 In a little bit, I'm going to share a poem about Easter. But first, I should acknowledge that sharing a poem about Easter with two weeks left in Lent is, well, it's not Orthodox. At this point in the arc of the story, Jesus hasn't even entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. There's a sense of foreboding in the story, but it's not clear how it's going to end. Well, I'm going to jump ahead anyway to Easter, and it's a good thing as Unitarian Universalists were not Orthodox. But actually, I'm not going to completely jump ahead. The poem I'm going to share has a fair amount of the Good Friday stuff, at least around the edges. The poem acknowledges the presence of shipwrecks, getting lost and sneering and complaining, the abyss, ruts, disasters, and just the plain old mundane. So in fact, sharing the poem now is not actually contrary to Easter. Easter makes no sense without the hellish parts of the story that come before the resurrection. Easter comes out of the ashes of dashed hopes, broken dreams, terrible suffering, horrific human actions, and even death. Well, Easter is tricky terrain for Unitarian Universalists. Many of us really struggle with this one. As a result, many Unitarian Universalists skip most of the difficult Good Friday parts of the story and jump right to Easter as a symbol of the new life that abounds in the spring. Daffodils, chicks, eggs, let's make this another feel-good holiday just like Christmas. Even when it's not Easter, a lot of us bring a fair amount of baggage from our religious pass with us when we come to services. Sometimes I visualize what it might look like if that religious baggage we bring with us was actually literal baggage. I picture baggage just luggage piled up around us in the worship space. On Easter, though, we wouldn't be able to fit all that baggage in the auditorium where we meet. We would have to let it spill over into the commons, into the CRE classrooms. There's so much baggage that we'd have to park some of it in the landmark building and in the nursery school and in the Isom House. Heck, we might even have to rent some space at the VA hospital for Easter weekend for our baggage. That's a pretty good image, right? Okay, now I'm ready to share the poem even though it's not Easter yet. I think we're prepared now. The poem is called Easter Exalted and it's by the beat poetry forerunner James Broughton. Shake out your qualms. Shake up your dreams. Deepen your roots. Extend your branches. Trust deep water and head for the open even if your vision shipwrecks you. Quit your addiction to sneer and complain. Open a lookout. Dance at a brink run with your wildfire. You are closer to glory leaping in abyss than upholstering a rut. Not dawdling, not doubting. Intrepid all the way walk toward clarity. At every crossroad be prepared to bump into wonder. Only love prevails. Enroute to disaster insist on canticles. Lift your ineffable out of the mundane. Nothing perishes. Nothing survives. Everything transforms. Honeymoon with big joy. Wow. I really love that poem. Broughton must have too because later in his life he sometimes actually went by the name Big Joy. So this poem is, as the title suggests, all about Easter. The late Unitarian Universalist Minister Forrest Church observes a book he wrote as he was struggling with cancer that ultimately would kill him. He wrote that Easter is about the spiritual rebirth of Jesus' followers. And more importantly, it's about what he called a saving transformation is available to us today as it was to the disciples in the Easter story. So what does Forrest Church mean by this? Well, he asks us to think about the contour of the story for Jesus' followers. On Palm Sunday, Jesus triumphantly enters into Jerusalem. His followers are brimming with hope. He really is the Messiah, a new era marked by justice and mercy and inclusion and love that cornerstones of his teaching is about to dawn. And within a week, it all comes crashing down. Jesus is betrayed by his friends. Arrested, humiliated, tortured, subjected to a sham trial, condemned and executed in a breathtakingly cruel way. And he struggles in all this, like a human being would struggle, not like some impervious divine entity. He cries out on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I thirst. He isn't superhuman. He's a vulnerable, suffering, lonely human being who feels abandoned. Some triumphant new age. This is not the ending his followers expected just a week earlier. So they scatter in terror. They must be thinking, will I be the next one to be arrested and put through such hell? Peter, one of the most faithful of them, denies Jesus three times hiding in terror. His followers must feel overcome by fear, bitter disappointment, isolation and hopelessness. And just about every one of them must feel terrible about how they abandoned their leader in his time of need. And it's at that desolate moment that the key twist in the story happens. Slowly, with Jesus' women followers in the lead, the last shall be first, he preached. They realize that all is not lost. Maybe the first hints of this are remembering Jesus' teachings about forgiveness. Maybe some of them start to wonder if that message of forgiveness might even apply to them. Perhaps a little desolation slips away as they begin to forgive themselves. And then they remember his teachings about love. God is love. That was the heart of his message. That teaching they realized, that teaching was not crucified and buried. It's still there in their hearts, tender, fragile, but alive. So they start feeling love for themselves and their fellow disciples. They remember that Jesus even applied that teaching to his enemies. Probably not today, but maybe someday. They will even be able to find some love for the Roman authorities and those who did their bidding. So their friend and their leader is gone, but now they understand that his teachings remain. The forgiveness and the love that he showered on them is still alive in their hearts, in their memories, in their spirits, and maybe even in their actions. And there you have it. Jesus' gift of love triumphs over death. Where is thy victory, O grave? Nowhere. Oppression and death and destruction cannot ultimately kill love. Not now, not ever. Thus it has always been in Selma, in Soweto, even in this is hard, even in Auschwitz. In the Easter story, the gift of love transcends the power of death and destruction and hate. Forest Church puts it this way. Jesus suffered, wept, forgave, and died. His followers failed, scattered, wept, found forgiveness, lived, reborn of his death, children of his undying love. For him and for them, even after death in his love, Jesus lived on. In his disciples' hearts he reigned as never before. Jesus lived within them, not simply among them. That forest church writes is the essence of the Easter experience. A transformation occurred. Jesus was reborn in their hearts. Death was the occasion, loved the medium, and forgiveness the catalyst. Let me just say that last line of his again. It's incredible. Death was the occasion of transformation, loved the medium, and forgiveness the catalyst. Well, I invite you to completely disregard this story if you have never felt disappointed in yourself or others. If you have never felt alone or abandoned. I invite you to just ignore this story if you have never wept in grief or despair. Disregard this if you have never had fear, grip your heart and your soul. Forget about this if you have never awoken in the middle of the night filled with anxiety and not been able to go back to sleep. But if you felt any of these things ever, then this story might have something to teach you. And so we come to big joy. Easter is an opportunity to open ourselves to big joy, to shout alleluia, to wear fancy hats and eat delicious treats. It's a day to dance on a brink, to run with our wildfire. Yes, there's an abyss right there in front of us and maybe we are closer to glory when leaping the abyss than when we're upholstering a rut. Be prepared to bump into wonder even as you face your mistakes in the fact of death. Get ready, get ready to say yes to life. Only love prevails. Nothing perishes, nothing survives, everything transforms. Honeymoon with big joy on Easter. Even better, honeymoon with big joy every day, not just Easter. Well this last thing, honeymooning with big joy every day, sure isn't easy. Saying yes to life is not always easy. Some days it even feels impossible. I'm guessing that a lot of us have had maybe more of those days in this past difficult year than usual. I've been thinking about this weekend as we struggle with yet another mass shooting this one, reeking of misogyny and racism. I've been thinking about this as the birthday of my dear friend who died of COVID last fall came on Friday. He probably got COVID when he went to a Walgreens store last fall to get a flu shot. Others in the store were not masked even as COVID was running wild in Appleton. Although he had a bad lung disease, his death was among those hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. If we only had had good leadership, if we had only all cared about one another in the common good. Grief, anger, even the abyss have been there for so many of us through this past year of COVID in a beginning reckoning with racism and insurrection and now yet another mass shooting. Many of us, especially those in marginalized communities, have had one hell of a lent and it's gone on for more than a year. I can feel light at the end of the COVID tunnel, but it's not over. And anyway, the point of the Easter story isn't really to wait until everything's hunky-dory, everything's copacetic, to see big joy. It's to try to make big joy in our space in our space for big joy in our lives now, right here, even when that feels impossible. Saying yes to life is a spiritual practice. Practice as in we make mistakes and then we practice some more. Practice as in we can get better at this. Sure, some days we are not able to honeymoon with big joy, but we can try, or at least we can say, well, I'm going to try again tomorrow. We can try to practice seeing the light even on those days when the clouds gather overhead. We can look anew for the new sun beginning to rise.