The Sacrifice and the Promise

Rev. Douglas Taylor

3-28-21

Spring is upon us. The snow has melted and the temperature has come up. There are Crocuses popping up where once the Snowdrops had dominated the gardens. This past week, people have been out walking, strolling, sauntering even, in the sun. It is a time of light and life and the refulgence to good things.

This has been a hard winter with heavy snow, heavy news, and a heavy burden of illness and plague. Spring arrives with an easing, a lifting of the heaviness. Even now when the weather gives a sudden, momentary turn back toward cold, we know it is not in earnest. In countless cultures over untold eras, celebrations existed to welcome this turning of the year to spring. Not to say everything is suddenly okay, only that there has been a lightening of the load, an easing of the hardship that is an archetypal and almost expected aspect of spring’s return.

As with our Time for All Ages story, we notice how people the world over have created these grand celebrations for the return of spring, with color and fragrance, with symbols of freedom, life, and fertility. In our Unitarian Universalist practice, we often note Passover and Easter and the Spring Equinox. These three holidays help us celebrate the shift from oppression into freedom, from loss back into hope resurging, and from the cold and dark season giving way once more to new life and light and warm days.

They help us recognize the pivot, the shift, from what was into what will be. They remind us that such cycles are echoed in our own lives even when our personal experiences don’t align to the calendar – you may find spring in your life during July some year, or an Easter resurrection in some December. But here we are in this moment of Spring, and the holidays ask that we all take note of what is happening in the world around us, take note and notice that it can and does happen within us as well.

These holidays invite us to honor our experiences of winters, to know and name the experience injustice and oppression that occur to us and those around us, to live through our share of loss and death.

Just recently, my mother died. She passed on March the 20^th just ahead of the equinox and the return of spring. And in noticing that I recalled the opening line of a memorial reading by Rev. George C. Whitney, “If I should die, (and die I must)/ Please let it be in springtime/ When I and life up-budding/ Shall be one.”

But that reading was not in the small packet my mother left for me of readings and songs she wanted included in her memorial service. As I consider the messages of Passover, Easter, and Spring, I am struck by a different piece from that packet of memorial readings my mother left me. This piece, by Nancy Wood, is from one of my mother’s favorite poetry books, Many Winters.

Reaching back from here

All that I remember of my life

Are the great round rocks and not

The unimportant stones.

I know that I experienced pain and yet

The scars have healed so that

I am like the tree covering itself

With new growth every year.

I know I walked in sadness and yet

All that I remember now

Is the soothing autumn light.

I know that there was much to make my life unhappy

If I had stopped to notice how

The world sings a broken song.

But I preferred to dwell within

A Universe of fields and streams

Which echoed the wholeness of my song.

I want to talk for a moment about what we experience of our losses and our suffering. As this reading suggests, it is good to focus on our great round rocks, our healing and growth, our time in the soothing light and song. Yes. Looking back, remember the light.

And Spring invites us to notice the return of life while by bidding a grateful farewell to winter. Easter asks us to not rush past Good Friday without honoring the loss first. Passover would have us remember where we have been and the sacrifices we’ve made. As we heard in the reading, Wendell Berry reminds us “To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.”

As the reading from Many Winters suggests, we will remember the best parts. But to embrace the message of these spring holidays, let us sit for a moment with our loss and our sacrifice. For in so doing we can honor the reality of our hardships. We do not need to stay here, but we do all pass this way. We do not live in our hardships; they do not define us – but we do not ignore them either. The reality of our losses and our sacrifices shows our strength and patience and resilience.

We are entering spring, we come now into a good time – and it is this time we will remember. But more importantly, when next we find ourselves in hardship, we can remember the promise of this season and of these celebrations.

Listen to a little more from Erik Walker Wikstrom. In our reading he said: “…if we are to honor life—not just the wonder of it but the whole of it, not just its triumph but its truth—then we must learn to honor, even embrace, both winter and the tomb.”

He goes on to say:

There is a promise here. And, as Martin Luther noted, the promise is written not just in books but in every springtime leaf. It’s even closer than that. The question is not whether we believe in resurrection but whether we have known it —known it in our own lived experience, seen it in the lives of others, felt it in the world around us.

Persephone returns to the world of light; Osiris is resurrected by the power of the love of his wife Isis; the Phoenix is born anew from its own ashes; Jesus leaves behind the tomb. Snow and ice melts, giving way to new life.

The promise of our Unitarian Universalist faith is the promise of the seasons and these stories—winter is not perpetual, the wheel will keep on turning, the tomb is not the end. We affirm the promise of rebirth, of resurrection; of life’s ultimate victory over death; of hope’s triumph over hopelessness—not just as some abstract concept but as the miraculous reality of our lives. This is what we celebrate today!

(from A Rite of Spring: An Eastertide Celebration in Three Acts By Erik Walker Wikstrom)

I have always felt drawn to the power and the promise found in the celebrations of Easter and Passover and the Spring Equinox. I sometimes grow concerned that we Unitarian Universalists will shy away from the deep massages by getting caught up in what we don’t believe about Jesus or the God of the Hebrew scripture. Our early Unitarian and Universalist history is often an extended theological argument against orthodox interpretations of God and Jesus and how we see ourselves as human beings in the grand universe.

I have wanted to honor Easter and Passover not only because I want us to know the joy and the bright promise, but also because I want us to honor the sacrifices and losses and sorrows through which we have traveled.

I suspect I have, at times over-compensated to defend Easter and Passover and the messages of resilience and promise they contain. And I suspect, I needn’t worry for the message. I have been amazed in our Unitarian Universalist communities by the depth of strength and resilience I witness among us in the face of hardship and suffering. I have seen our capacity to honor winter while living spring – and honor the coming spring while living winter. I have seen out capacity to fight against oppression both out there and in here, to allow the reality of loss and sacrifice while holding close to hope and the transformative power of love.

I should not be so concerned for redeeming the messages of these seasons. Instead, as I learn from watching my mother, from witnessing many of you, from allowing myself to embrace my own aching, blossoming heart: We know about the promise. We know the struggle and the suffering, and still rise to embrace hope and rejoice in the beauty of life’s resurgence and resurrection and deliverance.

Let us enter the celebration of flowers and festivity, of the triumph of hope and love, of the ‘miraculous reality of our lives.’ A new day is again dawning. Let it be a day of joy and song. Let our hearts echo the songs of promise and of wholeness. Let us say: It will be enough. And it will be enough.

In a world without end

May it be so