Easter Sunday and Flower Communion

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by Rev. Terry Davis

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist

Congregation on March 31, 2013

I was working rather late in my office down the hall this past Wednesday night. At about 9:30, as I was getting ready to go home, my cell phone buzzed, letting me know I had received a text message. “Look at the moon as you come out of the driveway tonight,” the text read. “And don’t work too late. Lots of love, Aruna.” Aruna, you see, had left choir practice just minutes before.

And so, I packed up my laptop computer, locked up the building, and got in my car. And, as I headed up the driveway, what do you think I saw? That’s right – a full moon. It was shining bright, a warm yellow color in the sky.

And, given that it was still early in the evening, the moon was just over the horizon, which means that it looked – what? Big or small? It looked big – it was enormous! Did the moon change size that night? No. Did the Earth get closer to the moon from one night to the next? No.

Instead, I experienced what scientists call the “moon illusion.” It basically means that our mind is playing tricks on us. Scientists say that our brain sees the trees, houses and hills we see along the horizon and is trying to figure out how big the moon should be in relation to them. So, it makes the moon seem bigger (or closer).

When the moon gets higher in the sky, there aren’t any trees or houses or hills to give us a perspective, so the moon appears smaller (or further away).

Apparently, one way that you can trick your mind out of the moon illusion is to bend over at the waist and look at the moon upside down through your legs.^[1]

I didn’t do that. What I did do is perhaps what Aruna did . . . I marveled at the gigantic moon in the sky and wondered how it could be so. I was seeing something I didn’t understand and the very unusual nature of it made it feel magical and special to me.

In many ways, this experience of seeing things that are out of the ordinary and hard to understand – and feeling a sense of awe at that mystery – is what Easter is all about.

In a liberal faith whose heritage springs from Christianity, it would be remiss for us not to recognize this religious holiday. How do we, as 21^st century Unitarian Universalists, find meaning in the holiest day in the Christian faith? What messages does this ancient story of Jesus’s death and resurrection hold for us?

I believe that gospel story of the empty tomb – the story of the women who came to find Jesus and, instead, saw something they didn’t understand – is a reminder that the most sacred part of  living may be when we encounter mystery. The most sacred part of our days may be when we don’t know the answers and, instead, allow ourselves to simply see what we see, experience what we experience, and stand in the moonlight of possibility.

The Easter story from the Christian scriptures says that three women went to find Jesus’s body, which had been taken to a cave after he died, to give it a proper Jewish burial. Instead, they found no sign of him. The body was gone.

Inside the cave, they encountered two men in dazzling clothes who asked them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”[2]  Awestruck, the women returned to the village where they reported to their friends that Jesus’s body was missing.

But none of Jesus’s other friends believed them. They thought the women were making the whole thing up. It wasn’t until Jesus appeared to the friends later that day that they realized what the women had been saying about the empty tomb was true.

Now, we know that most Unitarian Universalists today don’t believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead. However, I imagine,  regardless of our theology, we might all agree that experiences of awe and wonder are essential components of a rich human life, a rich spiritual life. Even a scientist like Albert Einstein – someone who worked hard to explain the mysteries of the universe – made room in his life to experience and appreciate the unexplainable.

He wrote, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

In thinking about this quote from Einstein and this Bible story, I can imagine that, perhaps, what was alive for the friends of Jesus in that moment when they encountered the empty tomb wasn’t Jesus himself. Rather, it was mystery. It was the mystery of hope that was alive . . . hope we will still be okay even when things have gone terribly wrong in our lives and in the lives of those we love . . . hope that we can carry on and eventually find joy and beauty to comfort us and to give us new life.

So, this Easter, as we reflect on that ancient tale of the empty tomb and admire the beautiful springtime flowers you brought here this morning, let’s not bend over at the waist and try to look at it all upside down through our legs. What I mean is, let’s not always spend our time trying to figure things out. Instead, may we find ourselves just taking it all in.

May we see our children joyfully hunting for eggs like they do every year. May we notice the bright red azaleas and white dogwood blossoms that appear so magically in Atlanta every Spring. And may we drive up the driveway one night and notice the big yellow moon on the horizon. May we see all these things and simply say “wow.” May it be so. Amen.