a string." What response is appropriate? You poor thing, as in pathos and sympathy? Or, you idiot, as in judgment and distancing? I mean really, what's wrong with you that you can't find a family, or a faith, or a movement to which to bond and make yourself safe? You poor thing. You idiot. You co-dependent. What do you want me to do about it? I'm just hanging on by a string myself. How come your problem wants to become my problem? Once we state the problem as, "I am just hanging on by a string," we already have problems. There aren't many good responses, either divine or human. Many of us descend into "let's call the whole thing off."
Note please that the Easter stories are only three and that they embody the string theory. Jesus appears to a couple of women, unlikely reporters at best. Jesus appears to a few disciples and eats a fish and they find their hearts strangely warmed. Jesus appears to the doubter Thomas. These appearances are the most important, and extend to Simon Peter, the ten apostles, then again to eleven gathered, to the apostles at the Sea of Tiberius, then in Galilee, to 500 "brethren," to all the apostles, then to St. Paul.
Paul goes on to later declare, in I Corinthians 15: 5 - 8, "that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time… Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me." (Poor Paul, always putting himself last.) And there are at least 20 other possible resurrections in scripture, besides Jesus': the Shunammite's son, an unnamed man in Second Kings, the widow's son in First Kings, Jairus's Daughter, the son of the widow of Nain, Lazarus of Bethany, to name but a few.
Even if you add it all up and say a thousand people say they saw the resurrection, it isn't much. So, based on the evidence, let's call the whole thing off. The enormous claims based on these little threads of evidence have the opposite effect of their intention. Instead of making people feel secure, they make people feel scared. That's what lies do: we try to tell the truth but the truth, extravagantly told, turns on us. Lies make us deeply afraid. I could not have thanked Frank Rich any more for his remarkable editorial about why Elizabeth Edwards should be the candidate for President. Everyone else looks phony besides her: "The more Elizabeth Edwards is in the spotlight, the more everyone else will have to be judged against her stark humanity."
The very best thing about the American people is how much we hate phoniness. We hate it in politics and we hate it in religion. Extravagant resurrection claims based on flimsy threads of evidence only make it worse: we inflate to deflate. We get so hyper about the exaggerations that we can't appreciate the precious life of a man who died because he loved people so much.
In passing, let us note at least three of the hyperbolic claims made for the cross: One is the ransom theory that Christ died for our sins and paid off humanity's debt. I don't know about you, but my credit card still earns interest. Another is what Garrison Keillor called the Unitarian theory: spring, bulbs, rebirth, just don't mention you know who. A third is the immortality theory: that because Christ lived, we live. Now I don't mind singing the Easter hymns with vigor. The strife is over. Christ the Lord is Risen today. I just want to make sure I am not lying when I sing them. I don't want to call the whole thing off; I want to call it on. I have learned to love threads and hate ropes. I have learned to appreciate the flimsy things and to understand the necessity of the weakness of Jesus. I am tired of the downbeat rhythm of the lost innocence frame, wherein our hopes are so large they can't possibly be met. Strings, in fact, have often been given extraordinary capacity. I think of Ariadne and her intestinal, wombish rebirth. I think of The Da Vinci Code reminding us of the Holy Grail's underground red thread. I think of how strong the Lilliputians were when they tied up big people in little strings. And that may be my definition of Easter: it is a flimsy string of evidence believed by the little people which has the power to tie the big people up in knots.
Some of you may know Donald Hall's poem, "String Too Short to Be Saved." He goes to his grandfather's attic, after he dies, and discovers a box marked in an old man's hand, "String too short to be saved." The box was full of little pieces of string. That is the Easter Evidence. That is the "Fascinating Rhythm" phase. It is not so much an extravagant belief as it is a modest hope. Some of you may have seen "Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting" at MOMA (organized by David McFadden, Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design). It shows the current renaissance of venerable handcraft traditions in the work of 27 international artists. Blowtorches, fiber optics, shredded currency, and knitting needles the size of telephone poles join a gown with long knitted veins that illuminates a whole body. Two commercial backhoes knit a 35-foot American flag. Niels Van Eijk of the Netherlands knots hundreds of individual optical fingers to create a chandelier that glows with light. These works, which show how fiber functions on a tangible, spiritual, and aesthetic level, are not your grandmother's crocheted doilies and knitted legwarmers…. Elena Herzog begins her installations by attaching a textile, such as a vintage bedspread, to a sheet rock panel using thousands of industrial staples. As she removes the staples from the fabric, surrounding bits of fabric are also removed, and the resulting work becomes a haunting, ghostlike image of what once was a whole cloth. We who once were a whole cloth get torn in pieces. We hang together by a thread. We are still and nonetheless beautiful.
I have come to have great respect for thread and lace, for the holy threaded, intestinal, bloody, and bloodied Grail of what happens when we keep our claims small and our hope active. Then we get rhythm for what we must do. So instead of calling the whole thing off because it is so preposterous, I propose a string like rhythm.
Last week I was gardening in Amherst, where I have a small farm. The tenants are very interesting people, but gardeners they are not. As I stood there in the herb garden uncovering the sweet woodruff and the creeping thyme, one of my tenants watched me (God forbid, he could get his knees wet - he's probably just hanging on by a string!). "Wow," he said, "I just didn't know all that green stuff was under there." A winter of wet leaves and dirty snow was sitting right on the head of the irises and the thyme. "I just didn't know that stuff was under there." There it is. While many people over-inflate the Easter Claim, some also under-inflate it and don't bother to give winter and cold a fight. They just smother the green in themselves. When we have the rhythm of resurrection, at least we pick up the garden in the spring. We give growth a chance. We also do small things to nod towards the immortal. Which brings me to the title of this sermon: "Calmly plotting the resurrection," as EB White said of his wife Katherine.
Katherine Sergeant Angell White was a strange gardener. She wrote a lot about gardening but mostly was the very precise editor - "the fastest pencil in the East" was her nickname at the New Yorker - of a lot of famous people, one of whom she married. The mother of Roger Angell, she was also a strange wife to EB White, whose whimsy entertained way more people than her pencil or her plants did.
They gardened in Maine and lived in New York. As a weekend gardener, she often wore her well-tailored blue suits and modest pumps in the garden because she didn't take time to change. She was the kind of gardener who gardened for precise bouquets for the luncheon table. Thus, season after season, EB observed her keeping her pumps from the mud and picking flowers for the luncheon table. When it was clear she was soon to die, they made a last early November trip to Maine. There she picked a few posies that had survived the early frosts and put in some bulbs for the next year. On that day EB write the first line of her eulogy, which was way too soon to be given.
"There was Katherine, blue suit, pumps, but kneeling, putting bulbs in the soil, calmly plotting the resurrection."
Katharine was hanging on by a thread. Many people will say they are just hanging on by a fingernail, or a thread. Often I say that may be all you need. I turn to part three here: Who could ask for anything more? Simone de Beauvoir wore a dirty string around her finger. Why? To remind herself that she was alive. Who could ask for anything more? Even some of the 80% of the prisoners in Guantánamo who are in solitary 22 hours a day go to bed with hope in their hearts. They are hanging on by a string, but at least they are hanging.
There is a joke going around about Katie Couric that some think belittles her. Walter Cronkite said, "That's the way it is," and Katie Couric says, "That's part of what we did our best to find out." For me, the less imperial the claim, the better. The more power is spread around, the better. The fewer large nations and the more smaller ones, the better.
There is a magnificent story of a fire in a French village. The father jumps first, to be followed by the two children. Both jump into his arms. Then the mother disappears from the flaming window for a moment, only to return with the family's lace. With it, she jumps to her husbands' arms. Why would anybody want to save lace? And can't you hear her saying, Who could ask for anything more?
When we run out of the bullets which we use to defend our grandiose claims - to be right about God, to be right as a nation, to be right as a person - when we run out of the bullets, we will run into the lace. We will find that hanging on by a string is a lot more noble than surviving by a bullet and an army. Rather than dithering in Darfur, we will find that saving so-called useless people in a so-called non-strategic part of the world is a good thing to do. We will have moved from "That's just the way it is," to "Darfur, though small, is a part of it all."
When we get our claims to the right size, we are able to quietly and calmly plot the resurrection. Socrates did; listen to the elegance of what he said in the Apology: "There is great hope that death is a blessing." Modest, stringy not stingy, quiet, and calm: that's how I like my Easter.
When I first read Jane Kenyon's poem about immortality, I all but wept. Jane, I needed so much more. God, she says, is Mercy, clothed in light. Come on, how am I going to get through a day with just that? Where is the meat? Kenyon argues that the meat is in the mercy. But mercy is so wimpy, so weak, isn't it? Only when you compare it to the alternative is mercy weak. The alternative hasn't much of a track record. Strength has not made us strong. And no, we do not know what mercy's track record will be, in our own lives or in that of the so called real world. Lace may be beautiful, even short strings may be worthy of salvation, but really: How do you run a world on strings? How do you get through a day on strings? Let's call the whole thing off? Or shall we dance to the fascinating rhythm?
Or does grace finally come to those of us in our own solitary confinement, our own non-strategic preoccupations? Most of us don't really need to be occupied by a foreign power or have a civil war: we preoccupy. Does grace come as a little ransom, a little spring as a few greens are liberated from the crush of winter? Is calmly plotting a resurrection possible in the hard ground of our souls? You see, I didn't leave my religion: it left me. It left me drowning in grandiosity and self-importance and overstatement. Overstatement, please ask understatement to dance.
Amen.
