04/05/2026
On this Easter Sunday, Rev. David writes:
In an age of rising Christian nationalism -- where Jesus is white, and militant, and wants to make America great again; where our country’s wars are crusades ordained by God, and the only thing that can save civil society is the ten commandments on public school walls -- I have an entirely different story to tell about the teacher: the one that’s actually written.
The old accounts says that Jesus spent his whole ministry making a community of radical inclusion and hospitality and welcome real in fact in this world.
Like Unitarians and Universalists have been doing for centuries, we gather at Easter to remember what Jesus did before he died, not to speculate about what came after. We don’t return to the Gospel story for the historical detail it provides, but the heart-story it describes – because we’ve lived that heart-story, too, glimpsed its invitation.
The old story says that Jesus spent his whole ministry making a community of radical inclusion and hospitality and welcome real in fact in this world.
And in the end, the teacher goes up into Jerusalem knowing he will be betrayed and killed. He knows it. And he goes anyway: joyful, hopeful, heartfelt, beautiful, undeceived. He goes to share the good news: the invitation into how we can be in this world; how different our life can be, will be, is when love is at the center and compassion the thread you follow through the maze of the world. That was the whole of his work, all the way to the end: joyful and heartbroken, both.
We retell that story here, to each other in this house: Christians, some, but mostly not: atheists and Buddhists and mystics and humanists and religious naturalists. We retell the story every Easter not because we’re interested in the religion about Jesus, but because we’re trying to do the same thing he invited his people into: living open-eyed and broken-hearted; deeply in love with this hurting world as it is, and as it can become, and as we can become within it.
Here’s the thing: I'm not interested in the fact of the resurrection. I don’t believe in the fact of the resurrection. But I know what the truth of resurrection looks like.
I know it firsthand in my own living. I’ve seen it in others. I’ve heard your stories, too, of what it is to come back into living again: from grief, from loss, from addiction, from hopelessness. To find a way through that narrow kind of living which squeezes the life out of you. To discover that within the grief which weighs you is a different way of carrying it. To find within yourself the capacity and capability of loving when hope and grief walk hand in hand. That there is a dawn that comes on the far side of the dark nights.
Myth isn’t about something that never happened, it’s about something happening over and over and over and over… The dead don’t rise, but we do.
Without miracle, without divinity, the Easter myth is not a comfort but a commission: that love can have the final word if we are love’s hands. That no power in the world that can stop a beloved community of resistance, not even death. And that the answer to the inevitable reality of death, and failure, and despair – which are facts of life – is not to run from them but to face them, and carry them, and transform them: to be whole and human.
In our liberal religious tradition, the invitation of Easter is to the demanding, liberating work of facing our grief and our celebration, and weaving them t...
