“Love Incarnate”

By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

April 8, 2007

            It’s Easter morning, or as I like to call it, “The Annual Conundrum.”

            Why do I call Easter morning the “The Annual Conundrum?”

            Isn’t it obvious? Most of you, I know, believe neither in the divinity of Jesus nor in the literal truth of his resurrection. Nor, by the way, do I. Nevertheless, on Easter Morning, many of you expect something Easter-ish.

            The way I’ve worked myself out of this conundrum in the past is to use Easter morning as my one time during the year to really talk about Jesus.

            For some of you, especially those of you still recovering from the religious wounds of your upbringing and still suffering from a bad case of cross cringe, you think talking about Jesus once a year is still too much, and you wish I would just stick to stories about bunnies and flowers and springtime.

            For some of you, especially those of you who may have left the religious tradition of your upbringing but have done so without so much baggage and are more used to an “all Jesus all the time” kind of church, talking about Jesus once a year doesn’t seem like enough.

            And this is why it’s so fun to be a Unitarian Universalist minister, especially on Easter morning.

            One Easter morning, not long ago, I talked about the difference between the historical Jesus and the popular image of Jesus in our culture. I talked about the popular image of Jesus as being one of Divine Savior. Most people today believe that Jesus was the divinely begotten Son of God, that his mission was to die for the sins of the world, and his message was about the importance of believing in him. However, many academic biblical scholars tell us this was not how Jesus understood himself, and these understandings of Jesus only developed in the decades and centuries after his death.

            On another Easter morning not long ago, I talked about the three most important things that we as Unitarian Universalists should remember about Jesus. What are these things? First and most importantly, he practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love. Second, what he opposed most was anything that oppressed or exploited the human spirit, especially economic exploitation. Third, he taught that the most appropriate response to oppression and exploitation was active, non-violent resistance.

            Then last year on Easter morning amidst the holy hullabaloo surrounding The DaVinci Code, I talked about some of the claims that novel and film made and what the best historical evidence tells us about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

            So I wondered, what I should talk about this year on Easter morning? I thought perhaps about talking about artistic representations of Jesus throughout history and what they tell us about ourselves. After all, there’s so many. There was Michelangelo’s Pieta. There was Norma “Duffy” Lyon’s depiction of The Last Supper at the 1999 Iowa State Fair, a depiction that was sculpted entirely out of one ton of butter. And there was this year in New York City Cosimo Cavallaro’s controversial all-chocolate nude sculpture of Jesus provocatively titled My Sweet Lord.

            However, I decided not to go there.

            Instead, I want to ask this question this morning. What would happen if we took the mythical stories about Jesus more seriously?

            You see on the one hand, I think it’s very important for us a Unitarian Universalists to seek out the best understanding we can about the historical Jesus, to understand who he really was and what he really stood for and what he really stood against. I think it’s terribly important that we take back Jesus back from those who would use his name to justify morally atrocious actions. One might say that Jesus is the biggest victim of identify theft in all human history. I think it’s important that we never forget that the values that were most important to him were compassion, inclusivity, justice, and non-violence.

            On the other hand, I think we may miss out on something if we don’t talk at all about the mythical stories about Jesus.

            Why? I think we live our lives by stories. We use stories to interpret our lives, to make sense out of our lives, to explain our lives, and even to help us decide how to live our lives.

            And many of the stories we use to interpret our lives are not stories that are not literally true, whether they be the plays of William Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen, or even the latest Harry Potter movie. Nevertheless, these stories point to universal truths about human existence and help us live more richly. In other words, we don’t have to take story literally to take it seriously and to benefit from it.

            And so the question that I want to ask this morning is what would happen if we took the mythical stories about Jesus more seriously?

            For example, let’s start with this notion that Jesus was divine, that God so loved humanity that God became incarnate, became embodied, became flesh and bone. When I reflect on this myth of incarnation, it seems ridiculous to me at first - - no, not ridiculous as a matter of fact, but ridiculous within the context of the biblical story itself. I mean, why would it be necessary for God to take human form? Couldn’t God just snap his fingers, or her fingers, to make whatever changes he or she wanted in the world? Wouldn’t one almighty wink of the eye do the trick? Couldn’t God just even imagine the changes he or she wanted to make them instantaneously occur?

            I think this apparent paradox points to one of the universal truths that this story reveals, that for anything to make a difference in this world, for anything to become real, it has to become incarnate, it has to become embodied, it has to take on flesh and bones. It can’t remain as spirit, or idea, or abstraction. Not even the love of an all-powerful God can make a difference without becoming incarnate, this story tells us.

            I would like to suggest that this is an especially important truth for us to remember as Unitarian Universalists. Why? For better or worse, we Unitarian Universalists are a rather heady bunch, and there’s nothing that many of us love in life more than a good discussion about almost any issue. I suspect we sometimes forget, however, that discussing the world won’t change it, and it’s not enough to have the right thoughts and the right values about the way things should be.

            Of course, once in a while when we get really upset about some problem in the world, we’ll do something really radical, like signing a petition. And if we think something is a really serious problem, we might even go so far as to pass a resolution at one of our General Assemblies. Afterward, we’ll go home, returning to our relatively comfortable middle-class lifestyles, self-satisfied with ourselves that we’ve “done something.”

            Perhaps this is why William Shulz when he was president of the Unitarian Universalist Association said that Unitarian Universalists need more of a “theology of dirty hands.” I think he recognized, to put it bluntly, that talk is cheap. Shulz words echoed the words of the Thomas Jefferson, who once said, “it is in our lives and not in our words that our religion must be read.”

            It’s also why I’m so happy that this congregation is beginning to do a much better job of reaching out into the communities where we live and living our our religious values.

            But why do we so often hesitate to put our not only our thoughts and our feelings but our deepest ideals and values into action, making them more real?

            Well, I reflect back on this story of God becoming incarnate

            Can you imagine the Lord God, sovereign of the universe, maker of heaven and earth, suddenly becoming incarnate, becoming flesh and bone, and being trapped in a body, not even the body of an adult, but in the body of a baby, and being wrapped up in swaddling clothes and suffering all the bodily indignities of being fully human - - of getting hungry and thirsty, and having to sleep, and having to excrete?

            I think that this points to another universal truth that this story reveals

            Becoming real is not only hard, it’s literally messy. It’s easy to wax eloquent about high ideals. It’s much harder to put them into practice in our lives. And this true of so many of the ideals we hold, but I think it’s especially true of love.

            I remember listening to the father of a friend of mine who remembers the first time he realized what real love is. It was not when he proposed to his wife. It was not on their wedding day when they exchanged their vows. It was during their first year of marriage when she had the stomach flu and he was holding back her hair as she threw up into the toilet. “This is what it really must mean to love somebody,” he said to himself.

            Real love is messy. Real anything is messy.

            Here’s another universal truth that I think this story reveals: Not only is making anything real hard and messy, but when we commit ourselves to any ideal, especially the ideal of love, we also ourselves up to the possibility of hurt. In life, love and hurt sometimes go together. In stories about Jesus, we see this in Jesus’ suffering on the cross - - the result of his efforts to make the world a more loving more just place.

            Kahil Gibran gets at this too in his book The Prophet, when he writes:

            Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which you laughter rises was oftentimes filled with yours tears.

       And how else can it be?

       The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

       Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?

       And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

       When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

       When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

            In other words, in life we don’t have a choice in life between joy and sorrow, between love and hurt.  They come together as a package, a two-for-one existential special. The only thing we have about a choice about is whether we live with our hearts open or shut.

            What do I mean?

            Here’s a story about one of my dogs. You see, I have two dogs, a lab and a beagle, and they’re both starting to get old. The lab is now 10, and the beagle is now 8. And my lab is lumpy. She has these big fatty lumps all over. None of them is malignant, and I have the vet bills to prove it.

            But when she first started getting these lumps, I got scared, even after I knew they were benign. They scared me because they made me realize that one day, I would lose this dog that I love and I knew it would hurt a lot. I found myself beginning to emotionally distancing myself from her without even realizing it. I didn’t want to touch her or her lumps or have her sit next to me on the couch when I read at night.

            I took me a while to realize that I was doing that - - that I was robbing her and me of precious time together now because of my fear of losing her in the future.

            It was a stupid thing to do, and I’ve learned to love her lumps and all, but I think the temptation is always there - - for us to stop loving and stop caring, about one another and about the greater world, because we’re afraid of the pain we might open ourselves up to.

            This leads me to a third universal truth that I think the mythical stories about Jesus reveal, and that has to do with the stories about his resurrection.

            That’s the event that most Christians celebrate today. But how do I take this part of the story seriously, even if I don’t take it literally?

            In many ways, the resurrection seems like a Hollywood happy ending that was tacked on to an otherwise tragic story, and in fact, as I said earlier, this is most likely what happened. In the decades after Jesus’ death, the early Christian communities borrowed from the myths of other gods arising from the dead because, after all, how could you have a good story when the hero dies in the end?

            Recognizing this, when Thomas Jefferson cut and paste his own version of the gospel stories together, he left out the resurrection. His last line was, “There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed.”

            But I know this. I do believe in resurrections. No, I’m not talking about the literal resurrection of the body after death, either of Jesus or anyone else. I’m talking about resurrections from the thousands of small metaphorical deaths that each of us face during our lives - - the disappointments, the frustrations, the struggles and occasional failures with our own demons, the larger public failures, our griefs over loss after loss after loss.

            I do not believe the human spirit is not indomitable, but I have come to believe that it is more resilient than any of us have any right to believe, and if there is anything worth truly celebrating on this Easter morning it is this - - that there is the possibility for each of us of rising again and again and again from our defeats, from our failures, and from our losses.

            I know there are people in this congregation who are having trouble in their marriages and in their families. I know there are people who are having problems at work. I know there are those who are having challenges with children. I know there are people experiencing health problems. I know there are those who are experiencing sharp, aching grief.

            My hope for those of you who are experiencing these things is that you won’t let go of the hope that there is the possibility of new life on the far side of frustration, failure, and loss.

            But how does this new life happen for us?

            Sometimes it comes through the achingly slow wisdom of time working its way in our souls, helping us to discover meaning in what was before meaningless.

            Sometimes it comes with the help of others. “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person,” Albert Schweitzer wrote, and “Each of has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

            Sometimes it comes through resurrections of our own making, through pure pluck and our sheer determination not to let life get the better of us.

            My colleague the Unitarian Universalist minister Lynn Ungar once asked provocatively who rolled away the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb, the resurrected Jesus himself or some other savior of the savior. Can anybody push away the stone in front of his or her own tomb? Perhaps.

            Here’s a story about Donna Frisk that I didn’t tell at her memorial service two weeks ago. After Donna faced a life-threatening illnesses in 1989, it took her nearly three years - - not three days - - to recover, and part of that recovery was simply getting up and walking again, which Donna did through sheer determination. Nearly every day, with her sister at her side, Donna would walk outside. It took her an hour to walk the distance a normal person could walk in 15 minutes, but she persistently shuffled along, and it was an important part of her becoming well  again. That is a resurrection whose literal truth I do believe in because I witnessed it with my own eyes.

            My friends, if we decide to take some of the more mythical stories about Jesus seriously - - not literally, but seriously - - these are some of the universal truths I want to suggest these stories might reveal: that nothing that does not become incarnate, become embodied, can ever make a difference in this world, but that making something real is always hard and messy; that when our values become incarnate in our lives, especially our love, it opens us to the possibility of both greater joy and greater sorrow, but that whenever life is difficult for us, we should hold on to the hope of a better, new life for us on the far side of frustration, failure, loss, and despair.

            May this Easter season be full of new life for us all.

            So may it be. Amen.