Happy Easter Sunday!
It’s been a busy period for me leading up to today. I’ve had the unusual privilege of doing Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services.
Then there was the planning for and arranging all these beautiful Easter lilies.
While these activities, in addition to the typical adventures in my week, have kept things hopping (there’s an Easter pun there), the biggest adventure has been preparing for this morning’s message.
Progressive preachers often experience this at Easter, given varying theologies.
And so, while Jesus’ physical resurrection won’t be the focus, we could centralize the new-life Easter theme of springtime’s blossoms and buds.
But the daffodils and tulips, through their impeccable beauty, already offer their quiet and perfect homilies, with no need for a second-rate pulpit encore.
For inspiration my mind kept going back to something Kate McGahan once said – Easter teaches us that life never ends and love never dies.
Never ending and never dying reminds me of an Easter story told by a preaching professor by the name of Fred Kraddick.
He recalls his church’s tradition of having 500 lilies in the sanctuary every Easter, thanks to their custom of parishioners having the opportunity each year to buy an Easter lily for $5 (obviously this story takes place a year or so ago).
These lilies were memorial lilies, so for that $5 their lily would be in remembrance of a deceased loved one, whose name would be included in the Easter bulletin.
For years they did this…500 lilies at $5 per, and 500 memorialized names (just like ours) in their bulletin. That had to be one mammoth bulletin, and one aromatic sanctuary. But no one complained.
It just so happened that on the 16th year of this custom a long-time member named Alice asked about taking her lily to the hospital to give to an ailing friend. Upon receiving no answer to her inquiry, Alice took it upon herself right after the service to go up front and get one.
As she picked it up she gasped, and everyone stopped in their tracks and wondered what on earth was wrong. Alice slowly turned around with her lily, and proclaimed with disgust, “It’s plastic!”
Faces fell, brows were furrowed. Grumbling was heard throughout the sanctuary.
An unidentified voice from the back rang out, “Have I been giving $5 a year for the last decade and a half for the same piece of plastic??”
A mathematically astute parishioner came forward after doing the calculations. “$5 for 500 lilies over 15 Easters means we have spent $37,500 on fake lilies.”
The minister, sensing an uprising, hustled up to the chancel and made his best attempt to defend the false flowers. He admitted that they were not real, but countered by saying the money had been spent on people in need.
Some present were satisfied with that, some were not. So the minister had to dig deeper in his defense drawer. Thinking on his feet, he hoped a theological approach would win over the remaining dissenters.
He said, “In addition to the money being used for a good cause, it’s fitting for Easter that they be plastic, because these lilies are eternally in bloom and never die.” (Never ending, never dying)
And then, with one last ditch effort to contain the mutiny, he concluded by saying, “After all, we don’t want to waste Easter.” (With ill will, presumably).
Not having been on the scene all those years ago (when you could get a fresh lily for $5), we’ll never know exactly how long it took that minister to swim out of the deep end of the plastic lily pool.
And more intriguing yet is the unanswered question….Did they start getting fresh lilies after that, and if so, what in the world do you do with hundreds of plastic ones? (This also explains why nobody complained about the intense aroma.)
We’ll never know. But one of the takeaways from this story – besides to never mess with congregants when it comes to memorializing their deceased loved ones and money – another takeaway is the idea of not wasting Easter.
It might sound like an odd thing to say, but think again. Especially if your personal theology, as is the case for some of us here, doesn’t exactly align with the traditional doctrinal observation.
It would be easy to put it neutral and coast through this holiday, focusing mostly on the rainbow punch that Lisa only makes for us a few times a year.
If you’re in that space, perhaps you’ll gain something written by Paul Dodenhoff which he called Why I Celebrate Easter Even Though I’m a Non-Believer.
Intriguing title. Let’s read on….
People ask me why I celebrate Easter even though I’m not a traditional Christian, and as such, am not a believer in the physical resurrection of Jesus. I celebrate because I believe it to be a spiritual metaphor—one of the most powerful and heartening of spiritual metaphors—for our own development and resurrection to a new life.
He speaks about the need, first, for the Good Friday business of dying to what he calls his small, petty, ego-self. And then he says…
Every day offers us, yet again, the chance to experience our own Divinity and spiritual Transformation. The stone is rolled away and the tomb is left empty every time we acknowledge our own Christ Reality—or whatever name you choose to use—the Reality that all beings and things are part and parcel of the Ultimate Divine Mystery in which we “live and move and have our being.”
Allow me to boil that down a bit…
- He sees Easter as being more about him than anything or anybody…including Jesus! …he’s the divine guy in the story; he’s the one being transformed.
- He sees Easter as every day, not one Sunday a year. Sort of like my mantra that every day is Valentine’s Day for lovers, except Easter style.
- He thinks the stone is his stone of stubbornness, the tomb is his tomb of tiredness (spiritually) – these things that distance him from his divinity and his transformation to embracing the divinity in all creation.
That’s the scenic route.
I suppose Paul’s fast track Easter vibe could be… The more I put myself on the cross of my pettiness, the more I’m set up for my stone to roll aside, and the more resurrective transformation I’ll be open to.
So, what do you think of his more personal perspective of Easter?
It makes it harder to put it in neutral and coast through Easter because ‘the theology doesn’t really fit.’
Whenever a concept becomes more accessible, more self-applicable, there seems to be more ‘there’ there.
It’s like we’re bringing new life to this new-life resurrection story.
And the part I like most about it is that it has no boundaries. This way of looking at Easter is just as applicable to the Jew as to the Gentile, to no matter where you’ve lived or in what era.
Let me tell you the story of one, a non-Christian, who embodied this understanding of divine love and new-life transformation.
As a 13-year-old Jewish girl in Czechoslovakia in 1944, Fritzie Fritzshall, along with her mother, and two brothers were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz concentration camp. It is there that her mother and brothers were murdered.
She recalled, “When we got onto the train, none of us knew we were being taken to a concentration camp [but then] we heard the lock go on from the outside, and then knew that wherever we taken to, it was not going to be freedom.”
“There is no way to describe what it was like to be in the rail car hungry, cold, without food, without water, watching pregnant women begging for water, watching people, including my own grandfather, dying in front of you from lack of food, air, and water,” Fritzie said.
Fritzie endured a torturous year in Auschwitz and a Nazi labor camp. In 1945, she was finally liberated by the Soviet Army after escaping into a nearby forest during a death march.
She tells the story of the promise she made to 599 women who, with each crumb of bread, kept her alive during the Holocaust.
After the war, in 1946, Fritzie came to Skokie, Illinois, and reunited with her father, who had come to America before the Holocaust to provide for his family. Fritzie married a U.S. Marine veteran, and she made a life for herself in Chicagoland, becoming an avid Cubs fan in the process.
Fritzie’s call to activism began in 1978 when neo-Nazis threatened to march through the streets of Skokie. The outrage of seeing swastikas in their town galvanized Fritzie and other survivors to establish the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, with the purpose of fighting bigotry with education.
The Museum opened in 2009, the third-largest Holocaust museum in the world. Fritzie served as its President.
Ever hopeful and optimistic, Fritzie’s understanding of where hate and intolerance can lead if left unchecked drove her entire life to educate and empower people,inspiring all to become Upstanders instead of bystanders.
My friends, this is an example of the Easter story that is not bound by time, geography or religion.
I’m betting Fritzie never officially celebrated Easter. And yet, by her life, by her reflection of divinity despite unimaginable suffering (like Jesus), she embodied the Easter message every day.
She died at the age of 91 in 2021.
When I hear Fritzie’s inspiring story, I can’t help but wonder what others will say about how the Easter message was interwoven into the days of my life.
Perhaps you, too, wonder what they will say at your memorial, and what your loved ones will remember about you when they see your name on the lily listing of their Easter Sunday bulletin.
May we all not only be inspired, but also transformed, infused with new life in our lives, by these Easter stories.
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