What is Easter? In our culture, it’s celebrated primarily as a Christian festival, although as society becomes steadily more secular, the religious elements of the celebration become less important to most people. Interestingly, as Easter becomes more of a secular Spring festival, it becomes more in tune with its origins. According to the Venerable Bede, an eighth century English monk whose sources are usually reliable, Easter was named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn, Eostre, whose principal festival was at the vernal equinox. Many of the Easter observances are at dawn, and there is probably some connection between ‘Easter’ and ‘East’, which is where the sun rises. In many European languages the name for Easter comes from a different root -- the Latin and Greek word Pascha, which is in turn derived from the Hebrew Pesach, or festival of the Shepherds, which developed into the Jewish Passover celebration. So that’s what Easter is -- Christian, Jewish, pagan and secular -- the marvellous blend which we can consider a blessing, because as Unitarians we celebrate elements of it all.

And when is Easter? You may have wondered why it is that Easter falls on different dates each year, unlike Christmas, which is always December 25th. It’s a "moveable feast" -- a phrase which has now entered the language to mean movement in place as well as in time. According to Sir James Frazer, the great anthropologist of religion, many of the early Christians celebrated Easter regularly on March 25, the exact date of the vernal equinox in the old Julian calendar. But eventually, perhaps because of that very connection with Springtime and natural cycles, and perhaps also because of a Christian wish to distinguish Easter from the Jewish Passover, it came to be tied to the phases of the moon, which had always provided a ready-made calendar for people. Easter Sunday is celebrated, as I learned as a child from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox. It’s very late this year, because there was a full moon just before the Equinox and we had to wait a lunar month (a "moonth") for the following one, which was last Wednesday -- and this is the first Sunday after it! Moveable feasts like this can remind us of the discrepancy between the yearly cycle on which our calendar is based and the moon cycles. Our natural rhythms are multi-dimensional; it’s not surprising if our spirits are affected by this complexity!

Who is Easter about? Is it Jesus, or the Easter Bunny, or the Spring Goddess, or who? Sometimes it’s hard to separate them, isn’t it? I’ve mentioned before one of my favourite stories, about the Sunday School teacher who was trying to prepare the children for the season. What happens at Easter? she asked. First child: "The Easter Bunny comes down the chimney." (No, no, no.) Second child: "We get to smash the pinata and all the chocolate eggs fall out." (Oh dear, no.) Third child: "We remember when Jesus was crucified by the Roman authorities for being a trouble-maker among the Jews and claiming a special relationship to God," (wow, this is more like it) "and then he comes out of the empty tomb and if he sees his shadow we have six more weeks of winter."

Even for Christians, who see Jesus as without question the central figure of the Easter story, there’s the paradox that his story of death and resurrection is echoed in numerous tales of gods and goddesses. The disciples of Jesus came to hold a firm belief, soon after his crucifixion, that he was not dead, but alive. Canadian Unitarian Phillip Hewett suggests that this belief was not quite like the popular belief in the resurrection of the gods Osiris or Attis, because the disciples believed in the continuing life and presence not of a god, but of a real human personality whom they had come to know and love. It’s perhaps more like the conviction that Elvis Presley is alive -- and isn’t it interesting that Elvis is known as "the King"!

Something happened to Jesus’ disciples after his death that made them forget forever the frustrated hopes they’d had for a national revolution -- hopes which had died with his crucifixion. A realization of what the mission of Jesus really was began to dawn upon them. That mission was one of inward renewal. It was personal, not political. The kingdom of heaven, as he had said, is within you. That had not failed. That could continue. It could continue through them. Death had not meant the end of his mission. "He is risen," they cried. And he was. The things which were most important in his life -- the principles for which he lived and for which he died -- had been resurrected in their hearts. As Albert Schweitzer pointed out, this feeling remains valid right down to our own time. Schweitzer said:

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. Not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from him in our spirits ... is that which overcomes [death].

So that’s the What and the When and the Who of Easter in a nutshell; now the Why, which is always the most interesting question to me, and perhaps to most Unitarians. The Why of celebrating Easter is related to what I’ve just said about Jesus, I think. As Phillip Hewett says, Easter "attempts to come to terms with the fact of death and to cherish the conviction that life is not vanquished and overthrown."

If you seek ultimate and abiding significance in life (Phillip continues), you are not going to find it within the narrow and constricted limits of your own life as an individual. You are going to find it within a larger, deeper, richer whole. Here lies the meaning of life and death and immortality. This is the Why of Easter. As the Unitarian poet Sir Edwin Arnold says in his translation of the Bhagavad-Gita:

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams!
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!

What is this strange thing called Earth Day -- so much less familiar than Easter, and even with some overtones of ecological fanaticism -- you know, tree-hugging and such! It’s not so new as you might think, though -- this year marks the 33rd observance of Earth Day. The initiator of this celebration was U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, in the summer of 1969. At the time, some of you will remember, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called "teach-ins," had spread to college campuses all across America, and the idea occurred to Nelson - why not organize a huge protest over what was happening to our environment? It could perhaps become a movement to save the earth, comparable to the peace movement. Nelson announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment. Earth Day was, indeed, celebrated that year and every year since.

When is it? Well, Earth Day is a less-moveable feast than Easter. It’s always on April 22nd, and it’s just a happy chance when it happens to coincide, or nearly so, with Easter, as it does this year.

Who is Earth Day about? Certainly it isn’t about Gaylord Nelson, not exactly a famous name to most of us. No, it’s about ordinary people; it’s about us. Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. No-one had the time nor resources to organize the 20 million demonstrators who turned out that first year, 1970, and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. The remarkable thing about Earth Day was that it apparently organized itself, and continues to do so, in a yearly reminder that we human beings, all of us, have a responsibility for this planet that we live on. We’re all more aware of our environment now, thanks to people like Senator Nelson, and in our own community Theo Raynham, and the Green Sanctuary group and the many people who keep plugging away at environmental issues.

And that’s the Why of Earth Day, too. Just as the struggle for human rights and justice in the fields of feminism, racial equality, peace and so many other vital causes is never finished, but is full of small battles won, so the struggle for a healthy and happy home planet is about determination and plugging away, I believe. Every time we learn of a waterway or lake recovering its balance, being cleaned up -- every time we hear of a Bill passed to help prevent pollution or a company or project being called to account for its impact on the earth, we can congratulate those who work so hard to keep us conscious of the state of the world. Without them, it wouldn’t have happened! Of course the efforts need to be magnified in their intensity and scope, but the efforts are effective. Today, on Earth Sunday, we celebrate all that is being done to respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, and we are thankful for a precious source of our living tradition: Spiritual teachings of earth-centred traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

Those rhythms of nature are the rhythms of life and death; our Easter and Earth Day observances are intimately connected and at heart the same, I believe. Easter celebrates the life that springs unfailingly from death, regardless of our human efforts or deserving; Earth Day calls us to recognize our human impact on the Earth, and to co-operate with Nature rather than trample on her. On this day of double celebration, may we join in affirming and nurturing the renewal of life, not only each Spring but each month, each day, each moment of our being.

When I included in my reflections the words "Easter For All Ages" I was thinking mainly of "all ages" as all the ages of history -- all times -- though I also realized that the phrase was reminiscent of our "Time for Children of All Ages". While I was preparing the service, I began to shift to the idea that in this third part of my reflections, as I try to integrate further our thoughts about Easter and Earth Day, I could hardly do better than share with you all, as I’ve shared with you at the Children’s Time on a couple of occasions, a story which does indeed bring it all together. It’s by one of my favourite writers of adult as well as children’s books, the psychoanalyst Judith Viorst, and it’s called The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. I offer it now especially for those of you who’ve lost animal companions recently, as well as all of us who must struggle to discover the ongoing life in the midst of what Judith Viorst calls our "Necessary Losses" of all kinds.

(The Tenth Good Thing About Barney is now read)

May we all live our lives in such a way that there will be at least ten good things to remember about us, and when the cycle of our lives reaches death and transformation, even in our sadness at the ending of a phase may we hold fast to the knowledge that life springs from death and shatters every fetter, and winter turns to Spring eternally. Let us celebrate together!

The symbols of this day are not only things we look at, such as the flowers and the frisky little lambs, and the bunnies. They are also the foods we share together, particularly eggs, real or chocolate, and special Easter bread. We shall share some festive bread together now, and we'll remember the message that out of death comes life.

The ingredients of the bread were once living -- wheat and eggs and yeast and sugar cane -- but in order to become the food that nourishes us they had to die. The egg is a symbol of creation: according to some traditions the whole world was born from an egg. The chick bursting from the darkness of its prison inside the shell and coming out into the light expresses the same idea of life triumphant as the flowers bursting from the darkness of the soil.

Bread is blessed -- by the elements of which it is made, by the work of its making and transformation, by the love with which it is given. This bread is blessed in all these ways. May it also be blessed for us in our eating it together, in communion, in this community. As we eat, let us give thanks both for the food itself and for the opportunity to eat it together.

(Bread is passed out. Music is played)

Life is a gift for which we are grateful. May we do all we can to sustain and renew it, not only at Easter and Earth Day but always.