Do you ever wonder what goes on behind  church doors on Easter? Here are two sermons from local churches, one a Dutch Reformed Church in Park Slope, the other a Unitarian church in Kensington.

On Easter morning, Rev. Daniel Meeter of Old First Dutch Reformed Church spoke about the church’s painting, The Empty Tomb by Vergilio Togetti. Here is the ending of his sermon.

How do you see your life? How do you summarize the meaning and purpose of your life? The message of this painting today is that the ultimate meaning of humanity comes from outside of humanity and our broken history. The meaning of human life is a surprising gift of God to us. The meaning of your own life. You come like the women, with your need, your loss, your grief, whatever your need may be, and you are given something else, not what you came for, but more, we are surprised by God, a greater gift, the new life of the world. It is for you. Its energy is love.

It strikes me that the women have been captured in a dance. The power of the resurrection has transformed their grief into a dance. Look, the resurrection is about our souls but even more about our bodies, in all their pain and pleasure, and about the place and purpose of our bodies in the kingdom of God. You will need your body for eternal life. For all the dancing. I hope that all the exercise will be dancing.

The ultimate purpose of your body, no less than your soul, is to glorify God and enjoy God forever. So God will let your body dissolve in death, and then raise you again on that great day, reconstituted and reconditioned, without spot or wrinkle, without compromise or weakness, so that you may do what you were given your body to do, to enjoy God forever within the moving circle of humanity. You can practice those steps right now. Read more here.

Here is an excerpt from the sermon delivered by Minister Tom Martinez of All Souls Bethlehem Church in Kensington, an ecumenical community of faith with ties to three liberal denominations: the Unitarian Universalist Association, the United Church of Christ, and the Christian Church, Disciples

Do you believe in a love bigger than death?

I like that question a lot more than the more typical, “Do you believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus?”  In certain religious circles that’s often used to weed out unbelievers.  Somehow the notion that there may be more than on interpretation of the resurrection story is so threatening the matter gets reduced to an either/or, a “You’re either with us or your against us,” kind of thing.

But asking whether or not you believe in a love that’s bigger than death comes at things from a slightly different perspective.   A couple of weeks ago we saw some forebodings of this in the passage in which Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus, pouring expensive oil onto his feet and rubbing it in with her hair.  That was an anticipation of the cleansing of his body after death.  She clearly loved Jesus deeply.

So much in fact that she was the first person at the tomb and she had more oil.  She was prepared to anoint his body again, even after it had been disgraced on the cross.  But instead she has an epiphany and sees a living Jesus.  Laying aside our scientific minds and embracing the mythopoetic truth of the story, I’d like to suggest that it was at this point that Mary discovered her love was bigger than death.

As a general rule I think it’s always a good idea to ground our theological meditations in the real world.  For me, when I think of love and life and death I think of my friend Rob.  Many of you know that I go out to Pennsylvania about every other week to visit Rob, who’s  been battling Lou Gehrig’s disease for about ten years now and he’s nearing the end of that battle.  He spends most of his time in bed, though he can still talk and he’s breathing on his own.  Beyond that he needs help to get dressed, to move from his bed to his wheelchair, to do almost anything.  But mentally he is completely there, which is one of the maddening aspects of this disease.  While your body slowly stops working, your mind observes without losing a beat.

This past Friday some of his relatives are visiting, including his mother in law, Barbara.  Knowing that I’m a minister, Barbara asked me, “Don’t you have things to do, what with this being Good Friday and all?”  And it struck me as so ironic that she made no connection between the crucifixion of Jesus and the slow, agonizing death her son-in-law was suffering right in front of her eyes.  I don’t mean to be too harsh on Barbara.  To be fair it didn’t occur to me in the moment either.  My first reaction was to feel a little defensive.  I wanted to explain that the Council discussed having a Good Friday service and in the end we simply agreed to focus our energies on Easter.  Or to tell her that I’d be working on Saturday to make up for the time I had taken out of my schedule to be there on Friday.  But mulling it over after the interaction it occurred to me: yes, I do have things to do on Good Friday.  And they’re right here.

So at first we both failed to make the connection between what Rob is going through and Good Friday.  This is the trouble with religion or more specifically with the religious life: too often it becomes a bulwark with which we protect ourselves from the onrushing force of life and its challenges, rather than allowing our religious orientation to open us to deeper dimensions of life’s mystery.  It was Jesus, after all, who said, “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full.”

This tension is nowhere more visible within Christianity than when we approach the subject of the resurrection.  Throughout my life I have witnessed the doctrine of the resurrection being used as a litmus test for orthodoxy.  “Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?”  For reasons which I think our explicable but would take us beyond the scope of today’s sermon, that is most often the question used to divide believers from unbelievers.  And that right there should serve as a red flag: that the question is used to divide rather than unify.

I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that it’s a bad thing to believe in the  bodily resurrection of Christ.  My point, is that it’s okay to believe in it.  And it’s okay to take another view of the resurrection.  These are profoundly esoteric and mysterious realities.  In this instance perhaps more than any other I am so grateful to be in a church that acknowledges the complexities of the spiritual search and affirms each person’s right to explore the mystery and arrive at your own conclusions.  So let’s explore this bursting forth of life, allowing it to move and inspire us.

I think it’s wise to invoke Rilke here, that is, his notion that sometimes we live the question and then gradually over time we live our way into the answers.

So it’s in the spirit of the spiritual search that I’d like to share a couple of fruitful ways of thinking about the resurrection.  These are not meant to convert you to any one view but rather to enrich your own thinking about this sacred time of year.

The first frame I’d like to offer for thinking about resurrection is that of nature.  We’re of course on solid ground here in terms of our UU heritage, not to mention that when Mary Magdalene first sees Jesus in today’s Gospel reading she thinks he’s the gardener.  Do you think that’s a bit of a hint?

We’re talking about what our dearly beloved departed member David Robinson called the self-renewing power of the universe.  This is the energy that expresses itself in nature’s glorious bursting forth we witness every spring.  We are reminded in the most fundamental sense that death does not have the final word but rather exists comfortable in a cycle of life, death, life.  Each year the sun returns and calls forth the Earth’s colors like a lover. You can feel it in your bones and that makes sense because we are intimately woven into the great web of life!