THE HOLY, UNLIKELY MIRACLE
An Easter Sunday Sermon
Rev. Scott W. Alexander, preaching
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Vero Beach
Sunday, March 31, 2013
[THE PHRASE “THE HOLY, UNLIKELY MIRACLE” IS PROJECTED UP ON THE CHANCEL
SCREENS AS REV. ALEXANDER BEGINS SPEAKING]
This Easter morning – and I pray that I needn’t spend any of my “airtime” pointing out to any of
you what an absolutely lovely spring day it is! – this Easter morning, I am going to begin by
reminding you of the single most important spiritual truth of your life. Are you ready?
This morning you woke up…and found yourself alive! This is the holy unlikely miracle of your
being … this morning you woke up, and found yourself alive!
Here ends the morning sermon.
[REV ALEXANDER PAUSES IN THE PULPIT; THEN SITS DOWN; AFTER A PAUSE FOR
LAUGHTER, HE RETURNS TO THE PULPIT.]
All right, I’m just kidding! I do have more to say this Easter Sunday…so please indulge me as I
take the rest of the time I have this morning to spiritually frame in and spin out this holy unlikely
miracle a bit more elaborately for you.
What got me thinking about this simple-yet-powerful foundational truth of our living was that
New York Times piece by author and essayist Bill Hayes that I read to you before the sermon...
where his friend Oliver – following an impromptu, yet somehow deliciously perfect, rooftop
dinner in Manhattan -- matter-of-factly exclaimed, “I’m glad I’m not dead!”…to which his friend
Bill (and then other neighbors sharing the perfect rooftop evening) responded, “I’m glad you’re
not dead too!” What I think they were all expressing – by just a bit of logical extension…beyond
their fondness for their neighbor Oliver – was how they glad they were to find themselves alive
and conscious in creation.
In that epiphonal New York moment of gratitude and awareness, everyone on that roof spoke
from the heart and said, “I’m glad you’re alive…I’m glad I’m alive! What a blessing it is to be
alive!” How simple…how sweet…how saving! You know, when you think about it, whenever
you acknowledge (quietly in your own heart) the holy amazing gift of being here on earth in the
first place, everything else is, as they say, “just commentary.”
I like the way my friend and colleague, the Rev. Dr. Forrest Church, articulated all this in his
wonderful (yet also sad) book “Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow,”
[THE PHOTO OF THE BOOK COVER IS PROJECTED UP ON THE CHANCEL SCREENS]
a book he wrote in the last year of his life, after he had been diagnosed at age 59 with what
proved to be terminal esophageal cancer. For most of his ministerial career, Forrest had
famously proclaimed (again and again, in his books, and from his pulpit at All Souls Church in
New York City), he had proclaimed that the work of religion (and, by logical extension, the work
of each of our individual spiritual lives) arises from – and now I quote him – “The twin
knowledge [that] we are alive and [that] we will die. Within this tension of life and death,” he
wrote, “lies its holy cloud, the mystery of interconnectedness of how we are woven out of each
other.”
[PHOTO OF REV. FORREST CHURCH IS PROJECTED UP]
And lying at the center of Forrest’s faith was the utter amazement and spiritual delight he took
from the fact we human beings find ourselves in the utterly unlikely miracle of being alive in the
first place. I want to quote him now at some length from a famous sermon of his on this subject,
because I think it’s really wonderful stuff…listen to his words:
“The odds against each one of us being here this morning are so mindstaggering that they cannot be computed…We’re talking miracles here…not an
unlikely miracle like God parting the Red Sea for Moses to escape…but [having]
the miracle of water itself, in which living organisms can incubate, and [the
miracle of having] just enough warmth and light from the sun to establish ideal
conditions for life to be nurtured and develop here on earth. [Beyond the
amazing miracle of there being life on this planet at all]
“Consider the odds [of you being here this morning]. Your parents had to couple
at precisely the right moment for the one possible sperm to fertilize the one
possible egg that would result in your conception. Right then, the odds were still
a-million-to-one against you being the answer to the question your biological
parents were consciously or unconsciously posing. And that’s just the beginning
of the miracle. The same unlikely happenstance must repeat itself throughout
the generations.
“Going back ten generations, the miracle must repeat itself one thousand times –
and [going back twenty generations, must repeat itself] one-and-a-quarter-million
times. That’s right, mathematically speaking [going back just 20 generations, we
each have] approximately two-and-a-half-million direct ancestors. This
remarkable pyramid turns in upon itself, of course, with individual ancestors
participating in multiple lines of generations, until we trace ourselves back to
when our [ancient] ancestors, the founding people, whom each one of us carries
in our bones, began the inexorable process that finally gave birth to us all, kith
and kin, blood brothers and sisters of the same mighty miracle. And that’s only
the egg and sperm part of the miracle.”
And then Church goes on to share an amazing piece of his own American family history, which
he is able to trace back to the Mayflower.
“Five of my direct relatives happened to be on that tiny boat…[and] I would not
be here this morning without the unwitting assistance of all of them. One of
them, twenty-four-year-old John Howland, an unmarried servant, fell off the
Mayflower into the ocean halfway across the Atlantic. Miraculously he caught the
rope his fellow Pilgrims threw overboard in their attempt to save him, and he
lived. Had john Howland drowned, you might be hearing a better sermon this
morning, but I, assuredly, would not be preaching it.”
And then Forrest completes his own personal story.
“[After the Mayflower landed], Elizabeth Tilley went on to marry John Howland,
establishing my mother’s American line; Elizabeth Warren married Richard
Church, establishing my father’s. These accidents of survival – ” Church goes on
to observe, “if nothing compared to the almost infinite odds against our winning
billions of crapshoots in the sperm-and-egg stakes – are at least somewhat
easier to grasp and existentially more meaningful to ponder.” And then Rev.
Church finally reflects on this wholly unlikely miracle of each of us finding
ourselves alive in the first place. “Mathematically, our death is a simple
inevitability, whereas our life hinges on an almost infinite sequence of perfect
accidents. Think about it. The [ancient] Universe was pregnant with us when it
was born.”
Even as Rev. Church lay dying from his terrible cancer, he was able to fully affirm the human
blessing of merely being alive. The last time I saw him alive, he was down to little more than
skin and bones, yet he still carried that warm and radiant smile of his, was fully engaged with his
family and his congregation, and seemed sincerely grateful just to have the chance to hang
around a bit longer.
In the book he wrote, “Every day we live is a miracle, rich with possibility, even
when, right off camera, the boom is about to fall…To this miracle, we must each
do everything in our human power to awaken [to become mindful]...Awakening is
like returning after a long journey and seeing the world [for the first time – seeing]
our loved ones, cherished possessions, and the tasks that are ours to perform –
with new eyes.”
And then Church went on, “Think of little things. Reaching out for the touch of a
loved one’s hand. Shared laughter. A letter to a lost friend. An undistracted
hour of silence, alone…with our thoughts…until there are no thoughts, only the
pulse of life…for this fleeting moment…our life becomes a sacrament of praise.”
This bright Easter morning, I hope that you are all spiritually inclined to take Dr. Church’s
appreciation and delight – with the everyday miracle of finding ourselves alive – to heart.
During his life, which ended so prematurely, he felt so existentially lucky – deep to his bones –
just to be able to hang around this creaky old creation of ours for a while. And he also believed
that his love (for both the life that came to him unbidden, and for he persons with whom he
shared it) was immortal and will “live on” in the energy of creation and continue to bless and
enrich this world for countless generations. I love the fiercely personal and lyrical way in which
Forrest expressed his gratitude for finding himself alive…for him life itself was a holy, unlikely
miracle for which the only reasonable human response is gratitude.
[PICTURE OF PORKYPINE AND POGO IS PROJECTED UP ON CHANCEL SCREENS]
I like the sophisticated way Forrest Church said all this…but I also can’t resist making the same
spiritual point more bluntly through my favorite Pogo cartoon character, Porkypine, seen up on
the screens. In my all-time favorite strip – and I realize I have shared this once before from this
pulpit – in my all-time favorite strip, the turtle character (Churchy Lafemme) is sitting with his
friend Porkypine in that leaky little boat of theirs, in that leaky little old Okefenokee swamp,
reading a newspaper whose headline blares “Sun to Burn out in 30 Billion Years, Ending All Life
on Earth.” In the next panel, Churchy – feeling quite sorry for himself with this news of earth’s
eventual demise – is crying those big tears of his, saying “Woe is me…I’m too young to die!” To
which, in the next panel, the ever wise Porkypine responds, “Aw SHUT UP…You’re lucky to be
here in the first place!”
That is, in effect, the same spiritual message Forrest Church placed at the very center of his
ministry…”you woke up this morning and found yourself alive…able to live and love and know
the world…everything else (including the fact that someday you must die) is uninteresting
commentary.”
But this affirmation…this Easter Sunday affirmation of the holy unlikely miracle of finding
yourself alive (and free to live fully and well) would be spiritually incomplete – even absurd –
without a full acknowledgment of the reality of Good Friday…the powerful and unavoidable
reality of human suffering and pain…and this too is something which Rev. Church fully
understood and appreciated. He wrote:
“Life is difficult, fragile, painful, unpredictable, unfathomable, and limited. Simply
put, everyone suffers. That is a given. Suffering is a birthright far more
inalienable than happiness. And the shares are not allotted evenly. We need
not look far to find evidence for this [hard truth]. How often innocents, especially
children, seem to suffer an unequal, undeserved share of affliction. Since neither
justice nor injustice is distributed proportionally, life is anything but fair. Not only
does the rain fall but the sun also shines on both the just and the unjust. Just try
to make sense of it…Yet all is not hopeless…despite our ignorance and
suffering, hope emerges in the lifelines that connect us. Suffering brings us
together when we discover the lifelines that connect our hearts.”
This, to me, is one of the greatest and most liberating truths about human living. Life just
comes to us. And it does not promise or give us an easy ride. Along the way of our individual
journeys, we will all inevitably experience some measure of sorrow and suffering…life is
frequently unfair, and sometimes profoundly difficult. But what sees us through is that we are all
in this together…as persons sharing earth, we are interconnected in so many beautiful and
saving ways…ways that give our lives their purpose, their texture, their grace and joy.
I want to close on this Easter Sunday by telling you a very personal story…a story from my life
that will always remain in my heart…and spiritually remind me what this journey we find
ourselves on is all about. Very early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic (which swept through the gay
male world in the early eighties with such ferocity…swiftly taking so many of my friends and
acquaintances…dear God how I still remember all those losses from my life in both New jersey
and Provincetown)...very early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic (way before the “cocktail of drugs”
successfully used today to treat the disease had been developed) a young colleague and friend
of mine, the Rev. Mark DeWolfe, became seriously ill with the disease. Mark was an
indefatigable spirit – a kind and intelligent young man with an irrepressible appetite for life and
persons.
The last time I saw him was at the 1988 General Assembly in Palm Springs, California. He was
very thin, and was clearly very sick, and in fact he would be dead just four months later. But for
that Assembly he was moving around from event to event…wearing a T-shirt just like this one,
with three great big letters emblazoned across it, N…D…Y. And what did these three letters
stand for? No…not North Dakota Youth. It stood for Not Dead Yet…Not Dead Yet.
The reason Mark had this t-shirt custom made for himself was that (in those early days of the
epidemic) there were many people (even otherwise sensitive and enlightened UUs) who had not
yet personally known someone with the disease, and were very nervous about Mark and
HIV/AIDS status…and as a result were unintentionally treating him at arms length – or as
though he was already gone. So Mark, ever the activist with a dry sense of humor moved
around that assembly in this T-shirt. And whenever somebody would inevitably ask,
“NDY…What’s that?” Mark would cheerfully exclaim, “Not Dead Yet…I’m Not Dead Yet!”
And, in spiritual fact, he was Not Dead Yet. Mark, ever grateful for the gift of life was not done
living. He was not done working with the congregation back in Ontario, Canada that he so
loved…he was not done sharing the pleasures and challenges of everyday life with his beloved
partner Jim…he was not done traveling – near and far to see the many marvels of this planet.
He was not done being a human being – fully living, caring, fighting, sharing and loving. Mark
lived his life (all the way to its end) with hope and humanity and purpose. In the face of
HIV/AIDS, he refused to submit his human agency…his freedom to choose...his opportunity to
live, and love well.
Mark was not going to waste the holy unlikely miracle of finding himself (as Forrest Church so
beautifully articulated) alive in a rich and interconnected universe of persons …and love…and
possibility. For as long as he had breath, he kept choosing life over death. Even in great
physical diminishment and pain, he lived every day he had with a rich fullness of purpose and
meaning and belonging. Every day he awoke, he chose hope…he chose life…and he spun
himself out of the universe with as much love and gumption as he could muster.
This Easter morning, dear friends, I would have you hold this one great spiritual truth close to
your hearts. This day – this simple spring day in this particularly beautiful corner of our amazing
creation – this day has been quietly born in possibility, richness, splendor and grace. And you
are here. You woke up alive. You are, as they say, “Not Dead Yet.” And, regardless of
whatever challenges, difficulties, or diminishments you particularly face in your life – and God
knows we all have them – regardless of the challenges and heartaches you face, you are free to
live this day with purpose and passion and love. You are in the holy unlikely miracle of your
life, so use it fully and well, dear friends, use it fully and well.
And while you’re at it, whisper to your heart...Hallelujah…Hallelujah…Hallelujah...
AMEN.