"Holy Week"

Today, Palm Sunday, marks the beginning of the most eventful time in the Christian calendar: Holy Week. From Jesus'’ momentous arrival in Jerusalem, where he drove the money-changers out of the temple, dazzled the people with parables, and foretold his own death, to the last supper and the grim sequence of events leading up to his crucifixion, the unfolding story is one everyone should know. And the story doesn’t end with death. The Good Friday vigil leads to Easter Sunday, when the gospels attest that Jesus rose miraculously from his tomb and appeared once again, to his followers.

This story, which is so definitive for Christians and their faith, is actually more than a Christian story. For Jesus was a Jew and he observed Passover while he was in Jerusalem. This year, Passover occurs during Holy Week, reminding us that these two observances, Passover and Easter, have an intimate history. Their roots come from the same place, the Hebrew bible. The New Testament gospels chronicle a much later time, but they also tell the story of a Jewish teacher, Jesus, who quoted Hebrew scripture and observed traditional rituals.

If you want to understand what Holy Week is all about, you need to know the biblical stories, Old and New. There are other influences, of course. In addition to the obvious seasonal, earth-centered celebration of the arrival of spring, which figures strongly in Passover and Easter, other ancient traditions, especially Roman and Hellenistic, put an imprint on everything from the structure of the seder to the concept of the resurrection. But the primary narrative, for Christians and Jews, is biblical. Every thoughtful Christian and Jew should know the narrative and apply its meaning to life. The story – and the tradition that has evolved from it – are central to Christian and Jewish people of faith.

But what do these stories mean to us? How do we apply their messages to our lives? Is our spirituality centered in them? Do we teach them to our children?

These are nagging questions for Unitarian Universalists, especially this time of year. Whenever I talk about Passover to the children, I cannot bring myself to tell them the whole story. Do they really need to hear how Pharaoh decreed that all Jewish boys should be killed at birth? That Moses invoked ten plagues on the Egyptian people, including the death of their first-born children? That when the Red Sea closed back up again, it drowned the Egyptians?

Perhaps I'm weak, but I can't do it. They already know enough about war and terrorism from the world around them, sad to say. I cannot teach them that our religion is about war and terrorism too.

I’m not a parent. I don’t know much about what goes on in children’s minds. I imagine that they have their share of bad thoughts, angry feelings, and untamed impulses. There probably isn’t much in the bible that is any more shocking than what they can see on TV anytime they want. But it doesn't matter. I can't be the one to tell them these stories.

Something I’ve noticed over the years is that I am increasingly reluctant to tell you those stories too. I rarely turn to a biblical text before writing a sermon. When I search for a good story to apply to our lives, I’m more likely to open a contemporary novel or the newspaper.

Contemplative words for meditation or prayer come just as easily from an eastern religion – perhaps more easily – than from the more familiar western tradition. Poetry touches me more deeply than the parables of Jesus. And I draw my image of God from my experiences of life, not from the testimony of Moses.

Still, I know and you know that the bible is full of important teachings, from which many people today draw meaningful lessons. Think of all that Holy Week compresses into one breathless day after another: Courage, betrayal, love, redemption. Ancient rituals and amazing miracles. Something for Christians, something for Jews. We need to know what’s in it.

But biblical literacy is not the same thing as a usable faith. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose words I spoke to open the service, was one of our early religious thinkers who questioned the relevance of the bible. “Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition?” he asked. “[Why should we not have] a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

These were radical ideas Emerson put forward, and not tentatively, but boldly and confidently. By the time Walt Whitman came along, a new spirituality – rooted in the Transcendentalist thought of Emerson and his friends – had made its mark on liberal religion. We read Whitman’s words this morning also: “We consider bibles and religions divine – I do not say they are not divine; I say that they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still; It is not they who give the life – it is you who give the life.”

Our Unitarian Universalist approach to religion emerged out of these words and ideas, our radical heritage still visible in much that we say and do. The approach many of us take to the bible – and any other sacred text – reflects what Emerson and Whitman taught us. Revelation is not confined to “bibles and religions.” Revelation comes from all of life. We bring ourselves to what we read and experience. Meaning comes from within.

It’s good to go over this ground every now and then, because many of us, including me, need to remember what it is that makes us the way we are. It explains our spiritual discipline, which is so personal that at times it might look like we didn’t have one. Our discipline is the examined life and the honesty with which we live it.

So if it all starts with us – if it is we “who give the life” to bibles and religions, as Whitman likes to say, how does that happen and what can it teach us? It is a challenge to explore some of this territory. A core value of our liberal tradition is openness to the wisdom of all faiths. Yet I have noticed in myself and in many of you more openness to some faiths than others. Often, the less familiar a faith tradition is, the more open we can be, while the faith of our childhood – especially if it was imposed on us – shuts us down.

Whenever I read a passage from the Hebrew bible or the New Testament during the service, I see little frowns and furrowed brows on many faces among you. I sense my own ambivalence too. And I struggle with what this means.

I struggle because I realize that any critique we could make of the biblical traditions: that they are too patriarchal, too hard to believe, too violent and inconsistent; we could also make of any other. From the great epics of Hinduism and Buddhism to the poetry of the Sufis, there are as many bad examples and ideas to reject as there are in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. What we find in Leviticus is as rule-bound and unacceptable as any fundamentalist reading of the Koran. Taken on its own, scripture is a great disappointment.

And yet, as Walt Whitman wrote, it comes out of us. The good and the bad, the loving and the hateful, it’s all familiar human territory. We have to look at it and take only what is meaningful to us.

The message it has for us is not in what we reject. The message is in what we accept. This is how we give it the life it has for us. We learn from what is positive.

If the relationship we have to the biblical tradition is problematic, perhaps it is because the activity of accepting and rejecting calls on more of us – our history, our familiarity, our joy and our pain – to give it the life it has for us. It takes work. It takes a little extra effort to be open-minded and even-handed in our dealings with it. But its message can be as universal and insightful as any other, when we are the ones who listen.

A couple of months ago, a great little book arrived in the mail, unsolicited, and titled "Oneness: Great Principles Shared by All Religions," edited by Jeffrey Moses. He organizes scripture and sayings from many different faith traditions under different categories, such as “the world is our family” and “speak truth.” You can see at a glance the many similarities all the religions share. The readings are carefully chosen, and that is their beauty.

When you see them all arranged that way, you realize that what makes them holy is not their exclusive insight into life, but their universality. People from all different religions and parts of the world have given them the life. And from them they received comfort and guidance that is rooted in ancient tradition and the history of humanity.

But just as Emerson reminded us, revelation does not belong only to what is ancient and historic. It can come from there, because revelation can come at any time, from any source: from daily life too, and nature, family, music – anywhere we look. What it takes is for us to be open to it wherever we may seek.

There is something to learn everywhere we turn. With self-knowledge and openness, we can go anywhere, learn anything, and grow in character and spirit. We should not fear what is old nor value too highly what is new. Instead we should examine carefully what we accept and what we reject and remember always that we are the ones who bring the life to every truth we discover.