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 His 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.

A few years ago I read an article about Lourdes, the Catholic shrine in southern France where many miracles of healing are thought to take place. I was in Lourdes once, and like the author of the article I had all the conflicting emotions which are produced by the mixture of desperation and faith, human need and rampant commercialism which you see there. But I didn't see the special little product mentioned in the article, which is probably a fairly recent addition to the Lourdes shops. It's an audio-cassette of a supposed conversation between . . . the Virgin Mary and Santa Claus! I guess they're both in the same line of work, eh?

At Christmas, Mary and Joseph and the three wise men get mixed up with Santa Claus and coloured lights. At Easter, Jesus takes his turn with the Easter Bunny, who's also a bit confused, bringing eggs which are usually produced by hens, not rabbits. It reminds me of the delightful little tale of 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."

You know, I think Easter for grown-up people is more or less the same as Easter for children. It's a confusing blend of fantasy and truth, myth and mundaneness, just as the reading from Jane Rzjepka suggested, just as the story of Horton hatching the egg may suggest. There's meaning for old and young and in-between in the many elements of this secular and religious, pagan and Christian holiday, elements which come from all the ages of human history and are to be found not just in Christianity and the story of Jesus' death and resurrection, but in diverse cultures and times. And the message is that love and living are stronger than hatred and killing.

Some of us feel, intuitively, that it's right there in the connections that the deepest meaning is to be found -- in the blend, rather than in the logically separate elements of this secular and religious, pagan and Christian holiday, . There may be meaning in even the most confusing aspects of the holiday. For example, if it's about Jesus, where do the eggs come in? And why are they brought by the Easter Bunny, when eggs are usually produced by hens, not rabbits? Creation and re-creation seem to be the underlying themes. According to Chinese mythology, heaven and earth were created from the Great World Egg. Ancient Egyptian scriptures describe how the sun-god, Ra, breaks the shell of an egg as an act of creation. Greek mythology has Eros spring from a silvery World Egg, and Christianity sees it as a symbol of rising from the dead, just as all kinds of old pagan customs became overlaid with later Christian symbolism.

In the western world, customs associated with eggs can be traced back to the early Middle Ages. Apparently, peasants in some places had to pay an "egg rent", a payment in eggs for the lease of their land and sometimes also for their membership in the church, and this egg-rent fell due at Easter. By the early 18th century, the obligation had turned into the widespread custom of exchanging dyed and decorated eggs among family members and between lovers, too, like Valentines. An 18th century clergyman in Bavaria wrote,

"Never throughout the year is the egg as much honoured as it is at Easter time. It is plated with gold and silver, marbled and beautifully dotted, and also painted in luminescent colours such as green, red, yellow and gold."

Easter eggs, then, are at least as old as Valentines and Christmas ornaments, for many non-Christian or non-religious reasons. Some people say that "Easter" was originally the name of a goddess, way back in prehistoric times, but there's a kind of chicken-and-egg quality about this, if you'll pardon the pun. As far as I can tell from my various reliable sources, the word can be traced back to the Indo-European word for "shining" or "dawn", which then was deified as the Germanic goddess of the dawn, who was worshiped at the Spring Equinox. So Easter means something like "The Shining"!

The first Christian missionaries strategically combined their celebration of the resurrection with the older pagan festivals of the equinox, so that Easter now means the whole Christian and pagan package, or any part of it you want to pull out. And they fit together so beautifully, the story of the coming-back-to-life of Jesus, and the coming-back-to-life of the earth. I can't imagine how they cope with this in Australia, where Easter, or Spring, is celebrated in the Fall. (I did ask an Australian friend about it, but the answer wasn't very clear!) It must be even more confusing than singing "In the bleak midwinter" while catching some rays on the beach in high summer.

There's another element of Easter which we sometimes overlook, and that's Passover, the Jewish holiday which Jesus was celebrating with his disciples the night before he died, and which marks the beginning of the journey by the children of Israel into the Promised Land. That's another kind of coming-back-to-life, from slavery to freedom. All these themes merge in our celebration of Easter today. It's the most ancient salutation of the dawn, a celebration of the life which returns with each new day and each Equinox, each Springtime. It's the ever-renewed struggle of oppressed peoples to move from bondage into freedom. It's the faith that these forces, of the dawn, the spring, the exodus, the resurrection, are worthy of our faith, our commitment and our celebration.

There's another happening which we observe around this time each year. Every once in a while, Easter Sunday even coincides exactly with putting the clocks forward, as happened this year. In some places it's called switching to "Daylight Saving Time". I wonder whether we really can "save time" by playing around with the clock or by adjusting our lives in other ways. I wonder, too, about all the other conventions associated with time, from the way we divide our days into hours, minutes and seconds to the way we divide the years into months and weeks. There's a mixture of nature and arbitrariness here, isn't there? Years and months and days are based on the turning of the earth and the moon; seconds and minutes and hours and weeks are more human inventions, although they may have some relation to nature. (Seconds may be related to heartbeats, for example.)

Did you know that the English days of the week are named after Saxon gods and planet names, while the French name them after Roman gods and planet names? So we have Sun Day, Moon Day, Tiw's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Frigg Day (yes, really, thank Frigg it's Friday!) and Saturn Day. And although the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Romans all had a 24- hour day, they divided it into 12 hours of light and 12 of dark, which meant that the length of the hours depended on the seasons. And it wasn't until 1883, not much more than 100 years ago, that a world-wide standard time was fixed, with a total of 6 time zones in Canada. And it's common throughout the world for clock time to be adjusted so that the added daylight during the summer can be used more efficiently. I've never quite understood this -- it always seemed to me that it's in winter that we'd really appreciate an extra hour of daylight. But I was told as a child that it has do with milking the cows, and I'm sure that's a good enough reason for all of us!

Generally, Western Europe goes on Daylight Saving Time on the last Sunday in March and changes back on the last Sunday in September; we start the first Sunday in April, and we don't change back till the end of October. Many areas of the world stay on what they call "advanced time" all year round. China, by government order, operates as one time zone, even though it should, geographically, be in five different zones. For religious reasons, Israel is two hours behind the rest of the Middle Eastern time zone. Paraguay, Ireland and the Dominican Republic adjust their clock time in winter instead of summer, which makes perfect sense to me.

You probably know that an imaginary line set at 180' longitude runs down the Earth, as well as the imaginary Equator which runs round it. When someone crosses the line travelling to the west, one day is added. The line zigzags for political reasons so that parts of countries don't find themselves on the wrong side -- for instance, all of Siberia is in the Asian system and all of Alaska is in the American system. All this points out how variable our conventions of time are. I've often heard people say that our real new year is when the children go back to school in September. The Spring Equinox might be a good time to recognize New Year, too. January 1 really doesn't seem to have much of a reason, unless it's perhaps to emphasize that human beings like to control time as much as possible, by naming it and trying to manipulate it, and even pretending to save it.

I say "pretending", because I'm not at all sure that we really can save time. We can devote more of it to one thing than another, certainly, which is what we usually seem to mean when we speak of saving time. My computer "saves me time" by enabling me to edit material very much more quickly and efficiently than in the old typewriter days, but it doesn't make the day last any longer. It still only has 24 hours of 60 minutes each, even if I've "saved" several minutes or even hours. So "saving time" is rather like the editing process in that we can cut and paste the way we spend our days -- but it's very different in that we can't delete certain days completely or add extra ones at the end of the week. As Omar Khayyam put it,

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Those are awesome words, aren't they? They remind us not only that we're helpless to put a stop to time or slow it down or freeze it in its tracks in the way the computer "saves" our work against any accidental changes, but that we can do nothing to change the past -- there's no editing capacity available, however much we'd like to go back and re-do a certain day or moment quite differently. It simply can't be done.

In our Good Friday service, we recalled some of the story of the day Jesus died, and remembered that there were two deaths in the story, but one of them is often overlooked. It's the death of Judas, who was so overcome with remorse about his betrayal of Jesus that he took his own life. Some of us who have struggled with suicidal feelings know how large a part guilt and shame and regret can play in those feelings, and even those of us with sunnier dispositions have nearly all experienced deep remorse at times -- the intense wish that we had not acted in a certain way or said certain things or hurt someone unnecessarily. We're only too well aware that we can't lure back the moment or undo our actions or unsay our words.

But the message of Easter is the message of a Saving time. It's the good news that although the past can never be changed, it can be redeemed and saved. It's the message that even the worst that can happen to us, the very worst, even suffering and dying, is not the last word. If the day when Jesus died can be called "Good" Friday, then our mistakes and cruelties and regrets and sorrows can all be transformed into something good, too. This festival of Easter is the celebration of a Saving Time, when we recognize the transformative power at the heart of the universe, the power which, in the words of our Universalist heritage, is saving everyone and everything, universally. A few years ago I found a poem which expresses this in an image from nature; it's by Antonio Machado:

Last night, as I lay sleeping,
I dreamt -- marvellous illusion! --
that I had a beehive here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs and sweet honey
from my old failures

Yes! The message of Easter is that our mistakes and failures and regrets and remorse can be made into something sweet and beautiful through the goodness which is at the heart of things. It may not need struggle or hard work on our part; it can happen even while we are sleeping. As an ancient teacher said, "Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." It happens, if we give up our resistance to it. And Easter Sunday is the day for celebrating it!

Here are some words by UU minister Mark Harris (you may have noticed that I have no compunction about using other people's words if they express what I want to say):

"Is the resurrection real? If we believe in a creative power which shatters the icy tomb of winter with the life-giving miracle of spring, we have seen a resurrection. If we believe in a creative power which moves tens and then tens of thousands of people to cry against the injustices of society, enabling the downfall of hatred and prejudice, then we have created a resurrection. If we believe in a creative power lying within each human breast which enables us to break the bonds of personal pain and know the hope of new tomorrows, then we have experienced a resurrection."

At Easter time ..... we celebrate the untold number of courageous individuals and groups who have sacrificed their lives to liberate others from oppression and create a more just and loving world. We celebrate the ability of the human heart to overcome personal tragedy or handicap and affirm once again the ability to love or excel when many others would have given up all hope. Easter celebrates the times of witnessing, experiencing and creating the resurrections of human life.

Perhaps the most critical part of the Easter message to Unitarian Universalists is the power within the heart of each person to bring life out of death. There is great undying potential buried beneath lifelessness and hopelessness. In the resurrection story there is both humiliation and death, but in the end also a new life of the spirit. For us it means confronting the deep wounds and scars we have suffered and then allowing ourselves to be transformed anew. When we are enslaved by bonds of sorrow or hate or greed, the experience of turning our lives in a new direction means we can forgive ourselves for imperfections. When this forgiveness occurs we are free to reach out and begin fulfilling lives of genuine human sharing.

The central message of the resurrection . . . is the human potential to overcome serious personal loss or failure and begin to live a more whole life. When we think of our earth's ability to regenerate itself, our social ability to join forces with others to overcome the human predilection for violence, and finally, our personal ability to recover from a seemingly empty or forsaken life, then the meaning of Easter can become powerful for [us]. We can make the "resurrection" a reality in our lives. It is I, you, and they who are risen from the dead.

We now have an hour more of daylight in the evening. We have, correspondingly, an hour less in the morning, because although we might call it Daylight Saving Time, there's really no way of saving time, holding the passing hours, by anything we do. But time can be saved; the words and deeds of our lives -- past, present and future -- can be transformed and made beautiful by the way we look at them, by what we learn from them, by how we live in light of them. This Easter Day, and every day, can be Saving Time for each one of us, if we will greet it with openness and love; it can be a celebration of life. Happy Easter, everyone!