Rolling Away the Stones

Doing a quick internet search, I found that “Rolling Away the Stone” is a popular and frequently used title for UU sermons on Easter.

All the UU sermons with that title make reference to the well known Biblical story about the female companions of Jesus who, early in the morning three days after the crucifixion (Easter Sunday), were on their way to where he was buried to anoint his body with spices. Mark's gospel says that the women begin to worry about how they are going to get the large boulder out of the way that had been put there to seal the tomb so they can get in. The other gospels don’t tell us what the women thought on the way there. All the stories say that the women arrive and find the stone has already been rolled away and that the body of Jesus is gone. An angel or a young man tells them that Jesus is no longer there. “He is risen”. Some versions say the women leave afraid and keep what they have heard to themselves. Others say they go tell the male disciples what they have seen and heard.

I found that many a UU minister on Easter Sunday has used the story of the stone rolled away revealing an empty tomb as a touch point. Celebrate the surprising power of life, they say. Pay attention to the theme of hope renewed. Many a UU minister uses the story of the empty tomb in the same way as they also use spring flowers, bunnies and eggs, fertile and pregnant goddesses, to reveal a universally available theme...that which is life-giving appears and will transform death into life again and again.

This is the time to celebrate that which is life-giving...

I have delivered many an Easter sermon lifting up the common denominators that I hope help UU’s to be comfortable, receptive to universal “theme” of resurrection.

Today my title is “rolling away the stones”!

I want you to feel uncomfortable! I want you to feel uncomfortable with the stones so many of us throw at Christians! ...especially UU – Christians...

Not all Christians are crowded into Christian churches this morning. Some are right here! It’s time we rolled away the stones that we use to seal UU-Christians in darkness...

There are UU-Christians here and throughout our movement. It is time that they are welcomed out of the closet, out the shadows and into the light of day.

Too many of us who are former Christians, who are carrying some kind of woundedness from a Christian background, have been too quick to throw stones at present day Christians! There are some of us, so sure we hold the patent on the way to be a real UU, who find it hard to believe that someone can put UU and Christian together in the same sentence! There are some of us who fear that if we allow Christians in, we’d all eventually be drinking the Kool Aid...

It’s time to end the projections and the judgments...to walk through our fear... and find a way to truly “anoint” each other...we can’t do that if boulders are in the way!

Earlier this week, while I was thinking about what to say to you and how to say it, I got an e-mail from a sender I didn’t recognize.

I could see the subject of the e-mail was “Lord Jesus Christ”.

I figured it was probably junk mail and I started not to open it, to just push the delete button. But curiosity took over.

The message said, “I have one question before I come to your church. That question is do you believe and love the Lord Jesus Christ?”

When I read that, my first reaction was to feel threatened! (They didn’t say it, but I heard; “You aren’t a REAL minister, if you aren’t a Christian. You are leading a whole congregation straight to hell, if you don’t believe, “love” and teach the Lord Jesus Christ.”)

I took a deep breath. I sat with my fear....

Eventually, I came back to the message, read it again, trying hard not to read between the lines, trying not to repeat the wounding words I have heard many times that were swirling around in my head.

I still didn’t push delete. I just ignored it.

I left it there in my inbox and after a while I began to think maybe, just maybe this was a person searching... and this was just the language they knew how to use. Maybe, I could I could answer the question they were asking. They took the time to ask. Maybe, I should take the time to answer...

And, I did answer, the next day...

I will tell you how I replied later.

When I was a brand new UU, about a dozen years ago, I remember trying to explain to my Christian relatives what we UU’s were all about. I said to my relatives that UU’s, at least those in the small fellowship I then knew, tried as best we could to follow Jesus’ example by loving and caring for each other, that we followed Jesus’ example by working for justice especially on behalf of the poor and the marginalized, that we tried to... as Jesus did... speak truth to power...yet we never talked about Jesus...and we didn’t worry or obsess about salvation or about whether we were going to heaven...

I tried to use language my relatives would understand. Most of my relatives, very familiar with the hypocrisy within Christian communities, thought my description of the UU fellowship I had joined was refreshing. They knew it was actions and behaviors in this life that really counted, way more than subscribing to a kind of insurance policy that would get you into heaven!

We try to do what Jesus did, but we don’t talk about Jesus...

I haven’t explained who we are in that way, for a long time.

It wasn’t long after those early years of being in love, enamored with UU’s, that I experienced our shadow side. That ugly part of who we are when we trash Christians, when we accept all sorts of spiritual expressions ...as long as they aren’t Christian, when we do our very best to make the few persecuted Christians among us feel like they had better stay in the closet, or they will be judged to be at best irrational and worse out to convert and rule over the rest of us with their “truth”!

Now, when I visit with potential new UU’s, those who have found us and long to be with an open-minded, loving community that puts actions first...sometimes I hear them ask if this is a place where they can freely follow Jesus? I cringe when I hear that question. I know what kind of hostility they will encounter. I urge them to come in and find other UU Christians to be with, to join the UU Christian online fellowship. Then I watch as they leave our congregations feeling hurt, lonely, judged, disillusioned, wounded in the same way that those UU’s who used to be Christians say they were wounded.

I know there are longtime UU’s and even some who are new, with thick skins, who quietly and discretely tell me that secretly they are Christians.

It’s a shame. We should be ashamed that some among us have learned to hide, to be discreet about their spiritual “truth”, about their experience of what is most worthy of their devotion, what focuses their journey to practice love and justice...

I am thankful that UU Christians are starting to come out of the closet! I long for the day when we will stop throwing stones at those who are UU and freely following Jesus....

Too often, I hear too many UU’s express not only disbelief, but harsh judgment that another UU finds hope not only in the life of Jesus, but has experienced the reality of the risen Christ.

Too often, too many of us, collapse all of Christianity into fundamentalism. We are right to be fearful of the rigidity of fundamentalism of all kinds... Yet, that’s not all there is to Christianity. It is not the only way to be a Christian.

Too many of us, just can’t wrap our minds around the fact that it is possible to be a liberal Christian. And, even when we can do that, we judge that liberal Christians belong in liberal Christian churches, not here!

We say in so many ways, if one insists on being a Christian here, keep quiet about it!

I hope we are beginning to roll away the stones...

Learning to listen with new ears, with an open heart to those who are UU – Christians...

Here is just one example of what you might hear.

(these are the words of Victoria Weinstein, from the essay "I am Convicted".)

“I call myself a Christian because I am a disciple of Jesus Christ—not just Jesus-that-great guy-and-teacher-with-the-long-hair-and-sandals but Jesus the living avatar of the great God and Jesus the Christ of Easter morning...I believe that the original community of disciples had a direct, experience of one who was truly dead, and who soon thereafter sent them out to love the world, to serve, to heal, and to overcome the forces of hatred and oppression.”

In another essay in this same collection, Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism, Robert Fabre has this to say;

“UU ism is at a crucial stage. We are pushing the limits of our boundaries. ...in a religious movement that does not have a creed, the limits of our tolerance—our acceptance—are exceedingly board. What we have to do is stop pretending that we are all alike, stop pretending that there are certain orthodoxies that we all believe (for example, there is a God, or there is no God), and start accepting the real differences among us.”

We are so different from each other...

A month ago, I was with the small group of UU ministers I regularly meet with. It has been our practice to tell our life stories in great detail to each other. We’ve spent long hours doing this. Not long ago my colleague, another UU minister told her life story. I listened. When she was finished, I had the overwhelming feeling that I had was listening to a being from another planet! I couldn’t say; “gosh, I know how that feels”, to a single thing she had shared.

This is another UU, who I love and admire and respect. The more details she shared the more I saw perceived her as a... “Martian”! I could not find a single touch point where I could “relate”. Not one!

The feeling was disconcerting and challenging! This is another UU, another UU minister, a woman, nearly the same age as me.

We are incredibly different from each other. To pretend that we are all the same devalues the often surprising and rich fullness of the other...

You don’t have to have lived someone else’s life to love them. You don’t have to think alike to love alike....

Here is how I answered the question; “do you believe and love the Lord Jesus Christ?”

It is my hope that, if you do visit our church, you will come with a heart full of love, because you truly know and manifest your confidence that God, through the risen Christ, made it possible for each and every person to behave according to the spirit of love that is universal and universally available. I believe that Jesus teaches us that God’s love was and is so powerful and so expansive that all may partner that love and be reconciled to the force of that love that is within every soul and between every person. When we know that love, we know God.

I can imagine that some of you may find my answer not only "wordy", but challenging and uncomfortable...I am uncomfortable that it put the "burden" of confidence and loving behavior based on that confidence on the other!

Yet for me, for today, I hope that somewhere in the words, I have "witnessed" to my my experience of the risen Christ...

Roll away the stones....

Sit with your fears. Listen not just for how we are all the same. Listen for how we are different from each other. Meet that difference with the confidence of knowing that you will be transformed, you will be resurrected from the tomb of your own darkness, of death, of suffering, of violence, free from all that would separate us from each other...this Easter morning...

Holy, Holy, Holy: How Art Thou Holy?

This morning for our opening hymn we sang, “Holy, Holy, Holy”.

Growing up in a Christian church, I sang this tune, (with different words) many, many times. Perhaps, some of you did, too. Perhaps, you know just where the words in our hymnal are different! Our Christian neighbors sing; “God in three persons, blessed trinity”, where we sang; “who was and is and ever more shall be”.

Would it surprise you to know that it was as long ago as the mid-1800’s when our Unitarian ancestors altered the words removing references to the trinity?

For a long time, it has mattered to us to be clear about how we are different. It has mattered to us, the “we” who were once called “heretics”, to distinguish ourselves from the majority, the mainstream, the status quo. We are Uni-tarians...(not trini-tarians!).

Part of forming and establishing our identity has always been to focus on how different we are, to be clear about what we are not.

I hear you talk about how different you are from the rest of your family, from the culture you grew up in, or are still surrounded by; how different you are from those people in other churches, from your co-workers, from your neighbors...

We put a tremendous amount of energy into saying who or what we are not.

We are not Trinitarians.

We are not Christians.

We are not, many of us, theists.


In the mid 1800’s and likely for a century, most Unitarians were OK with singing about the triple holy God who “was and is and ever more shall be”.

I am guessing that although the tune was familiar, there were a lot of you who thought even the “Unitarian” words sounded too foreign and unfamiliar and your mind fell into that “no” groove....
For some of us that groove is so deep, that our first and our ongoing, our habitual response is to just say “no”.

It is important to learn to say I’m not, I won’t, I can’t...

In order to figure out who you are; you have to know who you aren’t!

Everyone’s journey towards self-awareness includes saying no. Our minds say “no” to all sorts of things... We have to learn to say no, in order to say yes...

Last Sunday, we heard a litany of horrors about domestic violence. On and on, a recitation of acts of hatred and violence between family members...

Afterwards, during candles of community, we heard heartfelt testimony from those who have experienced domestic violence first hand. They shared not only their woundedness and their sorrow, they shared that their spirits had led them to say no, no more!

Pick up the newspaper, turn on the television; you can’t escape the violence, pain and suffering and horrors that our world and our lives are so full of...you can’t escape all that the mind and the spirit screams no to... We’d be less than alive, if we didn’t protest...if we didn’t say no..., “no more” to all that should not be...

We also heard, last Sunday, many of us for the first time that a beloved member of this congregation had just received a shocking medical diagnosis that could end her life prematurely. “No”, we say, it can’t be true... It is not fair...

How can we fix it, how can we change it, how can we wrap our minds around the reality of death, of violence, of suffering, of all that would deny the fullness and wholeness of life?
After the shock, after the cry of the spirit that says no...we will move to accept the reality of what is, knowing the best we can for a time is wrap our arms around each other and face the dark night together.

We hope in the words of the old tune “Holy, holy, holy” that “after the dark night, early in the morning, our song will rise...”

We know we have to find a way to get up again, to rise again, to say YES... or we will be less than alive....

We protest and we say no, and we sit with what is and feel our sorrow. Somehow we have to say yes, again.
Honest cynicism forms and shapes our protests. Yet, we cannot be a people who only know how to say “no”. Saying no is never enough.

We know that the energy to say YES to life dwells within each and every one of us; it waits to be released, it waits to comfort us, it waits ready to pull us out of the rut of negativity, the dark night of the soul, it waits to give us life, over and over again.

We come here to hear that YES...

We reach out to each other to hear YES, to say YES...

Learning to say no gives us clarity, honesty, discernment...yet, no cannot be all we give power to....

Learning to saying yes, welcoming the presence and reality of yes, yes we can, yes we will, yes life is more powerful than death....gives us freedom, courage, hope ... we are holy, worthy partners, authors of creation...

We are, each one of us, holy. Within each of us resides a profound yes...

Our most important work as a religious people is to listen for that yes...to welcome it within ourselves, to welcome that yes that is within each and every person...

This is the time to say yes...to ourselves...to each other...

To stand together no longer “hindered by our vanities”...by futile pride in what we are not...to move forward in our sacred task to say yes...

This is a critical time in our life as a congregation. It is a critical time in our community, in our wider world. It is a critical time for to say no more and yes, yes we can...

Perhaps some of you read the “pastoral letter” published last week by our current UU Association’s President, the Rev. Bill Sinkford. He began by saying:

“As we welcome spring this year, many of us feel a renewed sense of optimism now that the American political landscape has been transformed. At the same time, many of us are facing unprecedented financial challenges within our families, our work places and our congregations.
.... we are pulled in opposite directions, tossed between hope and fear. It feels like a kind of emotional whiplash. Fear-hope. Hope-fear.”

Sinkford reminds us of a familiar developmental theme. A crisis always brings an opportunity to break from what has been, to move forward to what can be. Sinkford says that we are living in just such a critical moment. We feel anxiousness and fear and we are tempted to give in to the paralysis of no, while at the very same time sense an incredible hope....we can lead the way and make real the compelling vision we hold for what is possible.

In a critical moment there is always a tension between longing to go back to what was, to return to the familiar, and an overwhelming dread about what lies ahead that feels so unknown. We have a decision to make in the present moment, circumstances have moved us beyond the past, but have not yet not fully pushed us into the future....

It takes faith and hope to let go of what was, to leap into the future, to trust that this present moment brings an unprecedented opportunity to say yes, even when we are afraid.
Who will we be? A collection of wounded, anxious, fearful folk who descend into conflict and blame shrink into cynical despair, who fall deeper into the rut of negativity?

Or will we rely on, be faithful to “what was, and is and evermore shall be”?

We needn’t think we are moving into the unknown. We know!

We know how to say YES. We know that the creative power embedded in the universe is within our very souls.

We can find, we can welcome our “spirit power”. We say Yes to the sacred calling that is ours to claim. Yes to opportunity to be who we really are.

We are compelled to say no to what needs to be changed. We must also, as Sinkford says, say yes to that which would expand our spirits, live by the expansive faith that we can be reconciled to each other, that we can find in another, and another and another that which makes us whole and holy.

Say yes!

Say yes, each morning... Say yes to yourself, say yes to your neighbor. Say yes to who you are, who we are. Say yes to the spirit of life, to what was, and is, and evermore shall be...