A LIFE WORTH DYING FOR
by Forrest Church
Easter Sermon, March 31, 2002
Here we are again, looking splendid for Easter as usual. I wonder sometimes why we don’t wear pastels in winter, when we really need them? Is it simply a matter of trying to fit in? After all, like the blacks and grays of winter, in spring, baby pinks and blues provide perfect human camouflage. Wear black in a garden and you will stand out. People will take note. They may not take positive note, but they will certainly take note. Last December, I wore my favorite pastel jacket four days before Christmas, the shortest day of the year. It made me feel great. When I looked for it in my closest a month later, I discovered that my wife had hidden it in storage. Apparently she couldn’t trust my judgment.
I’m still not convinced that we should dress for death in winter, but there is a perfectly good reason for not wearing mourning weeds in springtime. At this blessed time of year, pastels invoke a kind of sympathetic magic. Perhaps that is the real reason we imitate flowers in springtime: for the sake of our souls. To catch the magic of rebirth. To rise from ashes of winter and be born anew.
When you think about it, to one extent or another, we are all alchemists. We take the elements of nature and the longings of our hearts and mix them in the crucible of imagination, ever seeking to reinvent ourselves, endlessly toying with the stuff of life to find a catalyst that will charge our dust with meaning.
Crucible is an Easter word. Think of cross. Crux. Originally, perhaps, a crucible was a lamp with crossed wicks, enhancing illumination. It then became a caldron, in which to melt and cast base metal, not only employed for commercial reasons but also the centerpiece of every alchemist’s laboratory. A crucible was a vessel in which dreamers sought to transfigure base elements into gold.
The word has a more ominous connotation as well. Figuratively, we employ it to describe a severe test or trial. The crucible of regret. The crucible of pain. In the crucible of regret we are chastened, in the crucible of pain we are purified, or so the promise goes. Those who have seen Arthur Miller’s "The Crucible" were reminded once again how the flames that test our human metal also incinerate. What they fail to purify, they transfigure into ash. Not that we needed reminding. Not this Easter, with the crucible of the Middle East a witches brew of violence and brotherly hate. Not with the top religious story in America one of violated innocence, a great church roiling in the caldron of its own deceptions and betrayal. Not here in New York City, where our greatest buildings, mighty vessels for the alchemy of commerce, have been tested in a crucible of terror, their promise of gold turned to dust. Remember, last September, how, from twisted girders of steel, on the altar of devastation there rose a cross. In a sense, never have we needed Easter’s alchemy—Pheonix rising from its own cold ashes—more than we do this year. And yet, in another sense, this Easter is no different from any other Easter. One could preach on such stories forever and still not get to the crux of them. Hope today is what it has always been: that, sifting through the rubble of history and experience, we may somehow find the key to our own hearts.
However much we need it, Easter remains an awkward holiday for Unitarians. The trumpets sound, we all sing, and Jesus is not resurrected. At least not as God’s only son. So what are we doing here? Why even bother? Are we simply creatures of habit who have forgotten why we do the things we do? Are we all dressed up with nowhere to go, witless participants in a vain show designed to make us feel better about death, without offering any good reason why we should? If religion, as I believe, is the human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die—if we are the religious animal because we know that we must die and therefore question what life means—what is our response? Lacking a heavenly insurance policy, is the best answer we can come up with simply that flowers return in the Spring? Is that enough for you? Will Spring work its magic the year you die? If you don’t ask yourself such questions today, I can almost promise that you won’t do so tomorrow. In fact, you will surely do so only when the trap door is swinging beneath your feet, and then it will be too late.
Let me share a story that I tell in my new book, Bringing God Home. Three nights in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was in the White House, he cut up the gospels, excising the miracles and arranging Jesus’ life and teachings into a single narrative. Jefferson’s bible (my very first) led me, if unknowingly, to take my first tentative steps down the path to divinity school and into the parish ministry. Years later, I convinced Beacon Press to reissue the Jefferson Bible and wrote an introduction for it.
Jefferson performed this pruning operation for his own spiritual purposes—he had no intention of sharing his bible with a world that surely would have scorned his act as arrogant and impious. But according to the few surviving letters that allude to it, Jefferson was simply trying to rescue Jesus from the captivity of his biographers (whom he considered unlettered and superstitious) and from what he called the "sophistications" of Christian theology. By separating what he believed to be the teachings of Jesus from the teachings about Jesus, Jefferson sought reverently to construct for his evening devotions the ultimate in Christian commonplace books. What Jefferson omits is any hint of Jesus’ higher status among mortals. Jefferson opens his Bible not with the Annunciation, but with Jesus’s birth. Its final words are these: "There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed."
What an extraordinary revelation for a ten-year-old boy, a boy who knew how the story was supposed to turn out. The resurrection was missing. The tale of God’s son—preaching salvation and proclaiming the advent of the Realm of God—ended in the ordinary, all-too-human way. Having for a brief time lived, even having loved and served so memorably and well, the hero died. This realization is the first of many that have shaped my understanding of religion. If religion is our response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die, the purpose of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for. As much as anyone in history, Jesus lived in such a way that his life proved worth dying for.
Whether he was resurrected on Easter or not, Jesus’ Good Friday tribulations bear witness to an all-too-human death. Suffering, uncertainty, reconciliation and resignation are each manifest in his final words, as recorded in the Gospels. Jesus questions God ("Why hast Thou forsaken me?"). He suffers ("I thirst"). He seeks closure with his enemies ("Father forgive them, for they know not what they do"), and for himself ("It is finished"). Though the Book of Genesis proclaims that "there is none other than the House of God, and this is the gate of Heaven," for Jesus as for all of us, at times of death the House of God is first and foremost a house of sorrow.
By the same token, to be at home with life we must make our peace with death. Without death, life as we know it could not be. To the extent that religion is a death-defying act—offering strategies whereby we can live forever—it diminishes our reverent appreciation for life, thereby representing a failure of awe. Remember, we were immortal once. We were immortal before we became interesting. Recalling our most ancient ancestors (single-celled organisms, replicated in each succeeding generation), at one time in the history of our evolution, death did not exist for us. Death came into the picture only when we evolved into sexual beings that reproduce their kind but not themselves.
It’s not that I disbelieve in an afterlife; I simply have no experience of an afterlife and therefore have little to say concerning one. I do know this, however. First, nothing (including any imaginable afterlife) could possibly be more amazing than life itself is. Second, life as we know it is impossible without death. Finally, theology may begin at the tomb’s door—the specter of death prompting reflection on what life means—but surely no revelation is more compelling or worth pondering than that of a new-born infant emerging from its mother’s womb. Theology’s heartbeat is the miracle of our own existence.
That is why we are here this morning. To witness a miracle. Not the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection, but the miracle of his life, a life tested in the crucible and redeemed, a life worth dying for. We are here not to witness Jesus’ resurrection but, through an act of empathetic imagination, to witness our own awakening.
Think of little things. Reaching out for the touch of a loved one’s hand. Shared laughter. A letter to a lost friend. An undistracted hour of silence, alone, together with our thoughts until there are no thoughts, only the pulse of life itself. We may not understand any better than before who we are or why we are here. But for this fleeting moment—the one moment we can bank on—our life becomes a sacrament of praise.
The story is told of a Zen sage who sought enlightenment. Before practicing Zen, he said he saw mountains and rivers. When he was engaged in his pursuit of enlightenment, he did not see mountains and rivers. Upon attaining enlightenment he saw mountains and rivers again. Awakening is like returning after a long journey and seeing the world—our love ones, cherished possession, and the tasks that are ours to perform—with new eyes. Before we were half asleep, our lives living us, the sand unwatched running through our glass. Now we awaken to the unaccountable miracles of life and love. Now, we experience resurrection.
As Jefferson himself said, "It is in our lives, not our words, that our religion must me read." Give one tenth as much of yourself away as Jesus did, and your life will be read long after its curtain falls. The one thing that nothing, not even death, can ever take from us, is the love we have given away. Like the love of Jesus our love too endures long after the animating fire of life flickers and dies. So love life fiercely. Give your hearts away with magnificent purpose and abandon. Mix your hopes and dreams in life’s crucible; transfigure them into works of love and deeds of kindness. Become alchemists of the human heart.
If we follow Jesus’ counsel and become again as children, this very day we will be able to dance in the ring of eternity. At the very least, by remembering that the brass will sound for us one last time and then all earthly strains will cease, we will join the dance of life with more exuberance. How much finer it will be, when our band is struck, if we have loved the music while it lasted and enjoyed the dance.
We did nothing to deserve being born. We did nothing to earn life’s privileges of joy and pain. And on the day we die, we will still know almost nothing about what life was all about. Life on this planet is billions of years old. Our span of three score years and ten (give or take score or two) is barely time enough to get our minds wet. But if we awaken to the miracle of our own being—being alive, being here, being together—if we spring our hearts from their late captivity, we will have done what alchemists only dreamed of. If but for one brief moment, our minds resplendent with wonder and charged with hope eternal, we will have lived in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.
Amen. I love you. Happy Easter. And may God bless us all.
Closing Words
"Ten years ago if somebody had offered me a vigorous, healthy life that would never end, I would have said yes," writes Frederich Buechner. "Today I think I would say no. I love my life as much as I ever did and will cling on to it for as long as I can, but life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep." This is not mere fatalism. Making peace with death, we awaken to a song reminding us that life is not a given but a gift. That this gift will be taken away as suddenly as it was first bequeathed is not only the one condition that is placed upon it, but also a token of life’s preciousness. To Beuchner, "the secret of the universe is a room where life is reborn out of death. A room where you are commissioned in darkness. A room where the white wicker rocker ticks and morning after morning you are given back the world. . . . This room where you are now, crowded with angels."