Now The Green Blade Riseth

Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
March 19, 2000

One advantage that New England has over my native South Carolina is that seasons here are much more dramatic. Yes, fall comes in South Carolina too, but because most of the trees are evergreens, it arrives without all the fiery fanfare that it does here. And by the time of the official opening of spring at the equinox, the crocuses and tulips in South Carolina are well on their way and the azaleas are out everywhere. But here in Massachusetts, spring is by no means a done deal at the time it officially begins. We all know that the buds on the trees will open at their peril, that we will not put away our parkas and sweaters just yet, that if we rush outside in t-shirts on the first sunny day, we just might find ourselves with hypothermia inside a few minutes. We have seen in the last day how the powers that be have a way of April fooling us into thinking that winter is a thing of the past, then dumping wet gooey snow on us, just as surely as, later in the year, the Red Sox will raise our hopes and then break our hearts.

At this precise moment we are paused on the brink of the change of seasons. We know from experience that we will eventually get to summer, but we have no way of knowing how soon. It is the hinge time of the year. Or perhaps the fulcrum time, for the year is balanced like a seesaw between light and dark, between winter and summer, between death and life.

And it is balance that I want us to think about this morning. I called my sermon "now the green blade riseth," and we sung the fine hymn that inspired this line just now. It is a great miracle when we see the vegetation returning to life and feel the sap of spring coursing through our own veins, and yet is completely natural. Spring is a time when it possible to see the creative force of the world all around you.

There is a strain of thought called process theology that derives from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, which emphasizes how nothing really is, but rather, everything is in the process of becoming. We are perpetually situated on the crest of a breaking wave between the past, which has determined the spot we find ourselves in today, and the future which is open to us depending on what course of action we choose. God is often conceived in process theology as the creative force of the universe, and I like to use this language in prayers, as you know.

The Second law of Thermodynamics says that the universe goes from order to disorder, that energy is being dissipated, and entropy is always increasing. I see life and creativity as the counter to this trend. Life is anti-entropic. Life creates more order, by creating more life.

Consider the egg. What an orderly shape. It is perfectly symmetrical in every dimension but one. And yet within this little globe, if it were fertilized, would be all you need to make a chicken. The chicken is not an orderly animal, as you know if you've ever tried to catch one. But it is a remarkable animal and it is in one sense quite ordinary and in another sense quite extraordinary that the complete blueprint for a chicken is folded up in this little case. And humans are even more disorderly and complex than chickens, yet human eggs, or egg cells, are even smaller – you could fit one on the end of a sharpened pencil. A little acorn contains all the information needed to make a mighty oak.

So spring is the season of new life beginning, and the Vernal Equinox is the beginning of spring. You may know that prior to the coming of Christianity to the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxons celebrated the Vernal Equinox as the festival of Ostara, the Goddess of Spring. Ostara was a goddess very popular with children who loved little animals. The story goes that once she came upon a bird whose feathers were frozen to her body, so to save the bird's life, she turned it into a rabbit. But it was a miraculous rabbit and it laid eggs, to the delight of all the children of the realm. Later when Britain was converted to Christianity, they kept the celebration of Ostara, but they said it was in honor of Jesus' resurrection and they called it Easter. This is why bunnies and eggs are some of the symbols of Easter, and why Easter is celebrated according to the Lunar calendar, being set at the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox.

Ostara was the goddess of fertility, and in an agricultural society there is nothing so worth celebrating, so worth praying for, as fertility. You want your cows to have lots of calves, your horses to have lots of colts, your pigs to have lots of piglets. You want your crops to come up in abundance so there will plenty to harvest later. And you want your people to have lots of children so there will plenty of hands to work the farm.

Nowadays, we are not so quick to praise fertility. Unrestrained fertility is not necessarily a good thing. We look at the damage we have done to our planet by our lifestyle, and we wonder whether we really can afford all the people we have, let alone the new ones that are being born every minute around the world. The amount of land being cultivated reduces the size of the rain forests, and the raising of cattle and livestock has a bad effect on the environment. We can still praise fertility, but maybe it is fertility of mind, of ideas that we should be praising most. Maybe the creative force of the universe needs to operate on our consciousness more than on our bodies. And maybe the value we should pull out of the equinox ahead of fertility is balance.

I have been thinking a lot about balance ever since I pledged in my installation service to live a "simple and balanced life" and then immediately pulled several 16 hour days at my law office. Are your lives like this? Pulled this way and that, with seemingly no time to catch your breath, scheduled to the max and convinced that there must be a better way but unable to see it? We yearn for balance, or at least I do, and so I'm preaching this sermon to me, and if any of the rest of you want to listen in, you're welcome.

Balance is a virtue inherent in the equinox. As I said a minute ago, this is the time when the world teeters in equipoise between the dominance of day and the dominance of night. The great wheel of the year turns and proclaims the death of death, the beginnings of the great turnaround towards new life. The egg, symbol of the new life, may even be balanced on its end.

Now, I have to admit, I don't know whether this egg-balancing thing is science or folklore. I know that one vernal equinox about ten or twelve years ago, I successfully balanced not one but three eggs on end at or near the time the sun was crossing the equator. My then wife wrote a poem about it. I had read about this idea in the New Yorker, which had an article describing a whole group of folks meeting at the UN Plaza in New York City at the hour of the equinox, balancing eggs.

What does it mean, scientifically, if you can in fact balance an egg at the time of the equinox but no other time? Beats me. Maybe it's some sort of alignment of the magnetic force fields of the earth with those of the sun, or with the gravity field of the sun. Geophysicists would have to work that out. I just somehow like to think of the egg, traditional symbol of fertility, of spring, of Easter, in a state of balance.

On the symbolic plane, though, it works out. In order to have fertility, you have to have some balance. All animals species are divided into two halves, male and female and most plants have male and female parts; in each you need both the male and female in order to make babies. This is not, by the way, to put down alternative child-rearing; single folks and single-sex couples can make fine parents. I intend here a biological observation, not a social one.

Reproduction requires more balance than simply both sexes. It needs certain conditions for the thing to work. Depending on the plant or animal, the temperature must be right, the acidity of the environment, the chemicals in the soil, the absence of predators – all are factors determining whether new life can come into the world and grow to adulthood. When nature is out of balance, the dinosaurs and many other species up to the present day, become extinct. As we mourn the decline in biodiversity on our planet, we yet celebrate the miracle that conditions were balanced enough on this planet to bring forth life in the first place and that life is still possible for any of us.

Does the standing egg hold lessons for our lives? When and if the egg stands, that is a static balance. I don't think we can or want to achieve that kind of balance in our lives. If I try to balance this broomstick on my hand by standing still and keeping my hand still, I can't do it. It only works if I move my hand to keep it under the broomstick.

I think the balance we try to achieve in our lives is more of a moving balance, a dynamic balance. Take the pendulum. It is subject to two forces, the force of gravity and the force of inertia. The two forces act on it differently at different points in its travel. Overall the forces balance, but at any given time, one of them may have the upper hand.

The earth's path around the sun is like this. We are at the point when the day is just overcoming the night, but this is like the pendulum at the top of its swing, when the inertia which has brought it up there surrenders to the pull of gravity back down. We know that we are passing through this equinox and will go on to a spring season which will give way, at the solstice, to summer and then on through the rest of the cycle.

The rhythms of our lives are similar. Achieving balance does not have to be a matter of standing perfectly still. It can be a deliberate swing in the opposite direction to the way we've been going. If we have been working for a long period, we balance this by taking some time off, just doing nothing in particular. If we have been losing sleep, we try to make it up by sleeping in for a while. If we've been spending a lot of time with people, we may need to go spend some time by ourselves. If we've been spending a lot of time alone, we might want to get out and make some human contacts. If we've been spending a lot of time on the computer or on our video games, it might be time to go try some low-tech entertainment.

By the way, one area in which I have been striving for balance is the topics I address in sermons and the trappings of the worship service; some science and religion, some Christian, some UU, some pagan, some other world religions, some universal human themes. I would like to hear from you and to encourage open commentary on that balance and whether it needs to be adjusted.

Now the balance of activities, whether on an individual or group level, is a gross kind of balance, and it's a balance which we have some control over by the choices we make as to what to do from day to day. I think there are subtler kinds of balance at work in the world, however, that work independently of our wills and of our choices. One of these is what the Buddhists and Hindus call karma.

Karma is kind of a moral bank, where your good and bad deeds are stored. So if something good happens to you now, if you win the lottery or run into some other bit of good fortune, it may be because of something good you have already done. If something bad happens to you, it is because of something bad you've done. The problem is that people who haven't done anything particularly bad often have bad things happen to them. The doctrine of karma solves this problem by using the belief in rebirth which most Buddhist and Hindus hold. The karma bank keeps its accounts not only for what you've done in this life but also for whatever you did in a previous life. So however good you are in this life, you can still have bad things happen to you if you deposited bad karma in a previous life.

This little cartoon sketch doesn't do anything near full justice to the idea of karma, which I'd like to explore at length in a future sermon. I bring it up here as an example of a concept of balance, a moral balance, where each good we do is balanced by a good that happens to us and each sin by a bad thing that happens. In a way, I have often thought that strict Buddhists are quite akin to Presbyterians, for this kind of strict moral accountability was woven into the thinking of certain of my now-deceased Presbyterian relatives on my fathers side.

working toward an ethic consistent with the late Universalists which says that good and evil are not opposites. Calling good and evil opposites gives evil an equal status with good, just as calling hot and cold opposites gives hot an equal status with cold. This may be all right as far as common experience goes. We feel hot and cold as opposite forces on our bodies. But we know that scientifically, cold is simply the absence of heat, and while we can get theoretically as hot as we want, we can only get cold down to Absolute Zero. In a similar way, I am beginning to think of evil not as a thing in itself but as the absence of good. So the idea of storing up evil karma doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

What does make sense to me is the idea from Zen and Taoism that every quality contains its opposite. The familiar symbol of yin and yang, which is hanging on the wall in the stairway, expresses this. Yin and yang, as you probably know, stand for any pair of opposites, but particularly for the male and female principles and for the principles of activity or passivity. If they were simply opposites, the circle would just be divided in half by a straight line, one half black and one white. Instead, they are divided by a curving line, and each section has a dot of the other color in its middle. This symbolizes that each quality has something of the other in it, and each needs the other.

Each of us individually has a biological sexual identity, but each of us has inside hormones of both sexes, and personality traits of both sexes. It is a great awakening for a guy to try to understand the feminine forces a work in his psyche, and I imagine it is the same for a woman.

These words from the great Taoist work, the Tao te Ching, might have been written about the equinox:

All things bear the shade on their backs And the sun in their arms; By the blending of breath From the sun and the shade, Equilibrium comes to the world.

This is the work that the equinox does, at its deepest, on some of the eternal oppositions of our world. Spring, when death turns to life, reminds us that life has always contained within it the seeds of death, and that death has always contained within it the seeds of life. The day contains within it the seeds of night, as the night contains within it the seeds of day.

Here again the words of the Tao te Ching:

"So a loss sometimes benefits one Or a benefit proves to be loss."

Just as joy contains within it the seeds of sorrow, and sorrow, joy. I shared with you the other day a great feeling of triumph I had when I preached a sermon to my colleagues at the Mass Bay District retreat and they all loved it, several of them asking me for copies. I felt for the rest of the retreat that I had achieved some degree of professional acceptance among my colleagues in this district and mainly that felt very very good. However, I was also aware of a little tinge of bad feeling, and I worried over that until I realized what it was. In getting accepted into the club, so to speak, I had put down another root in the Boston scene. This meant that I was one step further away from my old life in South Carolina, and that was a sadness. Another bridge had burned behind me, and this taught me that every gain contains within it a loss.

In other words, we can try to balance our eggs, and try to live balanced lives, we can try to take care of ourselves and eat right and moderate our habits and floss after meals. But the balance we try to achieve is not as important as the balance that is there already, working in our lives, if we have the wit and the wisdom to see it.

Amen.

[1]To te Ching, 42, "On the Sun and the Shade"