“Something Easterish”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
March 23, 2008

             Life is difficult. Life is difficult. Life is difficult.

            My friends, of all the truths I know, this is one of the truths of which I am most certain.

            Of course, I am hardly the first one to say this.

            “Life is difficult,” is the first sentence of M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled.

            But he wasn’t the first one to say it either.

            More than 2,000 years earlier, when Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, spoke the first of his Four Noble Truths, the four statements that summarized his whole philosophy of life, he started by saying, “All of life is dukkha.”  Dukkha  is a Sanskrit word that is often translated to mean “suffering,” as in, “All of life is suffering,” but this is a poor translation. A better translation of dukkha is “difficultness,” as in, “All of life is difficultness.” Or in other words, we’re all in deep dukkha.

            Similarly, in Hebrew scripture, the author of Ecclesiastes, famously wrote, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…all things are wearisome; more than one can express.”

            Even now, as we’ve nudged our way into the 21^st century and live amidst technological marvels and miracles that would have astounded people even a generation ago, life is still difficult.

            And there are so many ways that life is difficult.

            Life is difficult because hardly anything in life is ever as easy as it seems. Almost everything in life takes longer than we think it will take. As human beings, we stumble, fall, and fail at almost everything we try, again and again and again. We are constantly failing.

            We fail because of our own ignorance. We fail because of short-sightedness. We fail because of our hubris. We fail because of the weaknesses of our own wills. We fail because we give in to the lesser angels of our nature, because we are human and imperfect.

            Sometimes we only stumble, so slightly that only we notice, but often we fall flat on our faces in the dirt, humiliated for all the world to see and stare at, and to make things even worse, there is always at least one voice to say, “I told you so. I told you that you were worthless,” and sadly, sometimes that one voice is our own.

            Life is difficult because love is difficult. Love, that sweet elixir that is not only supposed to make all life worth living but also make all our troubles go away, so often seems to be more cause than cure of our difficulties in life. We truly love those in our lives whom we love, but sometimes we struggle to like them very much. One of life’s bitter ironies is that it those we love most who sometimes hurt us the most and whom we sometimes hurt the most, either intentionally or through our carelessness.

            Life is difficult because there is so much injustice in the world, injustice driven by ignorance, by fear, by envy, by greed, by the lust for power, by pure meanness, and worst of all, by indifference to suffering. There are also all the “isms” which are used to rationalize and justify this injustice - - classism, racism, homophobia and heterosexism, ageism, the ableism, and all the other different ways that human beings say to one another, “You are not quite as human as I am,” all the different excuses that people give themselves for oppressing and exploiting those whom should be called “brother” or “sister.”

            Life is difficult because we do not live in Eden. Nature is indeed miraculous, beautiful, and abundant, but it can also be harsh, cruel, and fickle with its favor.

As anybody who has ever had blackberry bushes in their backyard knows, we can never truly live in harmony with nature, but only negotiated truce.

            Life is difficult because our bodies are such imperfect things, really meant for only a few decades of good use before things start to wear out and go wrong with them, and they’re poorly designed from the beginning. The wife of a friend of mine gave birth a few weeks ago and nearly died and most surely would have only a few generations ago. In this life, even the most precious, beautiful life-giving act is tinged with pain and risk.

            Life is difficult because each of us and everyone we love is mortal. We live in the knowledge that we will someday die, and before we die ourselves, we suffer the harsh anguish of loss and grieve the deaths of so many of those we have chosen to love.

            Life is difficult.

            And how easy it would be to give up, to give in, to cry uncle, to throw up our hands, to throw in the towel, to waive a white flag of surrender already drenched in our own sweat and tears.

            How easy it would be to resign ourselves to the futility of our own efforts, to the hopelessness of love, to the impossibility of our dreams, to the improbability that anything will ever get better and the possibility it may even get worse. The optimist says that we live in the best possible of all worlds, and the pessimist says he’s probably right.

            How easy it would be to give in to bitterness, to hopelessness, to despair.

            And yet, we don’t.

            Time after time, we don’t give in. Instead we rise again. We rise again from failure, from humiliation, from hurt, from injustice, from disaster, from injury, from illness, from the anguish of grief. We rise again from all of these things, and we rise to life.

            How do we do it?

            In her poem “Easter,” Lynn Ungar asks whether the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb was pushed away or rolled away.

             What I want to know is simply this: 

Who rolled away the stone? 

Did Jesus, reviving from the touch of Judas’ kiss

Turn miracle to muscle on his own?

Or did some savior of the Savior move the rock

To let life enter from outside –

Resurrection as a sort of picking of the lock

That separates the bridegroom from his waiting bride? 

Perhaps the stone itself got bored

With waiting for a happy ending to the story,

And rolled itself away to set the body it had stored

Upon the royal road to new life and eternal glory. 

            My experience of life teaches me that our own resurrections are usually of our own making. More than anybody else, we are each individually are responsible for our own lives, and it’s up to us to decide whether to roll away the stone or stay trapped in whatever tomb we have found ourselves trapped in.

            And time after time, we do. We roll away the stone, or we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and continue to put one foot in front of the other, over and over and over again. We persevere and refuse to quit, even though quitting would be the easiest thing to do, even though, at times, it seems like it would be the most rational thing to do.

            A few of you know that this church had a bad fire in 1969. A pot left on the stove in the kitchen started it all. The fire destroyed most of the contents of the sanctuary, including an organ. It did significant damage to the building itself, which members of this church had built mostly themselves with their own hands only nine years earlier. Can you imagine what it must have been like that first Sunday after the fire, when people drove up to this building and saw it so damaged? It would have been easy for those early members of this church to call it quits. But they didn’t. They didn’t give up on their dream creating a liberal religious home in South King County for themselves for the many others who would come after them.

            When we stumble, when we fall, when we fail, we learn from our mistakes, we strengthen our wills. We transcend the pain we have given to and received from those we love through the power of asking for and granting forgiveness. We take steps toward reconciliation. We search for and discover meaning in the vicissitudes of our living. We discover that love is stronger than death and outlasts death and that beyond grief there is gratitude.

            And though at times it may boil down to nothing more than pure stubbornness, we refuse to quit, and in doing so we discover inner reserves, we discover that we are able to endure things that we would have never imagined that we would be able to endure.

            If you had told me Hiromi and me on the day that we got married that we would have to wait more than 11 years before we would see a child we call our own gathering Easter eggs, a child who has brought so much joy to our lives, I have no idea what we would have said or done. We might have said that we didn’t have it in us to wait that long, but we did.

            So many of you have endured things that you never thought you could have endured. The loss of jobs, financial hardships, difficulties with children, marital infidelity, the end of relationships, recovery from addictions, difficult surgeries, rounds of chemotherapy, the loss and occasional replacement of parts of your body, and you have not only survived, but learn to thrive again, to say, “Life is good. Life is still good despite its limitations.”

            Even though I believe our own resurrections are mostly of our own making, I also know that not one of us rises again completely by ourselves. One of my favorite readings from our hymnal is by Albert Schweitzer: "At time our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us."

            In similar fashion, in Christian scripture in the Gospel of Mark, there is the miraculous healing story of Jesus’ encounter with a paralyzed man, and he tells the man, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and go home.”

            As religious liberals, we may doubt the historical truth of the story, but we can affirm that deeper truth, that in each of our lives there have been times when we have been paralyzed by doubt, by fear, or by something else, and there has been somebody who has seen within us the potential that were not able to see ourselves and has urged us to continue on, not to lie where we have fallen, and we have continued on.

            The times I am proudest to be the minister of this religious community are the times when I see you lifting each other up, offering one another not only sympathy, but hope and courage as well.

            While we often rise again through our own efforts or with the help of others, I also believe that we rise again with the help of something else. There have been times in my own life when my I have done everything I could do on my own or with the help of others and still it was not enough to lift myself back up, but then I have experienced something. The theologian Paul Tillich has said sometimes “a wave of light breaks into our darkness.” Whether you call this God or spirit or something else, I don’t think matters, but my experience of life teaches me that it is real.

            Time after time, in dealing with the difficulties of life, we rise again as individuals. We also rise again and again in our shared struggles.

            Sometimes, I get so discouraged. Sometimes I think that the problems that we face as a society are so overwhelming, that the forces against change are so powerful, and so I wonder what good will come from any small effort that I make.

            And then I remember.

            Human history is a story of oppression and exploitation and injustice, but it is also the story of people rising up again and again against injustice, rising up again and again for freedom, for equality, for justice, rising up against improbable odds, seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and seemingly intractable opponents.

            Who could have ever imagined, in the mid-1700s that a small group of American revolutionaries would be able to overcome the British army in order to create the beginnings of a free and democratic country on this continent?

            Who could have ever imagined in the mid-19^th century that slavery would ever end or that women would ever have the right to vote?

            Who could have ever imagined in the 1950s that one day not only would African Americans enjoy full civil rights, but that in 2008, two of the major candidates for the office of Presidents of the United States would be a woman and an African American man?

            Who could have ever imagined in 1962 when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and was subsequently vilified by powerful corporations and government officials that the pesticides she said were so harmful to our environment would one day be banned?

            Who could ever imagined in June of 1969, at the time of the first Stonewall protests, that one day gays and lesbians would have the right to marry in some states and would have at least some legal protections in many others including this one?

            Who could have ever imagined at the height of the Cold War that the Berlin Wall would ever fall, or that Apartheid would ever end in South Africa?

            But time and time again, people did imagine such things, were put down again and again, rose up again and again, and were eventually successful in their efforts.

            This week, many of us have heard or read about protests in Tibet, protests led mostly by Buddhist monks against the People’s Republic of China. At first glance, the monks’ protests seem so futile, but if history is any guide, the People’s Republic of China should be the one to give up now.

            Of course, there are never any guarantees. It is not inevitable that we will succeed or triumph in our individual or shared struggles in this life.

            And yet, sometimes we do. Enough times, we do.

            Sheenaugh Pugh writes in a poem titled “Sometimes”…

             Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

From bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

Faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,

Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

Elect an honest man; decide they care

Enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

Amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

That seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

             Sometimes it does happen for us. Sometimes, it already has happened. There is not a person sitting in this room today, I believe, that has not already overcome something incredible in their lives to be here today.

            And so my friends, let us celebrate.

            This is the season when we celebrate the earth re-awakening from its winter’s rest. The day now lasts longer than the night, and we look all around us in nature and see once again life returning, life emerging, life rejoicing, in every bud and flower, in the birdsong of every morning.

            This is also the season when those who find inspiration in the Christian tradition celebrate the Easter Story, a story that celebrates Christ’s victory over sin and death, but let us celebrate the deeper universal truth of that story, a truth known and celebrated in every culture of the world, a truth about the resilience of the human spirit.

            So let us celebrate the resilience of the human spirit this morning and this season, the resilience of the spirits of all of those who have come before to give us the world we have today and the resilience of our own spirits.

            Let us celebrate our own victory over all that we have overcome, all that we have endured, all that through which we have persevered, sometimes through our own efforts, sometimes with the help of one another, and sometimes with the help of that creative power within us and amidst us and known to us by many names.

            Let us revel in the glory of new life on the far side of frustration, struggle, failure, and loss. Let us rejoice over it. Let us delight in it. Let us be glad and give thanks and sing alleluia.

            So may it be.

            Amen.