The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

Publications

Are We Invited to the Easter Party

by The Reverend Richard R. Davis

April 8, 2007

Today is Easter – Christianity’s highest and holiest day of celebration - and quite frankly, I have had to wonder what place, if any, I might have at this party.  Should I consider it a celebration to which - because of my own beliefs – I have not received an invitation and am not welcome, and I should therefore quietly withdraw?   Or is there a place for me at this party?   Is there a sign at the entrance that says “bible believing Christians only”? 

            I am, I confess, tempted to say, “this is someone else’s celebration, not mine, because I don’t believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ.”   When I say this I am not claiming that those who do hold this belief are wrong. I’m not omniscient.  There’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand and might be mistaken about.  I am simply saying that nothing in my spiritual experience and nothing in my intellectual understanding of the nature of reality leads me to believe that Jesus literally resurrected, and if someone insists that I MUST believe this because some outside scriptural or theological authority claims that I must in order to find salvation, then I will resist, because that is an arbitrary imposition of a belief, a doctrine, and that would be a violation of my freedom of conscience.  Any religion, any brand of spirituality, that tramples on that sacred freedom – the freedom of conscience - betrays any ideals it might purport the champion. 

If pushed into a debate on the subject (and someone would have to push pretty hard and back me into a corner), I would say that I do know that there are other ancient stories and myths that speak of the resurrection of great figures, and I can’t help but believe that the original writers of the Gospels were influenced by these stories, and I would say that a more compelling case could be made that the Easter story is not literally true.

So, does this mean that I am simply another modern skeptic, a despiser of organized religion, a perpetual doubter, one of those hipper and smarter than thou, nihilist types?  No, that’s not me.  I wouldn’t be in the ministry, and I wouldn’t be in this beautiful space today if that were the case.  If I was really such a skeptic then the mysterious dream I recently had would not have arisen from the depths of my being.  

Before I tell you about that dream, I need to take you on a couple of detours – first, to  tell you a little something about my religious background and then I need to make a brief comment about the larger religious implications of my particular story.

 I was born into a Southern Baptist family and went to church regularly until I was sixteen, when a weekend job at McDonald’s hamburgers took over the Sunday morning time slot (to my poor mother’s eternal guilt and shame, but we needed the money).   Anyway, I had sixteen years to soak up a good bit of Christian influence before moving on in my life.  My next major spiritual stop were some Zen Buddhist centers during my twenties, and the Buddhist teachings and practices I encountered there continue to shape my life.  From there it was on to Unitarian Universalism late twenties, and from there it was on to a fairly liberal Christian seminary for three and half years as I prepared for Unitarian Universalist ministry.  I’ve been in this movement since 1979.   I should mention that in theology school, they sometimes referred to me as “the Rabbi” because I am told I looked the part and because my beliefs about Jesus were more Jewish than Christian.   Then, too, I should tell you that for me some of the sublimest of all sacred text are the Hindu Upanishads.  So what am I?  A Christo-Buddho-Judeo-Hindu-Humano-Unitarian Universalist (CBJHHUU)?   But that leaves out the creative influence of Beethoven, and Taoism, not to mention I’m beginning to pay more attention to Islam these days.  

It might strike you that I am a unique, syncretistic blend of a whole bunch of different religious traditions, but this is not just my personal story – it’s our story.  We generally think of religious traditions as separate and distinct entities, but as the late professor of comparative religion at Harvard University, Wilfred Cantwell Smith has shown, this is, at best, a convenient intellectual fiction that allows us to get some conceptual handle on a more wondrously complex reality.  In truth, there is no such thing as a separate and distinct religious tradition – there has been a great deal of cross breeding of ideas, stories, myths, doctrines, practices and rituals.  Some religions prefer to keep this theological truth in the closet and trumpet their pure blood lines as the “one true faith,” but this is delusional - somewhat akin to the delusional belief that there are separate and distinct races when, in fact, we’re all related. 

Professor Smith uses the example of the spiritual life of Leo Tolstoy to make this point.  (Please hang on now for a whirlwind tour of world religious influence)  Tolstoy was deeply influenced by a fable from the Christian text “The Lives of the Saints” that came from an account of the Christian Saints Barlaam, an ascetic preacher and Josaphat, a rich prince, who renounced the world to seek the Holy.  Centuries earlier the story of these saints and their renunciation of the world was profoundly influential to many medieval Christians.  Versions of their story appeared in several languages from Italy to Iceland .   Historians traced this Christian tale back to Georgia (the one next to Russia ) and discovered that the Christian Georgians actually lifted it from Islamic sources.  An  earlier Arabic/ Islamic version of the story of these two saints was widely popular in Muslim communities.  But then, by digging down deeper scholars discovered that the Muslims actually borrowed it from the Manicheans in Western Asia .   Looking further, scholars discovered that the Manicheans absorbed this and other stories from Buddhist lore in the first century A.D.   The original legend of the prince who renounced the world was none other than a story of the Buddha.   Before he attained enlightenment he was known as a “Bodhisattva” – i.e., a future Buddha.   Eventually, in the Latin Christian version this term was translated “Josaphat”  - hence the Christian name of this saint, who actually turned out to be the Buddha.  End of story?  Not quite.  Some elements of the story of the Christian Saints Barlaam and Josahpat actually come from Jain and Hindu sources, and some scholars think it has even earlier origins.   End of story NOW?   Not yet.  Turns out that the Jews picked up this story from the Muslims and created their own Hebrew version which got translated into several European languages, and a Yiddish version appeared in the 19^th Century. 

This is but one example many possible examples of how the inspiring stories and myths regularly cross the boundaries between religious traditions.   Purist, doctrinal border guards of various faith traditions might not like to admit that this is true, but it is.

Now to the dream that I had.  Dreams are incredible – arising from mysterious depths of being to convey truth through a compelling presentation of symbols and images while we sleep and can give them our undivided attention.  My dream was about aging, mortality, the human condition – the type of dream someone my age (almost 57) might have.   It is a dream that, in one form or another, we all will have because it deals with universal themes.  It’s a very short dream –  a Christian-Buddhist dream. 

In my dream I am lying on my back, and I have a profound consciousness that my body is slowly but inexorably declining  -  indeed, my salad days are over  and the lettuce is beginning to wilt a bit.  I’m blessed with good health for the time being, but as Buddhist teaching repeatedly notes, all things change, all flesh is subject to death and decay.   So in the dream I am lying on my back with a profound, disquieting consciousness of my mortality, and I utter these five words, directed to the universe at large:  “I believe, help my unbelief.” 

Where did those words come from?  What is their significance?  This is a phrase straight out of deepest strata of Christian scripture – the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels.  In Mark this cry is shouted out by a desperate father who is asking Jesus to cast a demon out of his mentally afflicted son – something that his disciples have not been able to do.  Jesus commends the man for having faith that such healing might be possible, and the father cries out those paradoxical words – “I believe.  Help my unbelief.”   (Some editions render this “I trust, help my lack of trust” – which is more psycho-spiritually precise language.)   And the son is restored to mental wholeness.  Most bible scholars say that the story of this healing episode did not actually occur but was part of a recurring rhetorical device the unknown gospel writer used to highlight the difference between Jesus’ trust and his disciple’s lack of trust.

But just because this healing didn’t happen doesn’t mean the words don’t convey truth.  This paradoxical phrase, “I trust, help my lack of trust” is amazingly insightful.  It points to the spiritual dilemma every person faces –  we are all poised over an existential precipice – if you face one side you sense that there is a cosmic safety net and if you face the other side there appears to be a bottomless abyss.   Ultimately we must respond with our whole being:  Do we trust life, or do we not trust it?  Do we feel that life is nothing but “sound and fury signifying nothing,” that we are merely doomed to death and oblivion, it is every person for him or her self and the best a person can hope for is to die with the most toys?   Or do we trust that there is something more, a unifying reality that is deeper, higher, greater, infinite, eternal, that transcends the ravages of time, a meaning that redeems our lives?   Our resolution of this dilemma shapes our lives. To trust or not to trust in the flow of life?  That is the question.  It’s not an easy choice – there are powerful forces that turn a person in either direction.

The direction we choose to face – toward fear and uncertainty or toward trust in life - shapes our lives – it shapes our character and how we live, it determines whether we live with a closed mind, a clinched hand or open heart and mind and a welcoming embrace.  

Here’s where two of my primary spiritual inspirations, the Buddha and Jesus, offer me their sage counsel.  Although they arose in vastly different cultural settings and although one was a peasant (Jesus) and one started life as a prince (the Buddha), they were of one mind in their response to this essential query of existence.  The remarkable similarities of their responses to the basic spiritual issues of life has fueled some speculation that Jesus may have been influenced by Buddhist teachings (Buddha was born 500 or so years before Jesus), but there is no historical evidence of such a link.  The more likely explanation is that these two spiritual geniuses looked very deeply into the nature of reality and arrived at the same basic spiritual conclusions regarding the puzzles of life.  

The Buddha taught his followers to re-orient their lives, to stop grasping (which causes suffering) and to “let go” (which sounds easy but requires great courage, dedication, patience and presence of mind.)   Jesus taught his followers to “empty themselves” and take the last place, to let go of worldly importance and become as a child, to be willing to let go of fear and anger, not to worry about tomorrow but consider the lovely example of the lilies of the field, to trust in the supreme goodness of ultimate being, even in the face death itself.    Both teachers call for death of sorts – the death of a small self who fears and grasps, and mistrusts, the small self who feels isolated and pitted against the rest of a fearsome world.  They call for the death of this self so there can be a resurrection into a new way of being, a way characterized by profound trust and a loving, compassionate sense of connection to other people and to the interdependent web of existence.   As the wonderfully broad minded, world renowned Christian religious scholar Marcus Borg - that bright light who has taught in Corvallis at OSU and prepares now to retire this year, puts it: “The path of which the Buddha and Jesus speak is a path of liberation from our anxious grasping, resurrection into a new way of being, and a transformation into the compassionate life.”

This path is more than just a personal choice – it has socio-economic and political  implications.   When a preponderance of people in a society are guided by the mindset of fear and dread, then the elemental forces of greed and hatred have free reign.  These forces will often cleverly disguise themselves in self righteous garb, but they are forces that divide people, diminish and destroy life.   Jesus died at the hands of authorities who ruled with such a mindset.   They thought they had killed him and dispensed with the threat he posed.  Yet they vastly underestimated the power that guided him in his life and ministry, which is to say that they vastly underestimated the power of love and hope and joy.  

This truth - that love and hope and trust in the ultimate will prevail over the forces fear and hate and greed - came to be clothed in a story, the story of the resurrection of the body of Jesus, which many of us do not regard as literal truth.  But look deeper.   The story is about something much more subtle and profound and universally true:  the truth that we can trust in life.  

So I think of my dream now, and I realize that it was my Easter dream this year.  It was a dream that reminds me that although I may not embrace the conventional understanding of this celebration, I have an open invitation to join in.  No self appointed theological bouncers have the right to say “Members only:  this is not your party.”   I’m invited.  Anyone who freely chooses is welcome.  Easter is an invitation to turn away from mistrust, from fear, from hate, from dread and to turn with hope toward ultimate trust that there is ever more love, compassion and joy than we can imagine.