"It Happens Every Spring"

This morning I want to talk about the spring holidays of Passover and Palm Sunday/Easter. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Usually it coincides with Passover. Naturally, since the Last Supper of Easter week was in all probability a Seder celebration. For those of you who struggle with biblical imagery, I invite you to think of these stories the way I was taught in a Unitarian Sunday school: think of them as springboards to contemplation. Take for instance, the Passover story recounted during the Seder meal: the Jews’ liberation from slavery described in the Book of Exodus. To understand stories of this kind, we have to think of religious literature as myth. By myth I don’t mean “primitive untruth.” I mean epic poetry inviting our imaginative engagement and elaboration. Whatever you do: don’t take myths literally: that’s what Fundamentalists do. They’re metaphorical. Whatever the story’s talking about, it’s more than a 1-time event. Moreover, all the parts of the story are all happening all the time. Pharaoh-like despots are exploiting others desperately; heroic leaders are inspiring followers; these things are happening across the globe every day. While myth tells the story, ritual acts it out. Myth & ritual always go together (myth = Exodus; ritual = Seder supper). It’s a struggle sometimes, but we have to try to transcend literalism: when you see Exodus as more than a one-time event, but as a symbol, a paradigm for liberation and change, that’s when you begin to get it mythically.

Let me approach this another way. It helps our appreciation of the Passover story as metaphor when we learn that the word “Egypt” in Hebrew means the “narrow place”. To be enslaved in Egypt means being bound to a narrow place, to a narrow vision and a narrow politics; we all know Egypt: the rigid world of natives vs. emigrants, gays vs. straights, patriots vs. socialists—a world that passes for common sense among modern-day Egyptians across America. The thing about myth though, all its parts are happening all the time: at all times there’s the invitation to leave Egypt behind and crossover to freedom. For our ancestors of biblical legend that freedom came once they agreed to live by a covenant. Just like ours that we recited earlier this morning—well, theirs was more patriarchal perhaps, but a covenant just the same. Here’s my point: from a mythic perspective you leave slavery behind when you bind together with like-minded, imaginative people for creative purposes. When we gather together in that spirit there’s almost no limit to what we can accomplish! Until we forget how to live in freedom and find ourselves wandering in the wilderness again—sometimes for a long while.

Hundreds of years after Exodus come the events described in New Testament: the story of an unofficial rabbi from the provinces who, after a brief ministry in the countryside, comes with his rag-tag band triumphantly into Jerusalem. All four gospels recount the enthusiasm he met that day—enthusiasm that was dashed within less than a week. I’ll do what I can to make sense of the tragic events next week. For the rest of this morning’s service I want to take look instead at the image of Jesus’ triumphal entry through the same mythic lens with which we contemplated Exodus. Looked at this way, Jesus’ triumphal moment can be seen as paradigmatic, as the archetypal image of the reformer. Further, I want to consider how this reformer archetype informed the heart of a 17th century literary hero from Massachusetts, and the efforts of early 20th century reformers here in California. I do this to help us remember that Christian myth—like Jewish myth, like all myth—is never about a single event. Myth happens all the time, and keeps happening all the time. It’s a way of describing life poetically. Indeed, every aspect of the story keeps happening all the time. So to understand the Palm Sunday story we need to, first, see and understand the archetype. Then we can see how it’s reflected—re-expressed, as it were—in other venues closer to home.

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“When you’re lost in the rain in Juárez, and it’s Easter time, too… “begins Bob Dylan’s masterful Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. Amidst sickness, despair, prostitutes and saints, the singer recounts a trip south of the border where he encounters mysterious powerful women like Saint Annie and Sweet Melinda, corrupt authorities, and other archetypal forces until—pulled by gravity, negativity, drink, illness, remorse and memories—he gathers himself together and heads home.

A few years ago, the district UU ministers and religious educators gathered in El Paso. On a free afternoon, I crossed into Ciudad Juárez, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues echoing in my head the whole time. It was great, but also troubling: gang and drug-related activity has left Juarez with the highest murder rate by far of any city in North America. Dozens of desperately poor children sought handouts. I remember thinking, this has to change…as I looked up to see, in front of me, “Casa de Cambrio,” “House of Change.” A Church? I wondered. A Community Center dedicated to social justice? Alas, the storefront was but a currency conversion booth—a convenient way to change dollars into pesos—and nothing more. Desperately poor though a community may be, there is always some entrepreneur ready to squeeze a few more dollars out of tourists.

Currency conversion…there’s always room for that, too…. It was currency conversion, after all, that led to Jesus’ denouement.

After a brief preaching and storytelling ministry in Galilee, Jesus, accompanied by a group of loyal disciples, went to Jerusalem—not to die but to proclaim his vision of the imminent Kingdom to the throng of worshippers there for the celebration of Passover. Whatever else this guy Jesus was, he was definitely a change agent. He probably entered the city unnoticed, but he soon attracted attention—the next day—by his dramatic purging of the temple. People from all over the Middle East were visiting the temple. Proper protocol required making a burnt offering of some animal, most often (because it was cheapest) a pigeon. The Sadducean temple clique required that these be purchased with coins from Israel. No other kind of coin was allowed, so the moneychangers were there to convert coins from Egypt and Rome and Babylon to the coins of Israel, at high interest. The temple priests also received a kickback from the moneychangers—sort of an executive bonus. Jesus was angry, declaring that the priests had turned a house of God into a den of robbers. His act of overturning the tables of the money changers is found in all four gospels, but in Mark—the oldest account—he adds that the temple was meant to be a house of prayer…for all peoples. In Mark’s telling, Jesus is more than a reformer who wants to clean up temple corruption—the change he has in mind is revolutionary, not only to clean up the temple but to transform it, not just for the people of Israel but for the whole world!

This act, together with his teaching in the temple area, quite likely added to his popularity with the people, but no doubt incurred the enmity of the Sadducean temple clique. At this point Pontius Pilate, the Roman military governor, possibly fearing that a popular religious leader teaching about some kingdom other than Caesar’s might become the center of a popular disturbance or revolt against Rome, had the man arrested. Following a summary hearing, he was condemned and crucified as a criminal. With this tragic conclusion to his high hopes, the story of Jesus ends…. Or does it? Finding hope in the midst of such an unexpected and utter collapse is next week’s story—Easter. Today I want to focus on the high hopes when he and his coterie were welcomed into the city with their new vision of a transformed and liberated faith, and world.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter concerns another liberal, universalistic spirit who comes to the capital in hopeful expectation, only to find scorn and contempt. Hester Prynne, the story’s hero, arrives from afar alone. When it becomes obvious that she’s pregnant and that she won’t reveal to the civil and religious authorities who her lover was, she is forced to wear a bright red letter “A” on her bodice as a badge of her adultery. Hawthorne’s descriptions of the narrow-minded scolds who condemn Hester and her innocent child are chilling and cruel. But such was the scene in those days. The eloquent young Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, unlike most of his contemporaries, does not preach hellfire and damnation, or the harsh punishment of sinners. People admire him, but they don’t listen to him—compassion and tenderness are not their way. It turns out, of course, that Dimmesdale, in a moment of weakness, was Hester’s lover and the father of her child. Moreover, the guilt of living with that knowledge cripples him so dreadfully that, in the end, he collapses in grief and shame. Shocked as the Puritan authorities are at this, it is nothing compared to their outrage that Hester would not be shamed. She wears her scarlet “A” with pride, intricately embroidering it into a beautiful, striking adornment. The “shame and blame” authoritarian clique does in Dimmesdale—he doesn’t have the courage to step outside the patriarchal rigid order and, in the end, it destroys him—but not Hester. She, of course, has the comfort of being a very private person. The young prophetic Dimmesdale, forced to comply with public rules and regulations, is crushed. The unbending patriarchal order survives for several generations, along with its shame and blame mentality, poised to crush almost anyone who dares to challenge it.

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Life in California one hundred years ago was different in many ways from that in ancient Palestine or 17th century Massachusetts. The ruling authorities, however, like those of 2000 and 250 years before, were an often harsh and hard-driving clique who ruled not so much with severity as with practiced carelessness. The powerful Southern Pacific Railroad and its major clients dominated state politics. In San Francisco and Los Angeles municipal corruption, replete with generous kickbacks and bonuses, was rampant. Tensions between capital and labor simmered under the surface, nurturing a constant threat of violence. Then, quite suddenly, vigorous reformers challenged the power of the railroad and successfully passed a dramatic set of badly needed reforms that promoted good government and democracy and soothed class conflict.

Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican attorney who had successfully prosecuted corruption in San Francisco, was elected Governor of California one hundred years ago this November. The legislative accomplishments of his administration were impressive: direct democracy, woman's suffrage, labor legislation, and railroad and utilities reform. Then, almost as quickly as they strode onto the scene the reformers vanished; 1911 was their high water mark. Rather than maintain their focus at the state level, California progressives turned their attention to the presidential election of 1912. GOP infighting led to the formation of the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party which nominated the still youthful ex-President Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt took California, but lost the election to the Virginia-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson—the first Southerner in the White House since the death of Zachary Taylor 64 years earlier, leading to the reintroduction of segregated washrooms throughout the nation’s capital. Hard economic times and then World War I quickly contributed to the collapse of the Progressive Party. By 1916 it was all over. Johnson became increasingly reactionary, Teddy Roosevelt withdrew from politics (his sympathizers displaced by conservatives within the leadership of the GOP) and war loomed. Before long, the Southern Pacific Railroad was controlling Sacramento once again.

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Ancient Palestine, long-ago Boston, and early 20th century California…. What about here, today? Where have we seen youthful, reformist energy thwarted by an unyielding Old Guard? Where do shame and blame still work to keep Beloved Community at bay? Obsessive observance to the letter over the spirit of the law? The belittlement and criminalization of spiritual renewal? Or liberal reform? These things happen everywhere. They happen right here in our neighborhoods. In City Hall and Sacramento. In Washington, DC.

Passover and Palm Sunday are not about obscure events that may have happened centuries ago. The exodus, the entry into Jerusalem—these things are happening every day…along with betrayal and picking up the pieces and all the other aspects of the myth that so often follow—though not invariably, as Hester’s capacity to transcend her predicament by refusing to be shamed in the face of love, and Franklin Roosevelt’s eventual picking up of his cousin Teddy’s liberal agenda both make clear.

My intention this morning is to help our members understand the ways in which mythic archetypes like “Exodus” and the ‘Entry into Jerusalem’ are alive at every hand, finding exemplification over and over in the drama of our lives. Think of President Obama and his liberal allies garnering the political will to pass healthcare reform. As always, the Sadducean-Puritan-Southern Pacific cult of Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Company lurks in the wings, praying for the young leader’s collapse—one they will be happy to accommodate, even help bring about, should the opportunity arise.

But for now, today, let us celebrate the triumph of hope and possibility over those forces that always threaten it. Let us admire young and fearless prophets and liberators wherever they find the courage to speak out and lead, and wherever followers find among themselves the audacity to hold such people up as the leaders they are. President Barack Obama. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. Hosanna! Blessed are they—all of them—that come in the name of peace, and Beloved Community, and change; who proclaim a new era, or Kingdom, or Casa de Cambrio, and challenge all of us—and our brothers and sisters across the aisle, across town and across the world—to build a new order with them, not of shame and blame any longer, not of power over, not of patriarchy or oligarchy or power clique anymore. But of love and compassion. Let us celebrate that: the triumph—however fragile and temporary it may be—of love and compassion and hope.

So May It Be. Shalom. Amen.