Every year I fight the feeling that our UU churches just can't win on Easter. Our familiar congregation will come through the doors, alongside a number of Easter visitors we've never seen before. Why do they come?

To hear familiar, traditional, Easter music.
To not hear familiar, traditional, Easter music.
To be reminded of the newness of spring, the pagan symbols of the season and the lengthening days, without a lot of talk about Jesus and resurrection.
To be reminded of Jesus and resurrection, without a lot of talk about the newness of spring, the pagan symbols of the season, and the lengthening days.
To participate in a family service, where children delight in discovering the many roots of our religious tradition.
To participate in a family service, where adults celebrate the undeniably Christian holiday, Easter.

We each have religious stories, spring dreams, seasonal celebrations. And on Easter they're with us, joining together in church. It is our glorious celebration, and by considering the blend a blessing, we win every time.

The title of today's service is taken from a poem by Thomas Nashe, a 16th century poet who wrote:

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing . . .

And Nashe followed up these cheerful thoughts with a heartfelt prayer, which we can probably all echo:

From winter, plague and pestilence, good lord, deliver us!

Today we are celebrating the fact of Spring, which arrives not exactly according to the calendar, but not with complete randomness either. By this time, mid-April, we can be pretty sure that there will be at least some evidence that the world is continuing to turn in its accustomed way, even though cold and sleet and snow flurries may delay things a bit. On at least some days, such as last Sunday, we've been able to say happily, even if only temporarily,

For lo! The winter is past,
The rain is over and gone,
The flowers appear on the earth,
The time of the singing birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

But then we listen to a weather forecast, or feel the chill of winter suddenly return to the air. The subtitle for today might be, "April is the Cruellest Month", from T.S.Eliot's poem, "The Wasteland", because Spring is more than just a sigh of relief after the hardship of winter: there's pain involved in rebirth, in coming back to life. It's nearly always poets who capture the paradoxes of life best, and I'll be giving you more words of the poets than of my own in this service. Let's begin with Eliot:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Winter kept us warm -- what does Eliot mean? I think he means that winter protected us from having to do much about anything. Winter allows us to live on our reserves, to draw out of the granaries of the past, to be relieved of responsibility. Nothing is required of us in winter but to survive, as our Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood has also pointed out. The deepest meaning of Spring is not just the death of winter and the resurrection of the earth; it's also the big task of ploughing, planting, watering, weeding, harvesting and storing -- and something even more personal, and intimate, and demanding.

To experience Spring to the fullest, we must involve ourselves in our own life's difficult coming-to-birth. That's why April is the cruellest month. Death is almost easy by comparison. It's birth that's hard and full of agony -- you may remember that Eliot said that, in his Christmas poem, the Journey of the Magi:

. . . were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? ..... I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

The history of humankind is absolutely full of the pain of death and the even longer, harder agony of rebirth. There's probably never been a year without a war, or a plague, or a famine, or a flood, or injustice, or terror, or fears, or hopes, or hopes struck down, or dreams, or dreams turned into nightmares, or saints, or cheats, or liars and thieves, or artists and creators, or despoilers and exploiters -- and in most years all of these at once. And yet, we plough on. We plant our seed, as Lawrence Binyon, poet of the thirties, did, in faith that
The small twy-bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in the Earth I trust.

We need that trust, don't we? There's so little we can be sure of these days, and the ability of the earth to grow flowers is one of the few remaining certainties. There doesn't seem to be much justice in this world, and like our Universalist forebears we have to look beyond this wintry world to a brighter reality. As Tennyson said:

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last -- far off -- at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

But it's hard to trust, and to act on that trust. The world is such a mess, and it's we who've made it that way, we who need to believe that we can help put things right. Perhaps, in a sense, we need to help the Spring come, even while trusting that it will. One of my favourite word-plays suggests this; it's in a poem called "Naming of Parts", by Henry Reed, about young soldiers learning the parts of a gun; their instructor, standing in the warm sun of an April day, is demonstrating how the weapon works in these words:

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

One of the paradoxical things about this season is the way it both heralds the warmer weather, the summer which is to come, and somehow also insists that we look back to previous Springs. This must be what Eliot meant by "mixing memory and desire". Every Spring we experience reminds us of the past, of our youth, the spring of our life. And every brief-lived flower we see reminds us how quickly that springtime passes:
Fair daffodils, we weep to see / You haste away so soon:
As yet the early-rising sun / Has not attained his noon.
Stay, stay, Until the hasting day / Has run /
But to the even-song;
And having pray'd together, we / Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay, / As you or any thing.

And we don't feel our fragility till we're past the springtime, do we? When we're young, we think we always will be, even though, as it says in a poem by Dylan Thomas, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age". Do you remember how things were in the Spring when we were children? As Thomas says in his poem Fern Hill, "When we were young and carefree,
. . . under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means.
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields as high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys -- it was air
And playing, lovely and watery and fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder; it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

We may not be able to offer our own children such idyllic Spring memories as this. The world we are passing on to them is no longer lamb-white, green and golden. We've left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we've done those things we ought not to have done, and there's not much health in us and our world. We need a rebirth, a fresh start. And, hard though it may be, I believe a new birth is possible. Spring, the season of urgent, painfully-driving life, is a season in which we can rejoice in spite of the pain, accepting the pain as the price of our inward growth. Here's a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, that Jesuit priest I've quoted before, who loved the natural world with a passion, and the Springtime above all:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring --
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden . . .
For Hopkins, as for most of us, I think, when we allow ourselves to experience the joy and delight of warmth and sunshine and growth, there's some dissolving of our gloom and we feel that hope is the overriding reality of the universe. Here's how George Herbert expressed it much earlier than Hopkins:
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recovered greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

Well, now, what are we going to do with this Spring which is so many things to us -- cruel and beautiful, gentle and warm, and full of the painful desire for growth? Are we simply going to welcome it, celebrating its many happy returns as a gift of the gods, without worrying about its demands? Or are we going to recognize that celebrating doesn't make enough sense unless we commit ourselves consciously to the increase of light and warmth and inward growth -- knowing that the season is short, like our lives? Well, you can guess where I stand. I'm often too scared to say a positive "yes" to all the possibility which life offers, but I believe that "yes" is the best answer. Even though it may cost us dearly, "yes" to life is better than "no".

And yet, a commitment to Spring isn't necessarily a busy or frenzied response. It may be more in the nature of contemplation, of worship. The experience of April sunlight, of ice breaking on the lakes and creeks, of the returning birds singing, of greenness in our hearts, -- this is the experience of the holy and in the end we may not need to do anything except wonder at it and drink it in. I'm going to end with two of my very favourite poems, first another one from Gerard Manly Hopkins and then one from A.E. Housman's collection called "A Shropshire Lad", in the hope that each one of you will be able to take your fill of Spring, the Sweet Spring, this year. First, Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

And from Housman:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go,
To see the cherry hung with snow.