Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
Easter Sunday, April 23, 2000

Easter is the most trying time for Unitarian Universalist ministers – indeed for all UUs – because it is the special day of the year whose specialness is historically defined by Christian beliefs that few Unitarian Universalists can buy. Most of us do not come to church this morning believing without question that Jesus rose from the dead, or that the meaning of his death and resurrection is that the sins of those who believe in him shall be exonerated. Always in the background of a Unitarian Universalist Easter service the question lurks, "what are we doing here?" We love the feeling and we love singing the old hymns, but the facts which are the central point of the celebration for our more orthodox brothers and sisters are problematic for us. The minister is tempted to duck the hard issues altogether and talk about eggs and bunnies or the regeneration of nature, all of which are worthy topics of consideration in their own right.

But I can't do that, because we already did that at the equinox. So I want to take a different tack. I suggested in my Easter letter that one way we can think about this holiday is to put ourselves in the position of Jesus, to think of our own self-imposed limitations as the tombs in which our souls are trapped. This Easter, I want to urge us, to use the closing words from a favorite poem by Wendell Berry, to practice resurrection.

This fits in with the theme of the other great fest of this past week, Passover. We liberate ourselves from the walls we have built as the children of Israel were liberated from slavery n Egypt. To practice resurrection is to practice liberation.

How can we do this? How can we free ourselves from our failures, our limitations, our illusions? I don't have a blue print for you, but I would like to say to you that the first steps can be taken, and I'd like to talk today about one of the most fruitful and satisfying areas where this can be done, forgiveness. Forgiveness is a resurrection practice.

Meditation is also a resurrection practice, and last Wednesday I attended the first of Mandy Neff's meditation sessions here in this church. We did a meditation exercise in which we focused on our breathing, and we envisioned that we were breathing in cloudy, dirty air, and breathing out clear, clean air. I loved the image, because it gave me a direct and personal feeling of transforming the world in which I was placed. The thought hit me that most of the time we go around not believing that it is possible to change things. Maybe this belief is consistent with our experience that it is difficult to change some things, but the thought that it is not possible is one of the stones sealing our tomb. We simply don't try. And in not trying, we turn away from God.

Now a theological aside: I am more and more drawn to a conception of God as the source of novelty, creativity, and change in the world. God is that which is new and different from what came the minute before. If we allow ourselves to be imprisoned in our limitations, we are walling ourselves off from God.

Let me tell you a story about a person very close to me whom I will call Joe. Joe married his high school sweetheart and had three children. There came a time when the marriage was no longer working for Joe, and after trying to work things out, he left the marriage. The youngest child, whom I will call Willie, was devastated and told his dad that if he left, he would never speak to him again.

Though Joe soon found happiness in a new marriage, the next ten years were a sort of hell for him. Willie kept his vow and had nothing to do with his father. Joe responded by refusing to pay support, which made his ex-wife take him back to court for that.

Joe didn't even know where Willie was applying to college, but finally did learn from one of the other kids that he was enrolled in a school in a neighboring state. One day Joe was passing by the college town while returning from a business trip, and on a whim, he turned off the interstate. He managed to locate the student apartment where his son was living. Joe walked up on the porch and rang the bell. Willie, the college freshman with hair spikes and eyebrow studs and low-slung jeans, came out on the porch and said "hi, Dad." Joe didn't press his luck; he didn't ask for a hug or try to talk about anything deep. They talked about Willie's schoolwork and the weather. But it was the first conversation they had had in over ten years.

I can't tell you how this reconciliation came about. All I know is that from Joe's point of view it was as if a great weight had been lifted, or the stone had been rolled away from the tomb of his soul. Here is the practice of resurrection, of liberation.

Forgiveness is hard work, don't make any mistake about it. The earliest sayings of Jesus, from the Q source I talked about in March reflect a strict code of forgiveness, almost a selflessness. Matthew 5:4:

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy' But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?"

Or a few lines earlier:

"You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give him your cloak as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile."

Now the Christian Church has always touted these sayings as a great reversal of the harsh Jewish ethic, but my own study convinces me that they are but extensions of principles already well enshrined in the ethic of the Torah and are echoed in other religions. Consider this from Confucius, as quoted on that source all veracity, the Internet:

"Love thy neighbor as thyself: Do not do to others what thou wouldst not wish be done to thyself: Forgive injuries. Forgive thy enemy, be reconciled to him, give him assistance, invoke God in his behalf."

I am concerned about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism on this Easter morning because I think that the recent actions of Pope John Paul II in visiting the wailing wall in Jerusalem and in asking for the forgiveness of the Jewish people for the blood libel put upon them by generations of Christians represents one of the most exciting opportunities for interfaith dialogue in years. The reading from James Carroll beautifully articulated the meaning of this and some of the problems of doctrine with have to be overcome.

Some people have criticized the Pope for seeking pardon for the acts of individual Christians and not for the church itself, but those critics are basically asking him not to be Catholic, since it is fundamental to Catholic doctrine as this non-Catholic understands it, that the church, as the intermediary between god and humanity, partakes of God's infallibility. The church is also a human institution, so any errors committed must be the errors of the humans who were running it at the time.

That is fair enough, as far as it goes, if we grant that view of the church, which is, of course, not the Protestant view. A more serious criticism is that the Pope's apology is to those oppressed by the humans who ran the church in the past, such as Pius XII who looked the other way as the Nazis exterminated their victims, without addressing those whom it is oppressing in the present, such as women who are barred from its priesthood and even forbidden effective control of their own reproductive systems.

This criticism is fair, but should not obscure the huge step that this Pope has taken, a step which could help Jews, Christians, and Muslims live together. This is the practice of resurrection, of liberation from our bondage.

Now the criticism does demonstrate one of the fundamental things about forgiveness: we want the person who is seeking forgiveness to show an awareness of the harm that he or she has caused. No harmed person can grant genuine forgiveness while the heel of the oppressor is still pressing his or her face.

So before we ask for forgiveness from someone we've harmed, we need to ask ourselves, "do I understand what I've done?" Not just from my point of view, but from his or her point of view. Do I understand the harm I've inflicted on this other person within his or her frame of reference? Do I "get it?"

Next, if I understand the harm I've done, do I understand what led me to do the harm? What was I trying to do? It may be that my aims were perfectly legitimate, but I inadvertently used harmful means to accomplish them. It may be that my goals were unworthy. It may have been that I was angry and wanted to harm them. If so I need to understand why I was angry.

Understanding has a big impact on the morality of our actions. From a Universalist point of view, either evil doesn't exist or it is a category not especially useful in ethical decisions. We don't look at whether an action was "good" or "bad" in itself, but whether it was ignorant or enlightened. To the extent that we educate ourselves about ourselves and our neighbors, to the extent we can become more enlightened, more conscious, more mindful beings, to that extent we can lessen the harm that we inflict on others as we make our way through the world. If we want to seek forgiveness, we must understand what made us commit the harm in the first place, so that we can come to the person harmed with some realistic promise that the harm won't happen again. The practice of mindfulness is the practice of resurrection, the practice of liberation.

So far we've been focusing on seeking forgiveness for the harm we've caused. But seeking forgiveness is inextricably tied to granting forgiveness to others for the harm they've caused us. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

If asking for forgiveness is hard in our relationships, giving it is harder, if anything. Its difficulty rises in proportion to the depth of the wound inflicted. I am awed by the process of forgiveness going on in places where there has been systematic oppression such as South Africa. We bystanders pray for an increase in the level of forgiveness in those places presently caught in society-wide cycles of violence and retribution such as Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, and East Timor.

On a smaller but still awesome scale is the story of the woman who spoke at a conference I attended last fall, whose story I've already related in my sermon last Thanksgiving: she was shot in the head by a teenager in a robbery attempt while stopped at a stoplight in Asheville, NC. She survived, and while recovering had a dream in which she was the savior of this boy. She came to make that dream real, taking responsibility for a very confused kid and getting him the help he needed to make something of his life. That is the practice of resurrection. That is the practice of liberation.

I think, too, of those who have suffered physical sexual and emotional abuse by parents, stepparents, lovers, spouses and others close to them. What a long road it must be for those even to come to terms with the harm that has been done to them, let alone think of forgiving the abuser. And yet there are those who travel that long road and eventually come to forgive.

The harms that I have suffered in my life are nowhere near on this scale, I have never lost a child, thank God, or been thrown out of my dwelling or been tortured. So maybe my own struggles with forgiveness of others don't really speak to these greater harms, but I have been thinking a lot about them anyway. After all, I know my own heart better than I know anyone else's.

The two people who are not so easy for me are my father and my ex-wife. As some of you know, my father committed suicide when I was 27 years old by jumping off a parking structure. I was shocked, but also saw it at the time as an altruistic act, since he had felt a burden on his family because his mental condition had been deteriorating as a result of stroke for the past 10 years, and he wanted to get out of the way to let my mother get new chances in life.

Later, in my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, I came to see that I had carried a load of anger toward my father for 20 years that I never acknowledged to myself. I had never really grieved his death, and the anger sprang from the sense of loss occasioned by the way he left us. I have now come to recognize that anger driving some of the things I do and some of the feelings I have. I don't have a chance to go back and forgive him, but I sometimes imagine myself up on the ledge with him, talking to him about whether he should jump or not. I think I understand his motivations, and maybe that's as close as I can get to forgiving him. At least in understanding my own anger, I can come to grips with it.

As to my own high-school sweetheart, it has now been four years since she broke off a marriage of 27 years by leaving me for a Texas doctor she met at a poetry conference in Vermont. The events of that time slowly fade in my heart, and I have come a long way in my thinking. In my second unit of CPE, a colleague reflected back to me that every time I mentioned my divorce I talked like it was 100% the fault of my wife. This brought me to look at something my anger had hidden from me, my own responsibility for the events leading into the decision she made. Indeed, I had broken her heart before she broke mine, and her act was part retaliation and part desperation. I think I have come to understand her actions more.

However, if residual anger is the test, I have not forgiven her. The anger diminishes month by month, but it has not gone away.

Now, I'm not proud of this. I would like to stand up here before you and say that I had overcome the biggest stone in my life, that I had laid down the burden of this grudge, that I was liberated from the shackle of this animosity. I know that I want this liberation. I know that my relationships with Jacqueline and especially with my two children and even, perhaps with some of you would be better if I could rid myself of the anger.

But I haven't and this points up the lesson that makes this worth speaking about: forgiveness has to come in its own time, and none of us can make it happen. The would-be forgiver can't make it happen in any particular time, and if he or she can't, certainly no one else can either. It is a matter of grace working in the world, and grace takes its own time.

As a corollary to this, no one can tell us to forgive. The forgiver has to decide him- or herself, in his or her time.

Why should we forgive? It's easy to pay lip service to forgiveness, it's one of those warm and fuzzy values like motherhood and apple pie. It's so easy to advocate that someone else forgive. But when it comes down to me or you, and that long-time grievance we've had against so-and-so, we realize how hard it is and we ask, naturally enough, why should I have to go through this? My anger is comforting, my self-justification is useful to me because it lets me remember how righteous I was, how much more sinned against than sinning.

I don't think while any of us is in this mindset that there is anything attractive I can say about forgiveness to get us out. The anger, the grudge held so long is its own excuse for being. The justifications have hardened like cement.

It is only when we have become tired of carrying this cement around with us every day that we might start to think of something better. As we increase our self-understanding, we may come to realize that the principal victim of our anger is not the person against whom we hold the grudge, but ourselves. And that is the beginning of the road to forgiveness. I can't tell you to travel that road. I can only point out that it's there, and that it leads to a better place. You have to take the first step yourself, and only when you are ready.

So my friends, my message for you this day is, practice resurrection. The anger you're carrying with you towards that person who hurt you is a giant stone that seals the tomb of your soul. Roll away the stone and you will be closer to yourself and closer to God. Practice liberation. Children of Israel, your anger is the yoke of bondage to the Pharoah. Overcome it and liberate yourselves from slavery. Breathe and transform the stale bitterness of past slights into the fresh air of liberation. You can do it if you think you can.

Amen.