Easter Flowers
“[God] has written the promise of the resurrection not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.”
—Martin Luther
Order of Service - Script
for Sunday April 17, 2022
NIUU, Sue Hansen-Barber, Jeanie Donaldson,
Pastor Fred
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
personal statement from Fred:
For many years on Easter Sunday, I have come close to proclaiming that the story itself is a far more powerful sermon than I could ever preach. I've never yet simply said those words of proclamation, but this year I'm coming closer. Sue Hansen-Barber and I have carefully chosen words and readings, mostly written by others, to speak powerfully to us all about the meaning of today's celebration.
Announcements
Sue: Welcome
The Unitarian Universalist minister Max Coots once wrote:
“We need a celebration that speaks the spring-inspired word about life and death, about us as we live and die, through all the cycling seasons, days, and years. We need the sense of deity to crack our own hard, brown, December husks and push life out of inner tombs and outer pain. Unless we move the seasons of the self, and spring can come for us, the winter will go on and on. And Easter will remain a myth, and life will never come again, despite the fact of spring.”[1]
On this morning when our Christian siblings celebrate Easter, may we open our hearts and minds to all of the “spring-inspired” truths our human kin have found and that we, and our world, so desperately need to hear.
Fred: Ringing of the Bell(s)
CHURCH BELL SOUN,D EFFECT IN HIGH QUALITY:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c4x9M3v-ug
After the steeple bell has been rung for a moment, we will be ringing our Chime
Come into this circle of love and compassion,
Come into this community where we can dream and
Believe in those dreams—
Welcome to North Idaho Unitarian Universalists where we accept, we support, we transform: Ourselves, Our Community. Our world.
Fred - Interlude
Anne Sexton wrote: “Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.” [Let us, then] give thanks for those moments when we can feel that we live in a world that is not indifferent to our need.
We all have so many needs—a thousand prayers—a thousand needs—that really only need one answer: let the world not be indifferent. And may we live and be with each other in the way that shows this truth whatever the day brings: that neither are we indifferent to each other.[8]
[So] let there [now] be an offering to sustain and strengthen this place which is sacred to so many of us, a community of memory and of hope, for we are now the keepers of the dream.[9]
Please place your offering in the basket. Please indicate what you want to give to our congregation and what you want to give to Heritage Health, our charity of the month.
Fred - Offering Information :
Heritage Health
"We provide healthcare from the heart for anyone that needs us and we seek to develop meaningful treatment relationships that focus on preventing and reversing the impact of diseases."
NIUU
P.O. Box 221
CDA ID 83816
Sue - Lighting the Chalice:
“You who have an eye for miracles, regard the bud now appearing on the bare branch of the fragile young tree. It’s a mere dot, a nothing. But already it’s a flower, already a fruit, already its own death and resurrection.” [2]
Congregational response: We light our chalice in peace and friendship.
Fred - Opening Words:
Reader: The Story of Our Lives
The story has been told in so many ways, the story of the seasonal cycle from springtime through autumn to winter: it’s the story of Persephone’s descent into the underworld; it’s the story of Osiris’ death at the hands of his brother Set; it’s the Phoenix dying in a blaze of fire; and it’s Jesus on the cross and in the tomb.
Of course, these mythological stories exist not just to explain how the world works out there, but how it works in here. So these are also the stories of you and me. You and me when our relationships falter, or fail. You and me when worries about making ends meet keep us up at night. You and me when depression clouds our souls. You and me when concern for the world leaves us immobilized. You and me when one we love dies. You and me as we face our own mortality.
These stories of the coming of winter—these stories of death and despair—are not just stories from some far away people in some far away time. They are our stories. And while we may want to rush from cross to resurrection, from the first flurry to the first crocus, it is important that we spend some time here, for each of us has what Sarah Moores Campbell calls a “tomb of the soul” in which “we carry secret yearnings, pains, frustrations, loneliness, fears, regrets, [and] worries.” To gloss over them, to ignore this place and this season, is not to rid ourselves of it but rather to ensure that we come back here again and again and again, like an injury left untreated that flares up each time worse than the last.
Douglas John Hall has written, “It is the propensity of religion to avoid, precisely, suffering: to have light without darkness, vision without trust and risk, hope without an ongoing dialog with despair—in short, Easter without Good Friday.” Perhaps the poet Wendell Berry put it most succinctly: “To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.” And 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.
Innana goes down to the underworld; Baldur is killed by Loki’s deadly mistletoe; and life brings pain and shocks to you and me—the story is told again and again.
Fred - Covenant:
Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek truth in love,
And to help one another.
Greeting each other (Those present in person can leave our seats for this, if we wish.)
Joys and Concerns (with lighting of candles of caring)
Story:
Sue - Reader: The Story of Jesus
There once was a little boy born to poor parents from an oppressed people in a tiny backwater village from which no one thought any good could come.[3] Not much is known about his early years except that he was sharp of mind and large of heart and “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”[4] It seems likely that he took seriously the religion of his people—so seriously that it set him apart from his earliest days.
As a young man he began to preach and teach and heal. He taught that all people are God’s children and that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do—God loves you anyway and will embrace you with joy if you’ll only turn toward that Love. It is said that this boy—known in his day as Yeshua—was so filled with this Love that when he spoke it was as if God were speaking and when you looked on him it was as if you were looking at God face-to-face.
Crowds began to gather around him, crowds mostly of the poor, the disconsolate, the outcast—those whom others deemed unworthy. A community grew, a community with a welcome more wide and more deep than any anyone had known before. Even some of the scholars, and the priests, and the well-to-do found a home with the itinerant band that followed this wandering preacher and healer.
“When[ever] the crowds learned [where he was], they followed him; and he welcomed them and spoke to them of the kingdom of God, and cured those who had need of healing.”[5] He taught that God’s kingdom was not some far off dream to be yearned for but something real within and around each of us, that it was something to be worked for. He taught that each of us, with faith, could “move mountains”[6] and that “if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you.”[7] He taught that love of God and love of neighbor are inextricably intertwined and that pious words alone are worth nothing.
None of these teachings were well received by the authorities, of course—neither the religious authorities nor the authorities of the state who heard in his description of the “kingdom of God” a decidedly negative comparison with the kingdom of Caesar. Such radical egalitarianism was a threat to the status quo, and the growing crowds were worrisome, too. And so Jesus was arrested, tried, and sentenced to die.
On Friday evening he was taken out, publicly humiliated and brutally flogged, and brought outside the city walls to be nailed to a cross. His closest companions abandoned him and hid in fear. Yet even in the face of all this he refused to return evil for evil—offering only love, as he had all his life—praying to God from the cross for forgiveness on behalf of those who did these things.
In time, and in agony, Jesus died. His disciples removed his body from the cross and placed it in a stone tomb, but as the Sabbath was beginning they could not properly prepare the body for burial. A stone was rolled in front of the entrance, and this man in whom so many had seen God was gone. The “light of the world” was snuffed out, and those who knew him were bereft.
Fred - Reader: The Story of Spring
Some notice first the Snowdrops on our local hills. For others it’s the Crocus, or the Daffodils; We hear the peepers again, and the birds with their joyful energy seem to be saying, "I'm here and open for business." By the time the lilacs are out, you know that Spring is here for sure.
Everywhere things seem to be opening. Our energy seems to be returning with the colors. Even though we don't know winter at its harshest, we know the return of Spring. This is what we celebrate today: Spring has sprung again!
Hymn #44 - We Sing of Golden Mornings
Reader: The Story of Jesus
On the third day the women of Jesus’ community went to the tomb to wash and care for the body. To their astonishment they found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. Beside themselves, they asked everyone they met: “Where have they taken him?” A man they supposed to be a gardener said, “The one you are looking for is not here,” but that was hardly helpful. And yet, finding no answer from others they found one in themselves—Jesus’ death on the cross was not the end of the Love-filled life they had known. Jesus of Nazareth, Yeshua ben Miriam, was still alive, and they ran to tell the others.
The companions, still frightened and despondent, were locked together in an upper room. They would not believe the women’s story, would not believe that all was not lost. Yet even though the doors were locked—and, perhaps, their hearts as well—the spirit of their teacher came, assuring them that death is not the end of life. And this is what we celebrate today: that life is stronger than death and that love is stronger than anything!
Hymn: Jesus Christ is Risen Today (SLT # 268) - Jeanie
Words: Charles Wesley
Music: Lyra Davidica
Fred - Meditation:
Reader: The Story of our Lives
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!
Fred - Sermon:
Flower Power
By Gary Kowalski
When I think of power, strength, sheer physical force, I think of an avalanche.
Tons of thundering snow come falling down the side of a steep mountain with the speed and irresistible force of a locomotive or freight train. In an instant an avalanche can sweep away everything in its path.
But there’s something even more powerful than an avalanche, and that’s a glacier. A glacier doesn’t move as fast as an avalanche. It can be slow, inching forward a few yards in the course of an entire year. But glaciers are enormous.
They can be a mile wide and hundreds of feet thick, a creeping river of ice that can move boulders like matchsticks and grind smaller rocks to powder fine as flour.
Avalanches and glaciers are powerful forces of nature. Very strong. Giants of the natural world. But there is something even stronger in nature. And that would be a flower.
I’m thinking of the Avalanche Lily and the Glacier Lily. Each spring as the snow begins to melt in the high mountains, these tiny flowers push their slender green stalks upward through the softening ice, through the wintry crust and into the warming sun. The Avalanche Lily has white flowers with a yellow center, and the Glacier Lily is all yellow. Neither is very big.
Compared to a glacier, they’re tiny. The flowers are just an inch or two in size. But the bud is inside a growing green stem that pierces right through the cold overlay of February and March and brightens into the promise of April and a brand new season.
Flowers themselves are newcomers on the Earth. For in the beginning, millions of years ago, there were no flowers. There were ferns. There were fungi. There were dull, mossy-colored plants that spread and reproduced by means of spores. But there were no orchids or azaleas, no blossoms of apple or peach or pear, no fields of grass or daisies or brightly colored wildflowers.
It was a monotonous world, not only dull in color but also dull in sense and feeling. For this was the age of dinosaurs, great hulking lizards who ruled the earth through brute force. They were giants of the animal kingdom, big and powerful, but dumb, like an avalanche or a glacier. They were no match for flowers, you understand.
For toward the end of the age of dinosaurs, about a hundred million years ago, something strange and very wonderful happened. Plants learned how to do a new thing. They learned how to reproduce through seeds.
Unlike the spores that preceded them, seeds were actually tiny organisms, embryonic but ready to grow, packaged like meals-to-go with a built-in store of nutrition. And that gave the world an entirely new source of edible and abundant energy—energy that could be converted into heat—that boosted the temperature of the four-legged and flying creatures up a notch, from cold-blooded to warm. Birds and mammals appeared, the limbic system that governs the emotions was laid over the old reptilian brain, and the inner landscape changed. Mothers began to feel a deepened bond with their children, and children clung with affection to the parents. Love appeared, and loyalty, and grief, tears and laughter, curiosity and play, all made possible by the blooming plants that had turned the earth into a botanical buffet of rare fragrances and sweet perfumes.
So with the invention of seeds came all of the birds that feed on seeds, the cardinals and the grosbeaks and finches. And the grass made grasslands and all the creatures that thrive on the grassland, horses and zebras and prairie dogs and antelope and deer. And plants learned how to produce fruit, and the fruit also provided meals for monkeys and chimpanzees and finally for you and me.
And it all started with the rise of the angiosperms, which is the name scientists give to flowers or plants that produce seeds and flowers and fruits. The Earth took on a whole new look. The ferns were crowded out by all the amazing diversity of life we see today, and the slow-moving dinosaurs gave way, replaced by creatures who were not only quick but also quick-witted, warm-blooded and warm-hearted, sensitive and tender, as bright and agile mentally as the flowers were brilliant in all their purples and yellows and blues and crimsons.
No wonder flowers are the symbol of springtime and hope. And no wonder lilies are symbols of Easter. For there have always been empires that established their rule through sheer raw power, kingdoms of this world based on military domination of their neighbors. The Roman empire was like that, its legions like glaciers that slowly crushed everyone who stood in their way. Their rulers were tyrant kings, like Tyrannosaurus. But they were no match for the power of one small man. No match for the purity and simplicity of his vision. Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field because he himself was like a flower. Almost effortlessly, the beauty of his words and deeds captured the hearts of people who listened and became his disciples. He said his kingdom was like a seed that could spread and grow, and that if we nurtured that seed of compassion inside ourselves it could become the greatest force on earth.
It was the simple truth. For there have always been regimes like the Romans. The Nazis were similar, their storm troopers icy cold and unyielding, their panzer divisions like lumbering giants clattering with fearsome armor into combat. They were ruled over by a despot, predatory and bloodthirsty as any Caesar or thunder lizard. But again, they were no match for flowers or the man who shared them.
Norbert Capek was a Unitarian minister who lived in the last century in the city of Prague. His home and his church were overrun by German soldiers in the years of World War II. He gave his life defying their cruel occupation. But before he died, he influenced thousands of people with the beauty of his words and ideals, including the Flower Ceremony that he originated, symbolizing the light and color and fragrance of many creeds, many cultures, and many races joining together in a bright, living bouquet.
The Nazis are now gone, but the Flower Ceremony continues to be celebrated in this congregation and hundreds of others around the world, a testament to the power of love to withstand hate and to the vision of a tolerant faith which sweeps the world, not by persecution or threats of violence, but by drawing people to its principles with the sweet scent of peace and freedom.
So the flowers we share this morning bring us the assurance that warmth and kindness can pierce through frost of cruelty and indifference, that mercy and decency will blossom, that goodness has deep roots and will prevail. What seems most fragile and perishable is most persistent and enduring. Sisterhood and brotherhood, justice and charity, will ultimately prevail.
This is the lesson of the lilies. And this is the message of Easter.
Sue - (At this point, we will invite the members of the congregation to come up and pick a flower to take home. - When all who wish to have a flower, we will continue with the meditation)
Fred - Meditation
Take a moment now to contemplate your flower.
Notice it has a center, a focal point from which everything radiates.
Ask yourself, where your own center lies.
Flowers stretch up toward the life giving sun.
Ask yourself, toward what lofty aim does your own soul aspire?
Flowers have roots, hugging the earth.
Ask yourself, where do you draw your own strength and nourishment?
As we go forth this day,
May we grow in beauty,
In light,
In cheer and joy,
And share our gifts as freely as these pleasant flowers bloom
Congregational Response - if time allows
Sue - Extinguishing the Chalice :
We extinguish our chalice as we lit it, in peace and friendship. We receive both the peace and the friendship into our hearts to bring light into our world.
Fred - Closing words:
There is so much death in our world—literal and figurative. So much pain. So much loss. So many people trapped in tombs—some of their own making and some thrust upon them. Let us go forth from this place determined to roll back those stones, to heal the wounded, and to raise the dead. Life has come again; Love has come again. Alleluia indeed!
posted by pastorfred at 4:11 PM
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