Easter – Dan Harper

Another View of Easter

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

Easter is one of those holidays that has spread out beyond its original religious setting. For Christians, Easter is the culmination of Holy Week, a week of religious observance. Holy week begins with Palm Sunday, which commemorates the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover (remember they were all observant Jews). Then there’s Maundy Thursday, which according to tradition was when Jesus and his followers had a Seder. Good Friday is a solemn observance of when the Romans executed Jesus. Then Easter Sunday is the joyous celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

Now all this was confusing to me as a Unitarian Universalist child. By the rigid religious divisions that existed in Massachusetts back then, Unitarians were called Protestants. But — just like here in Cohasset — the Unitarian congregation I grew up in started out as a Puritan church. For those who inherited the Puritan tradition, there was only one holy day, and that was Sunday; any other holiday was considered to be mere superstition. As a result, when I was a child I didn’t understand Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and all the rest. Even today, I have to admit I still default to the Puritan tradition that says Sunday is the only holy day.

Some years ago, I was the Director of Religious Education at First Parish in Lexington, which like our congregation started out as a Puritan church. One year, just like this year, Easter happened to fall on the Sunday closest to April 19 or Patriots Day. Most of you probably think of Patriots Day — if you think of it at all — as that three day weekend in April when they run the Boston Marathon. But if you live in Lexington or Concord, you quickly learn that Patriots Day is when all good Americans celebrate the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Now as the oldest church in Lexington, First Parish in Lexington was the church of the Minutemen. On the Sunday closest to Patriots Day, there would always be men dressed up in Minuteman costumes, and women wearing 18th century dresses. In my recollection, the Sunday nearest Patriots Day was also the only Sunday during the year when they celebrated communion. In the Unitarian tradition, communion typically is a simple commemoration of the Last Supper. But in First Parish in Lexington, it became more than a commemoration of the Last Supper; with the men and women in 18th century garb, and with the congregation’s 18th century communion silver making its annual appearance, communion also become a sort of historical reenactment of 18th century communion services. Then when Patriots Day fell close to Easter, there would also be an Easter celebration layered on top of all that.

While this may sound weird and confusing, this is actually the way most religions operate. Pop culture, local history, and religious traditions get all mushed together, making a glorious celebratory mash-up. The fundamentalist Christians and the hard-core atheists are both highly critical of this kind of cultural mash-up, because (as they rightly point out) it does not make rational sense. This is why atheists and conservative Christians criticize Easter eggs, and the Easter Bunny, and Minutemen at Easter services in Lexington. But for the rest of us, cultural mash-ups are loads of fun. We eat our chocolate eggs, we don’t worry about the contradictions, and we welcome the Minutemen on Easter.

One reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and today is Easter. I went to the celebration in Concord yesterday, and there is something inside me fully expecting someone to walk through the door of our 18th century meetinghouse, all dressed up in 18th century garb.

Another reason I happen to be thinking about all this is because over the last century or so, liberal Christians have been thinking about Easter and Holy Week in new ways. The Christian tradition makes it clear that Jesus and his followers went into Jerusalem to celebrate Pesach, or Passover. Pesach celebrates the Exodus, when the ancient Israelites escaped from the bondage and political oppression they experienced in Egypt. In the time of Jesus, Jews no longer lived in Egypt, but they were once again oppressed, this time by the Roman Empire. In an essay published last week in the New York Times, Episcopal priest Andrew Thayer wrote that Palm Sunday celebrations “often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.”(1)

In this interpretation of the Easter story, Jesus came, not just to save souls for heaven, but also to push back against the economic policies of the Roman Empire that kept so many Jews living in poverty. Jesus may have wanted to get people into heaven after they died, but he was also seriously concerned about the well-being of people here and now, while they were still alive.

If we think about Palm Sunday in this way, we might think about Easter differently, too. Instead of making a theological point about the salvation of individuals, we could also think of Easter as a holiday that celebrates the resilience of an entire community. Although it sometimes gets obscured, the central purpose of Christianity is to be a community with the goal to take care of all who are poor and downtrodden. The Romans could kill Jesus, but they could not kill an entire movement devoted to taking care of those who are less fortunate.

When we think about the Easter story in this way, then it doesn’t seem quite so odd that First Parish in Lexington sometimes had men in Minuteman suits show up on Easter Sunday. Even thought the political situation at the time of the American Revolution was very different from the political situation in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus — even though the underlying philosophies of the Jesus movement and the American Revolution had important differences — nevertheless, both Jesus’s followers, and the architects of the American republic, had a sense that each and every human personality was something to be cherished. When the founders of the United States said that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” they were drawing on an ethical tradition that goes back to Jesus; that tradition goes even further back, to the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, where it says: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (2). This is the ethical tradition of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do to you; and this same idea is not exclusive to Judaism and Christianity, but appears in somewhat different forms in nearly every human culture throughout history.

We live in a time when there are deep divisions in our country. I think most Americans still profess devotion to the Golden Rule — whether we use the words of Leviticus, or one of the other great ethical and religious traditions where the same principle is articulated. But we are deeply divided about how to apply this principle in real life. Does the Golden Rule apply to LGBTQ people? Does the Golden Rule apply to people who are poor? Does the Golden Rule apply to immigrants? Does the Golden Rule apply to both Republicans and Democrats?

While most Americans seem to agree that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we currently have bitter disagreements on how this might play out politically. And in our bitter disagreements, some of us have been descending into outright hatred. Sometimes we seem to forget that the Golden Rule applies not just to people who share our religion and our politics, but also to the people of other religions, and to people from other countries, and even to people who belong to a different political party.

This country experienced similar deep divisions back in the 1960s and 1970s. I was a child and teenager in those decades, and I remember listening to the news on television and hearing about the assassinations, the bombings, and the people throwing rocks at school buses right here in eastern Massachusetts.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., captured the feeling of that era in his 1968 speech at Grosse Point High School, when he retold the story of the Good Samaritan. This is the story, as you may remember, of the man who was going over the dangerous mountain road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This man was attacked by robbers, severely beaten, and left to die by the side of the road. A priest and a Levite — both solid upstanding citizens — walked by, saw the man lying there, and hurried away; King says that no doubt they both worried that this was a trap set by robbers to lure them in so that they would be robbed. Then a Samaritan — a member of a despised religious minority — came by, but he stopped to help. King concluded the story by saying: “…the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”(3)

By telling this story, Dr. King revealed an essential problem of human ethics. We know from the Golden Rule that we are called upon to help others; but over and over again, we think only of what will happen to us. Considering just our own country, we have seen this happen again and again in American history: over and over again, we have forgotten this high ideals of the American Revolution, and we have reverted back to a primitive selfishness. In a sermon he gave in 1967, Dr. King said that over and over again Jesus tried to show human beings how to follow the Golden Rule, but that over and over again we turn away from the truth — just as the priest and the Levite turned away from the man who had been beaten and left lying by the side of the road — just as the Roman Empire turned away from the truth of the golden Rule when they executed Jesus on trumped-up political charges. But although too often we turn away from the Golden Rule, we also feel that there is another way. Dr. King put it this way: “[People] love darkness rather than the light, and they crucified [Jesus], and there on Good Friday [when Jesus died] it was still dark, but the Easter came, and Easter is an eternal reminder of the fact that the truth crushed [to] earth will rise again.”(4)

And that is my Easter hope for you. Even though the deep divisions in our country are crushing the truth of the Golden Rule at the moment — even though the hatred that exists in our country is crushing the truth of this ancient teaching from the Hebrew Bible that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves — despite everything that’s going on around us, Easter is an eternal reminder that the truth crushed to earth will rise again.

Notes

(1) Andrew Thayer, “Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession,” New York Times, 13 April 2025.
(2) Leviticus 19:18.
(3) Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America,” speech at Grosse Point (Mich.) High School, 14 March 1968. In the opening sentence of this speech, King recognized the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Grosse Point, Rev. Harry Meserve; Meserve had served as the minister of First Parish in Cohasset in the late 1930s. Text from the Grosse Point Historical Society website: https://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/index.htm accessed 19 April 2025.
(4) Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Christmas Sermon,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, 24 December 1967.

A Unitarian Universalist Easter

Readings

The first reading is from the Christian scriptures, the last chapter of the Book of Mark, as translated by Hugh Schonfield, a Jewish scholar of the ancient Near East. Later copyists added a more upbeat ending to the Book of Mark; in this reading you will hear the original ending, filled with ambiguity.

When the sabbath was ended, Mary of Magdala, Mary mother of James, and Salome, brought spices in order to go and anoint him. And very early in the morning of the day after the sabbath they came to the tomb as soon as the sun was up. “Who is going to roll away the boulder for us from the entrance of the tomb?” they asked themselves. But when they came to look they saw that the boulder had been rolled aside.

On entering the tomb they were startled to see a young man sitting on the far right side clad in a flowing white robe. “Do not be alarmed,” he said to them. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, here is the place where he was laid. Go now and tell his followers, and Peter particularly, he is preceding you to Galilee. You will see him there just as he told you.”

They fled from the tomb, for they were trembling and unnerved. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

The second reading is “The Hailstones,” by Ai Qing [aye ching], translated in 1983 by Angela Jung Palandri. This poem was written in 1979, after the poet was released from the prison camp where he had been spent the previous twenty years, because he had fallen out of favor with the Chinese Communist Party. The poem can be found in this online essay (scroll down to page 72).

The final reading was by Joy Harjo, poet laureate of the United States. The title of the poem is “Singing Everything.” This poem is reproduced at the end of this newspaper article.

[These two links go to webpages that reproduce the poems with full permission of the poets.]

Sermon: “A Unitarian Universalist Easter”

That last reading, the poem by Joy Harjo, tells a truth that is worth considering on Easter Sunday. We used to have songs for everything, “Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting,” as the poet tells us, and songs “for sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war.” But today we are reduced to a narrow range of songs.

Admittedly, Joy Harjo exaggerates a little when she tells us, “Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and /Falling apart after falling in love songs.” We do have a few other kinds of songs such as political songs, and songs of interior landscapes by singer-songwriters. But Joy Harjo is an enrolled member of the Muscogee nation, and as a Native American she is aware of a broader range of songs that once existed. Most of those kinds of songs that once existed in indigenous cultures — including indigenous European and African and Asian cultures — have disappeared from today’s mass-produced culture.

Mind you, I love the music of today’s culture. I love Taylor Swift’s song “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” It has to be the best falling-apart-after-falling-in-love song ever. And some of you will remember Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a song at the roots of hip hop; this is a truly great political song. Perhaps you are now hearing in your head the many other great songs of our time. Even so, most of our popular songs today are love songs, or political songs, or songs of interior landscapes. We have very few songs about sunrise, or planting, or harvesting, or giving birth, or (as Harjo says in her poem) “songs of the guardians of silence.” We have many great songs today, but they mostly stick to a relatively narrow range of topics.

The same is true of much of religion in today’s world. Most of today’s religion occupies a narrow range of feeling and values and being. Popular American culture thinks of religion as having to do with the Bible, except that the Bible is merely supposed to support the assumptions and prejudices of conservative American Christianity. One of my favorite examples of this is that conservative American Christianity assumes that the God of their Bible is entirely male; except that in the Bible, in Genesis 1:28, it very clearly states that God is non-binary gender: “God created humankind in his image… male and female he created them.” God may choose to use he/him pronouns, but God’s actual body is both male and female. Somehow the conservative American Christians manage to ignore that part of the Bible. This shows you what I mean when I say that today’s American religion occupies a too-narrow range of feeling and values and being.

We might imagine for ourselves a religion with a broader range. Consider with me the story of Easter as we heard it in the first reading, as it was originally told in the book of Mark. Here’s how I would retell this story:

The Roman Empire executes Jesus of Nazareth, and he dies at sundown on Friday. The friends and followers of Jesus are all observant Jews. Since the Jewish sabbath begins at sundown of Friday, they want to wait until the sabbath is over to prepare the body for burial. So they place the body in a tomb. Promptly on the morning after the sabbath, Jesus’ mother, accompanied by Mary of Magdala and Salome (these three are leaders among the followers of Jesus, and as women would know more about preparing bodies for burial than any of the men), these three women go to the tomb to care for the body. There they encounter a stranger, a man who is strangely dressed, who tells them that Jesus has been raised, and will precede them to Galilee. The stranger tells the women not to tell the men these things. Not surprisingly, the three women find this strange and weird. They are unnerved. Fearing for themselves and for the other followers of Jesus, they quickly leave the tomb. They tell no one.

That’s it. That’s the end of the story.

Now, the book of Mark is accepted by most scholars as the earliest story we still have that tells about the life and death of Jesus. This means that all those traditional stories about Easter we hear — the stories of resurrection and triumph — that’s not the way the story was first told. The original book of Mark does not end in triumph, and so it sounds like some contemporary poetry — like the poem of Ai Qing we heard as the second reading. Ai Qing lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in China; he was exiled to a labor camp for twenty years. His poem “The Hailstones” is a poetic retelling of how the Cultural Revolution brought his poetry to a violent end. Since he’s telling us this in a poem, we know that eventually his poetry was reborn. Yet when he looks back on those twenty lost years, he can only say: “What remains / Are sad memories of the calamity.”

You notice that I’m using a poem by a disgraced Chinese Communist poet to talk about Easter. I’m not talking about Easter the way we’re “supposed” to talk about Easter; at least, the way the conservative American Christians tell us is the correct, orthodox way to talk about Easter. We Unitarian Universalists have never limited our religion to the narrow confines of conservative American Christianity. For us, religion and spirituality are broad and inclusive. We can look at the Easter story with fresh eyes.

We don’t feel a need to shoehorn the Easter story into a confining orthodoxy. We don’t need the Easter story to somehow prove that Jesus was a god who could not actually be killed. If you want to interpret the Easter story in that way, that’s fine. Yet for us, the Easter story contains far more complexity. As with any good literature, we find multiple levels of meaning. I’ll give you an example from my own life. This past year has been a year of loss in my household: my father-in-law died just about a year ago, and my spouse’s stepmother died the day after Christmas. So this year when I read the Easter story in the book of Mark, what I feel is the emotional truth of that story: someone you love is alive one day, and then they’re no longer alive, and you know they are gone forever. This can leave you (as the story puts it) trembling and unnerved, and you can find yourself afraid and unwilling to talk about it.

That is one emotional truth we can find in the story. We can also find another emotional truth carried in that story. After people die, we have not lost them. They live on in our love. If there’s a resurrection story that all Unitarian Universalists agree on, this it it: love transcends death.

And we can find still more emotional truths in this simple story. For example: Jesus was a brilliant spiritual teacher, who encapsulated spirituality in simple, easy-to-understand stories and formulas. His most famous spiritual teaching is quite simple: love your neighbor as yourself. (Simple in the saying, but far more difficult in actual practice.) When the Roman Empire executed him, his teachings did not die. You cannot kill truth that easily. This another emotional truth of the Easter story that all Unitarian Universalists can agree on: you cannot kill truth so easily.

With enough time, we can find still more emotional truths in this story. So it is that we can see how religion and spirituality have a much wider range than popular American culture would have us believe. Popular American culture tells us that religion is concerned with beliefs many of us find unbelievable, beliefs to which we are supposed to conform. In truth, however, religion and spirituality exist to help us understand the perplexities of life. From this, we gain comfort and support. Religion and spirituality concern the truth that never dies. From this, we remember that love transcends even death. Religion and spirituality teach a universal love that includes all people, no matter what gender or sexual preference, no matter what race, no matter what, period. And with that knowledge, we can create a world where we truly love our neighbors as ourselves.

That’s why we keep coming back here to this community. That’s why we keep our religion and spirituality alive in our personal lives. We celebrate the incredible diversity of humankind, the diversity which exists among us here today. And we celebrate that which transcends us all and which unites us all — that which is highest and best, that which keeps us going from day to day.

Easter for Our Times

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Sermon — “Easter for Our Times”

Those of you who come to church regularly have heard me say more than once that I am an unashamed Bible geek. Indeed, there are some of you in this congregation who are also Bible geeks. It’s a great time to be a Bible geek. Unrestrained by traditional Christian theologies, linguists, textual critics, social scientists, and a whole range of other scholars are publishing wonderful studies of Biblical texts these days — including studies of ancient Christian texts that didn’t make it into the official Bible. For me, being a Bible geek these days is as much fun as when I first bought my own personal computer twenty years ago, and while trying to superpower DOS wrote a bad command that completely killed the whole computer. Those were the days.

Now, for the Bible geek, the Christian holiday of Easter poses some interesting problems. Let me tell you what those problems are.

We all know the story of Easter: Jesus gets executed and dies at sundown on Friday; since the next day is the Jewish Sabbath, and since Jesus and all his followers are good observant Jews, they can’t prepare the body for burial on the sabbath so they put it for safekeeping into a tomb; then on Sunday, the followers go to get Jesus’s body only to find it gone, and suddenly there’s Jesus himself talking to them and saying he has risen. What a great story this is! I mean, I’m a religious naturalist who doesn’t admit of any supernatural elements in religion, and even I love this story. It has all the power of any great literature.

Problem is, that’s not quite how the story appears in the Bible. As any Bible geek is willing to tell you, there is not one story of Easter in the Bible: there are four Easter stories in the Bible, each of which is different, and some of which seem to contradict the others. It’s worth taking the time to briefly retell each of the four Easter stories in the Bible. And I think you’ll find that by retelling each of these stories, we can gain some insights into meaning that Easter might have for our times.

…

First story: this comes from the book known as the Gospel of Mark.

When the Jewish sabbath day was over, two women, Mary Magdala and Mary mother of James and Salome, go to the tomb, carrying spices to embalm the body, all according to Jewish ritual and tradition. They are a little concerned because it’s just the two of them, and they’re not sure how they’re going to get the door to the tomb opened. You see, these tombs were actually small caves cut into the side of a hill, and the doors were these big heavy stone circles that ran in a track; and the way you opened the tomb was you had to roll this big stone circle aside. Mary and Mary weren’t quite sure they were strong enough to do it themselves, and they’re wondering whom they could trust to help them open up the door.

But when they get to the tomb, the door is already opened. This was not good! After all, Jesus had been executed on trumped-up political charges; what were they walking into here? were they going to get arrested by the government forces? And then they look inside the tomb, and there’s this young man, a youth, sitting off to the right. Who is he? the secret police? an agent of the Romans? He speaks to them reassuringly, telling them not to be worried, and saying that Jesus is going ahead to meet them all at Galilee. These words do not reassure Mary and Mary, and as soon as they can, they break away from this mysterious young man and flee from the tomb out of fear and excitement.

And that, my friends, is the end of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus does not appear to reassure his followers — to reassure us modern-day readers, for that matter — that everything is fine. At the end of the Gospel of Mark, everything is most definitely not fine. We may sense that the moral and ethical movement founded by Jesus will continue, but we also sense that the fear of political repression will continue as well. I think of this as the pragmatic Easter story: Jesus’s followers will continue the struggle for righteousness, but they are fully aware of the price they must pay for continuing the struggle.

…

Second story: this comes from the book known as the Gospel of Matthew.

Mary Magdala and the other Mary go to the tomb on Sunday morning. Suddenly there’s a strong earthquake. There’s someone sitting in the tomb, although in this version of the story it’s not a young man sitting there, we’re told it is a messenger of God. He speaks to them reassuringly, telling them not to be worried, and saying that Jesus is going ahead to meet them all at Galilee. Mary and Mary hear this, and feeling apprehensive and joyous they hurry away to tell the other disciples. But whom do they meet on the way, but Jesus himself, who talks with them briefly.

Meanwhile, word gets back to some of the evil rulers of Jerusalem that Jesus’s body has disappeared. They bribe the guards to tell everyone that some of Jesus’s disciples came in the middle of the night and took the body away, and that’s why Mary and Mary didn’t find the body first thing in the morning.

So ends this version of the Easter story. You will notice that it is quite different than the first version: in this version of the story, Jesus actually appears on Easter. Also in this version of the story, we get the peculiar story of how some of the rulers of Jerusalem decided to bribe some guards to claim that Jesus’s followers had taken his body away in the middle of the night; as if the storyteller were trying to explain away what perhaps actually did happen. But overall, this is an essentially sunny, optimistic version of the Easter story, which acknowledges some of the political realities facing Jesus’s followers, while emphasizing the storyteller’s central theological point that Jesus didn’t really die.

…

Third story: this comes from the book known as the Gospel of Luke.

First thing Sunday morning, a group of women make their way to the tomb, to prepare the body. When I say it was a group of women, it included Mary Magdala, the other Mary, Joanna, and the rest of the women who were close followers of Jesus. They get to the tomb, which is already open, and they look inside. No body, no Jesus. Suddenly, two men appear and start talking to the women, telling them that they’re not going to find Jesus in the tomb, that Jesus had risen. So without further ado, the women walk back to the eleven male followers, and tell them what they had just seen; but to the men the women’s story sounded like utter nonsense, so the men refused to believe it.

That is, the men refused to believe the story until two of the men happened to be walking to another village, and suddenly there is Jesus walking along with them, except they don’t recognize him. And they get into this long conversation with Jesus, and finally Jesus says, Hey guys, you idiots, it’s me. Finally, the men believe, and they go back and tell the other men, who finally believe what the women have told them.

You will notice that this version of the Easter story is different than the first two. First of all, there’s more of everything: all the women go to the tomb, not just one or two; two men appear in the tomb, not just one; there are long conversations with Jesus, not just brief exchanges. Second of all, there is almost no hint of Jesus’s political life in this story: this is a story where the storyteller’s theology hides nearly all traces of Jesus’s politics. Finally, and to me most importantly, in this story the women are the smart ones: they’re the ones who really get what has happened, and when they tell the men, the men are too stupid to get it.

…

Fourth story: this comes from the book known as the Gospel of John. It is about as different from the first story as you can get.

In this version of the story, Mary Magdala comes alone to the tomb to prepare the body. She sees that the tomb is already open, so she goes back to tell two of the male disciples that Jesus’s body is gone. Followed by Mary, the two men go to the tomb, they look around, it’s empty, they go back home. But Mary sticks around, and suddenly she sees two heavenly messengers, and next thing you know, there’s Jesus standing there too. She has a conversation with Jesus, during which he says, “Don’t touch me,” and then she goes back home. And that evening, Sunday evening, Jesus appears to the other disciples, says “Shalom” to them, and has a brief conversation before disappearing again.

When you actually read this version of the Easter story, there’s a sort of dreamlike quality to it. I think of this as the mystic’s version of Easter: the storyteller is telling us about grand theological events, while the characters in the story are divorced from mundane realities like political struggle, fear of arrest and torture, grief, and the need for secrecy.

…

So there you have it. Four different versions of the Easter story: the pragmatist’s story of ongoing struggle; the sunny, optimistic story; the story where the women are the smart ones; and the mystic’s story. As different as each of these stories may be, there are common threads that run through them. And at least three of these common threads are still woven into the warp and woof of our lives today.

The first common thread I would like to pick out is the thread that has to do with physical bodies. Most obviously, each of these four Easter stories is very concerned with determining what happened to the physical body of Jesus. What happened to the body of Jesus that Easter morning? Did his body rise up, to fulfill the predictions of later Christian theology? Did some of the followers arrive in the middle of the night to remove the body, forgetting to tell Mary Magdala and the other Mary? Was his body removed by person or persons unknown, in order to carry out one or more political objectives? I find no definitive answers to these questions in the Bible.

But what I do find in the Bible is a deep and abiding concern for bodies in general. Bodies were important to the people who wrote the Bible; bodies were not things to ignore or dismiss. In these Easter stories, I don’t find false divisions between mind and body, between matter and spirit; in these Easter stories, we are our bodies. I am particularly interested in that first Easter story we heard, the pragmatists’ story from the Gospel of Mark: Mary Magdala and the other Mary show up at the tomb only to find that Jesus’s body is missing; when things look fishy, they don’t risk themselves, they flee. They take care of their own bodies, so that they may continue the struggle for justice and righteousness another day.

I would offer that as the first bit of wisdom we might gain from these four Easter stories. I was not in the pulpit last Sunday because I got ill and instead of taking care of myself I tried to ignore my illness which only made things worse. Don’t do as I did a week ago. Take care of your body; be gentle with yourself; and be gentle with others. We can learn from these Easter stories to be concerned with, and to take care of, our bodies. While the struggle for justice and righteousness is important, we carry out that struggle as embodied beings; so our first priority must be to care for our bodies.

The second common thread which I would like to pick out for you, a thread which runs through these four Easter stories, has to do with community. Jesus was not alone in his struggle for justice and righteousness; he had a strong community of people surrounding him and supporting him. Perhaps I am more aware of this because I am a Unitarian, and therefore I am not confused by notions that Jesus was some sort of God or God-like being. Jesus was a human being, and he was one part of a community of human beings who worked together to try to create heaven on earth. Yes, Jesus was the most important human being in his little community while he was still alive; he was the moral and spiritual leader of that community. But they all knew he was going to be arrested on trumped-up political charges, so the community was prepared to continue without him. Not that we’re ever fully prepared for the grief that comes when someone we’re close to dies. Yet when Jesus did die, his community of followers was able to carry on without him.

I would offer that as the second bit of wisdom we might gain from these Easter stories. This powerful bit of wisdom applies to every one of us here this morning. At some point, let us hope in the very distant future, each one of us is going to have to die. Yet because we have invested ourselves in communities and social networks while we are alive and active, because of that investment we will achieve a level of immortality after our death. For a religious naturalist like me, this is the real resurrection of Easter: knowing that the communities and social networks I help nurture today will carry on long after my death, carry on and carry forward the ongoing struggle for justice and righteousness.

The final common thread I would like to pick out for you from these four Easter stories is probably obvious to some of you. Jesus was executed by the political and religious powers of his day because he and his followers wanted to establish a kind of heaven on earth: an idealized form of government where no one would be more powerful than anyone else, where the poor and oppressed would be more than equal to the rich and powerful, where the paramount law would be to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. That kind of heaven on earth enrages the rich and powerful, because they think they will have to give up so much of what they now have while gaining nothing in return.

And I offer this as the final bit of wisdom that we might gain from these Easter stories. The struggle for justice that Jesus participated inn two thousand years ago continues today. Today, just as was true in the days of Jesus, the rich and powerful people of this world continue to oppress and impoverish whomever they can so that they may remain in control. So it is that today, just as was true in the times of Jesus, that the rest of us continue to strive to establish a kingdom of heaven here on earth. That is to say, we continue to engage in moral political action that will allow all persons — regardless of age, gender, race, national origin, economic class, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability — to live their lives without fear and without hatred.

And on this Easter Sunday, let us commit to continue following this ideal of Jesus. We will not do this alone, for we have this church community and many other social networks who will support us. And as we continue to follow this ideal, we will take care of our bodies, being gentle with ourselves and with each other. So may we nurture heaven on earth, with true peace and true justice for all.